Linear

a short visual poem on the topic of non-linear thinking, ADHD and brain fog

How to play

You are the little neuron in the centre of the screen. Move around using arrows or WASD. Step on the fog tiles to remove them.

What is this about

I made this prototype after playing through several Bitsy essays in a row and noticing that many of them led the player through a linear argument. I've always loved games as a medium for artistic and critical expression, mainly because, unlike texts, they can comfortably contain thoughts that are not strictly logical, or easy to verbalize, and are instead dynamic, visual, hard to grasp without having a chance to play around with them on your own.

This is what my thought process is largely like: constantly jumping between different topics, following connections that seem obvious to me, but non-existent to others. I've often thought that there are a lot of things about games that make the process of playing them similar to "how my (ADHD) brain works" -- and so, there must be a way to make games that portray this thought process.

When I made the game, I'd just read Simon Bailey's ADHD Mythology, which talks about the various collectively-developed stories that surround ADHD. One metaphor that Bailey focuses on in particular is a map: when we draw maps we simplify terrain and imagine definitive borders where none exist. We do this with locations and spaces on our planet, but we also do this with brains, when we do experimental neuroscience.

So if a brain were a map, in a video game one could traverse it. And when one traverses a map in a game, there is often fog-of-war. But this is a brain, so the fog there would be brain fog. And somewhere among it are thoughts -- connected but fleeting, or fleeting but connected -- and there is no linear path through them.

I tried to capture some of this feeling and this thought process in here -- maybe this will make you feel some recognition as well? I was pleasantly surprised by how meditative I found the process of cleaning up each screen myself. But then every time I reached "head empty" and there was nothing else to do.