[Bodell]

I just finished playing this and I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed to be saying that your anxiety is controlling you when you choose not to use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder. I don’t believe that using social media apps is a necessary or meaningful thing to do with your life. Nor do I think it’s fair to imply that people who choose not to engage on those platforms are suffering from anxiety disorders. In fact it often seems more the opposite way around.

However, I’m not entirely sure that this was the intended insinuation. Yet it’s hard to read anything else into it since its about a girl trying to engage with her friends on her phone across these various platforms and being stopped by the ‘anxiety wolf’. She even gets her health dinged for sharing a news story, which to some extent could be viewed as engaging with reality.

Engaging with reality can most assuredly cause anxiety, however I don’t really view this as improper. I don’t believe that mental health should be thought of as a framing or mindset one has to the extent that it frames reality away. I.E. I may feel better if I pretend covid is not real though I am not making a healthy choice if I do.

[danShumway]

> It seemed to be saying that your anxiety is controlling you when you choose not to use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder.

This is a really odd reading to me. Especially if you play through the scenario multiple times, you see that the Anxiety Wolf controls Human regardless of what you do: even if you turn down the party invitations or if you never interact with the news story on Twitter at all.

It's not that engaging with social networks is bad, it's that Anxiety Wolf views every interaction and outcome as dangerous. If you eat bread, you're eating junk food. If you don't eat bread, you might have an eating disorder. If you don't share a story, you're disengaged. If you do share a story, you didn't fact check it enough. If you eat lunch alone, you're going to die alone because you can't make friends. If you try to get a date, your date's a serial killer. You can't win; there isn't a move that Anxiety Wolf will be happy with other than being in a constant state of panic all the time or curling up in a ball and crying, because Anxiety Wolf is scared of everything.

The point of the first section of the game is that Anxiety Wolf has an unhealthy relationship with risk analysis, which ultimately leads into the point of the second act of the game -- that the absence of Anxiety Wolf also causes Human to have an unhealthy relationship with risk analysis in the opposite direction, to the point where Human starts ignoring imminently dangerous situations.

> I.E. I may feel better if I pretend covid is not real though I am not making a healthy choice if I do.

Covid is actually a pretty good example here. Anxiety Wolf wants you to get vaccinated (which is a very good idea, because you should be scared of catching Delta). But Anxiety Wolf was also the voice early on in the pandemic telling people to dip their fruit in bleach in case somebody in the grocery store had touched it. It's important to figure out how to distinguish between those two suggestions.

[Bodell]

My play through definitely implied that social media was good and that not using it was bad. Seems to me that anyone could play this and decide their own interpretation of "anxious wolf" which is exactly my criticism of it. Things that contain more depth are less subjective in their interpretations. I would even take aim at the idea that "fear of being a bad person" is something we over-estimate, I often wish more people had this fear (like vaccines because it's good).

It reminds me of the whole Colbert paradox, where he polls equally well with all sides of the political spectrum despite engaging with politics daily. No matter what you believed you felt he believed the same things as you.

This is not that I disagree with your overall view here - I don't, people should absolutely apply logic in reasoning to their rick/reward calculations rather then going on pure gut feeling - however I just do not believe this game really goes into any of this in a manner fitting to the complexity of the subject. But really, how could 6 min flash game do that?

[danShumway]

> Seems to me that anyone could play this and decide their own interpretation of "anxious wolf" which is exactly my criticism of it.

Right, I think this is very intentional. The author even interrupts the game at one point to tell the player that they should choose the choices that personally give them the most anxiety. My playthrough ended up focusing in on a lot of the "productivity" lines; are you wasting time doing X, is it responsible to engage with people if you don't have a clear set of goals about where it will end, that kind of thing.

> Things that contain more depth are less subjective in their interpretations.

I'm not sure about this. A vision of anxiety that focuses on "this specific action causes stress" would be less subjective, but I think it would also be less accurate. Anxiety (particularly clinical anxiety) is often all-encompassing, when anxiety gets really "fun" is in the moments where you're simultaneously scared of every possible choice at the same time, including inaction. I've been fortunate enough to avoid the worst of these experiences in my life, but from what experiences I do have, the feeling the game invokes of being scared almost just for the sake of being scared, as if fear itself is some kind of defense against the world falling apart -- that does resonate with me, and I think the game does a good job of capturing that.

The other thing that I suspect that some people online have latched onto with this game is just the process of sitting down and visualizing yourself and asking "what am I scared of right now." It's not universal, but for a lot of people I think disassociation can often be a really powerful cognitive technique both for self-analysis and for staging self-interventions during some types of panic attacks, and disassociation is not always something that comes intuitively to everyone.

It's interesting to see the different reactions though. :) It's funny because if anything my criticism of the game is that near the end it gets a little too specific and too prescriptive for my tastes about how to address fears. I like the idea of having a healthy relationship with anxiety, and I do think that idea captures something meaningful; but I don't think that's something that can be set up in only one conversation, and I don't think the motivations/solutions the author lays out for fear are broad enough to capture what that process will or should look like for everyone, the game feels overly optimistic about how hard that process is.

But like you said, it's a short game. I think it suffers a little bit from not having the necessary time available to avoid an abrupt ending that sort of implies treating anxiety just requires having an emotional breakthrough that solves everything.

[Bodell]

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I do not think with disagree very much on this topic, other than our subjective impressions of the game - liking and/or disliking. I do think that we may be talking on slightly different levels of abstraction. Which is tough for me to get right with short online comments. Thanks for engaging on this, though. I enjoyed reading your thoughts very much.

[inkblotuniverse]

How's a news story reality, and social media not? News stories (especially the sorts you'd share on social media) are usually virtual, detached from reality.

[Bodell]

I was not expressing a critical view of news media simply because it is not contextual in this situation. The “game” is actually very non-specific as to what the “news” is - or anything else for that matter. So, I was simply applying something like covid or global warming to it in order to show that the generalized premise of the game does not hold as a very insightful view of human being’s relationships with their anxiety.