The Asylum
(Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys)
Created by Parapluesch
About 2+ hours (unless you're a psychiatrist)
This is a very, very dear game. One of my friends works in psychiatry and I just watched her laughing her head off as she was told that cuddly toys have no defence against the violent tantrums of their owners in a dysfunctional lonely world, and then I watched her methodically try to diagnose the mental health problems of a traumatised stuffed snake. And suddenly there you have it - the most realistic sim I've seen of psychiatric therapy that exists on the net, and it involves sock puppets, crazy toys, cuddly drugs and fluffy dream therapy.
Once you get past the badly drawn nurse, what becomes immediately apparent in The Asylum is the incredibly high level of depth and personality in our cuddly characters, and the Sherlock Holmes-like diligence needed to solve the mystery of their cutesy wutesy mental illnesses.
I
In gameplay, tests on our furry friends do not work if applied haphazardly, also it sometimes takes time and repetition for a breakthrough to occur. This quickly brings home a sense of responsibility and commitment to the toy, and I admit I felt brilliant when I actually "helped" a toy overcome it's early 'toyhood' trauma. I now feel adequately qualified to go into an Asylum and give a few treatments here and there with my sock puppet :)
Meanwhile it's isn't exactly clear what Parapluesch's motive is, why does this game exist? Throughout the game there are opportunities to buy a real toy as portrayed in the game, so I guess the motive could be to get people to buy cuddly toys, but the game is so deep and relatively unknown that I thought it unlikely that it's a for profit. There are crossovers with other toy projects, links to field studies, a link to a forum which had scores of "doctors" posting about treatment of cuddly toys...
Digging a bit further into the Parapluesch website, there are diagrams on psychoanalysis of cuddly toys, you can find referral letters for each character, and even discussions on animism (the idea that non-human entities, including animals, plants, and often even inanimate objects can have souls). This is clearly much more than just a simple game. In fact I feel a bit like I've discovered some strange spiritual cult. What on earth is going on here?
I finally googled the name "Martin Kittsteiner", the contact name at the bottom of the Parapluesch page, and found the truth. Martin Kittsteiner is a toymaker from Hamburg that thought it would be a good idea to create and sell toys with psychiatric problems that you could then solve online. There are brief articles and interviews scattered around the net in 2010 and nothing since, but the game remains and is being discovered to this day. Well. I hope Martin is doing well out of it. I'm going to order a Sly snake, or a Dr Wood crow. And never never do anything bad to it ever.
This is a great example of an idea FAR surpassing it's original intentions, I would argue that most players don't even know The Asylum is more than a web game, but many will wonder at how something so deep could ever have been created. Well now you know - Enjoy! - JP
(Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys)
Created by Parapluesch
About 2+ hours (unless you're a psychiatrist)
Once you get past the badly drawn nurse, what becomes immediately apparent in The Asylum is the incredibly high level of depth and personality in our cuddly characters, and the Sherlock Holmes-like diligence needed to solve the mystery of their cutesy wutesy mental illnesses.
I
In gameplay, tests on our furry friends do not work if applied haphazardly, also it sometimes takes time and repetition for a breakthrough to occur. This quickly brings home a sense of responsibility and commitment to the toy, and I admit I felt brilliant when I actually "helped" a toy overcome it's early 'toyhood' trauma. I now feel adequately qualified to go into an Asylum and give a few treatments here and there with my sock puppet :)
Meanwhile it's isn't exactly clear what Parapluesch's motive is, why does this game exist? Throughout the game there are opportunities to buy a real toy as portrayed in the game, so I guess the motive could be to get people to buy cuddly toys, but the game is so deep and relatively unknown that I thought it unlikely that it's a for profit. There are crossovers with other toy projects, links to field studies, a link to a forum which had scores of "doctors" posting about treatment of cuddly toys...
Digging a bit further into the Parapluesch website, there are diagrams on psychoanalysis of cuddly toys, you can find referral letters for each character, and even discussions on animism (the idea that non-human entities, including animals, plants, and often even inanimate objects can have souls). This is clearly much more than just a simple game. In fact I feel a bit like I've discovered some strange spiritual cult. What on earth is going on here?
I finally googled the name "Martin Kittsteiner", the contact name at the bottom of the Parapluesch page, and found the truth. Martin Kittsteiner is a toymaker from Hamburg that thought it would be a good idea to create and sell toys with psychiatric problems that you could then solve online. There are brief articles and interviews scattered around the net in 2010 and nothing since, but the game remains and is being discovered to this day. Well. I hope Martin is doing well out of it. I'm going to order a Sly snake, or a Dr Wood crow. And never never do anything bad to it ever.
This is a great example of an idea FAR surpassing it's original intentions, I would argue that most players don't even know The Asylum is more than a web game, but many will wonder at how something so deep could ever have been created. Well now you know - Enjoy! - JP
No comments:
Post a Comment