THE ORIGINS OF DOSE
- Lawrence Appenzeller
- Apr 18, 2016
- 4 min read
Warning: May contain spoilers.
The origins of 'DOSE' are pretty long running. About four or so years ago was when the concept first started. As a lover of horror games, I like to conceptualize stories that could go with the genre. For a while I had this seemingly great idea bopping around in my head about a game based on the stories of the Brother's Grimm. The player character would be locked in a mental hospital, and would move through the different stories, each character representing someone in the player character's life. This is as far as I had gotten though, as Telltale announced 'The Wolf Among Us' based on the 'Fables' comic series by Bill Willingham. For the time being, I decided to put the idea on the back burner.
A year ago in August, the idea was very much pushed to the forefront of my thoughts as I found myself committed to a mental clinic. Depression and anxiety have been a long term struggle, and they began to overwhelm me. It was a negative experience and the staff seemed a little clueless. I was only there for a week, but the entire time I was trying to find a way to call someone, no one knew where I was and I knew my roommates would be worried. Ignored by the staff, the first phone call I was able to make was to ask my roommate to come pick me up as I was being discharged. There were many other mishaps, for example, I was put in the substance abuse ward and had to attend AA. As someone with no history of substance abuse, it felt strange to be a part of.
It was clear this experience wasn't going to help my problems, I took it as a learning experience. My initial impression of the clinic was how different it was from the ones I saw in mainstream media. The treatment and rehabilitation focused on a therapy based recovery and struck me as a weird mix between a hospital and a prison. There weren't any padded cells and little to no hospital equipment. No IV's or gurneys, and people who fell ill were transferred to the hospital across the street.
This was one of the first things I really remembered because a majority of people trust the distorted depictions seen in the media. In movies and video games, the mental clinic is always abandoned, broken down, and overrun with blood, ghosts, and horror. Though this clinic is nothing like that, it is terrifying in itself. As a patient, I had no control over my day or when I got to leave. The haunted asylum cliche does not address the real world problems with mental health clinics, so why not come at it with a different angle by creating a functioning clinic with problems reflective of this experience?
The second thing that really struck me was the other patients. As I said earlier, I was put in the substance abuse ward, which was quite jarring because my family doesn't have a history of substance abuse. I really wanted to listen and learn about these people's stories. Something that stuck with me came from a patient who struggled with drug addiction as a nurse. While she was speaking to another patient struggling with alcoholism, she said...
“It’s [drug addiction] an illness like everything else, but more taboo. Just like alcohol, it's inflicted on yourself, then you cross the invisible line where you can’t get back.”
The more I thought about what she had said, the more it stuck. She would often talk about how similar drug addiction was to alcoholism, but for some reason she was demonized for her addiction.
I thought about it more. Rarely in games or movies could I recall seeing a recovering drug addict. There is often a trope of characters struggling to recover from alcoholism because alcohol is a legal substance. However, a large amount of people there had been abusing prescription drugs. The vast majority of patients in the Depression/Bipolar ward were transferred from the hospital because of their addiction to prescription drugs. In this sense, at it's core, there isn't a difference.
The last thing I noticed was how many mothers were struggling with these situations. Most of the women I spoke to had children and had experienced separation, abandonment, divorce, and/or domestic abuse at the hand of their significant other. Motherhood is a daunting task, and I couldn't imagine having to take care of children while experiencing depression or addiction.
With all of this in mind I started to form 'DOSE' in my head, keeping the Grimm Fairy tales idea, but changing the player character to a single mother. I couldn't think of any horror games that featured a mother (or really anything other than a middle aged white man or conventionally attractive teenage girl), and especially not a mother struggling with addiction. I very much wanted to have a game that is fun and thrilling, but still keeps the important message of representing someone who is struggling and adapting that into gameplay that forces the player to make choices to take the easy road, or the hard one to get back what is really important.
I was thrilled when the rest of our team agreed to work on it. Now, Interworld Games is in Post-Production of the project and my hope when we release the game is that through message and this experience that somebody is able to take something away from it.
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