Psychoscope Towards Yu: analysis of Prey (2017) based on psychology
One of the most important theme of the game Prey(2017) is psychology. This is a game with a tag of psychological horror anyway, and many references of psychology and neuroscience could be found, such as ink spot personality test, and trolley problems, etc. However, I never thought about this too deep until recently I was trying to work on a piece of fan art after some interval. I suddenly realized that, neuromod, especially its side effects, could be a metaphor of Morgan Yu’s mental problem, since you can find traces in real life psychological theories and mental illness.
Conclusion first: Morgan Yu is highly likely a PTSD/CPTSD survivor, despite very limited background stories were given in the game. The most obvious and blatant evidence is definitely “weakness: toxic family” but this is too bland if we start from here, so I’ll leave it for later and start from symptoms first.
1. I keep having… this dream.
This is one of the iconic lines in Prey. This wasn’t explained in the game which might be subtly hinting the effect of neuromod or typhon. However, nightmares (I mean real nightmares) could widely occur in people with all types of mental illnesses, but especially people with trauma or PTSD. In the description of the dream, Morgan wasn’t clearly seeing any scene, but feeling a strong and penetrating emotion of fear, when interpreting outside of the story background, could be a reaction of past trauma or bad memory emerged subconsciously.
In addition to the dreams, there were scenes when Morgan touches coral, they “remembered” or saw something suddenly and vaguely. Although this was explained by breaking the boundary of simulation, this scene still vividly shows a typical symptom — flashback, of PTSD survivors.
2. Memory lost, of Morgan and Calvino
Obviously, you don’t need neuromod to have bad memory. For people with trauma, it’s very common to trying to forget things that might be a threat. If threat repeatedly or continually appear, it might cause memory fragmentation. Actually I want to jokingly point out the process of using neuromod is traumatic enough: you poke through your eyelid with long needles directly to your brain, while needing to keep opening your eye for 5 minutes without blinking. As for Dr. Calvino, his story of memory loss is more likely caused by age and that’s kind of why that moment was very touching.
This might be the most sci-fi side effect of neuromod because we indeed don’t see people with multi-personality, or Dissociative Identity Disorder every day. However the symptom of dissociation might be more common than you think, especially for people with PTSD that it might be a core symptom. To protect the survivors from shocking events, trauma or triggers, sometimes they will react uncontrollably and unconsciously, leaving others even themselves feeling alien and unusual. Especially when Morgan shows other “personalities” that suggest running away from danger (December), this is a typical response for survivors and could in real life be a symptom of identity instability.
4. Toxic family but more than that
In Prey, we can all feel that Yus family is suffocating even without much direct storytelling. All of Morgan’s siblings including themselves serve in the family business. Their brother Alex chose to break their arm for deleting a game save. Their father didn’t even hesitate to choose eliminating his children when the company is under crisis. These all hinted that Morgan wasn’t living in a happy family and likely having been raised as a tool of the family corporation.
Indeed, Morgan is very excel in science and research, but very emotionless and cruel according to others. This perfectionist and emotionless could be strongly hinted towards trauma as a result of the toxic family. The cruelty of Morgan when they execute the volunteer was a very tense scene and I always questioned why Morgan could be so humanless. Now that with the lense of trauma, this became very understandable: if Morgan was always be treated as a tool and is readily to be abandoned for research or profit at any moment, then no wonder they’re seeing others like this too.
Another thing that I felt strange about the story was, Morgan’s decision to test neuromod repeatedly on themselves is actually unwise. Even if Morgan was really willing to sacrifice for science, if Morgan cannot remember anything or gain any ability out of this experiment, it doesn’t seem a real motivation to conduct ON themselves instead of BY themselves. But what if Morgan was subtly forced to do so? Or self-brainwashed to? These are actually very common among people with trauma.
In conclusion, I’m feeling that Arkane had done a very good job of weaving a whole metaphor around a real life mental illness, even if not deliberately. It might obviously be my overreading but I just want to share a new point of view of the deep and philosophical story of Prey.
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
areudirty
