Gaming's Best Portrayal of Mental Illness: Milk Inside A Bag of Milk

Comments · 925

• PL

  @PlayItEssays · 1 year ago (edited) · pinned

  Part 2 is out! Warning, it is in fact an hour long. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkoSqaVDpU">https://youtu.be/qMkoSqaVDpU</a>

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• YO

  @youtub9035 · 1 year ago

  To me, the &quot;o&quot; conversation feels like when you can&apos;t fully hear/understand someone, so you just kind of agree with what they&apos;re saying. Like the girl doesn&apos;t get what that character is trying to tell her, &nbsp;so she just mimics him in the hopes that she&apos;s giving the right response.

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• FK

  @Fkamynk · 1 year ago

  Living with social anxiety is brutal in a world where your survival is contingent on how well you socialize

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• WI

  @williamwebb580 · 1 year ago

  Everything about this game is so painfully familiar. The pretending you&apos;re a character in a video game with dialogue options, counting your steps on the pavement, rehearsing what you have to say before going anywhere, then the panic when people don&apos;t react the way you planned for them to react or say what you expected them to say. Even the bit where she considers accurately predicting what someone is going say a little victory (even if it&apos;s the voice in her own head).<br><br>It hits on all the seemingly little things that make trying to live independently so frustrating if you&apos;re not mentally equipped to do so. It honestly made me ask myself how many of these mental gymnastics I&apos;d go through, if right now, I walked down to the store alone just to buy milk.

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• EC

  @EchoesRemastered · 1 year ago

  I think she&apos;s hyperfixating on the <i>O</i> syllable of &apos;hello&apos;

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• BE

  @beanzie-1055 · 1 year ago

  &quot;She knows but she isn&apos;t ready to confront that. She can barely buy milk, you can&apos;t ask too much of her&quot; oh my God THIS is what i wish more mentally healthy people understood about mental illness. So often we get called lazy and people think we&apos;re just unwilling to do the work, but they don&apos;t understand that basic existence is hard enough as it is, we don&apos;t have the extra mental or emotional capacity to fight our demons too. Sometimes the best we can do is just, make a game and play along with them.

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• SO

  @Solinaru · 1 year ago

  This game really hits hard when i think back to when i was younger and still needed to work on my masking. While i never had their level of OCD, the having to practice speech before just going to get groceries took so much energy just to accomplish. &nbsp;If theres one thing i hope most people understand is to be more understanding that strangers are dealing with their own trama, and we can easily hurt others or gelp others with just how we act.

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• AL

  @alienhazy · 1 year ago

  no joke, my partner played this game and the sequel in succession, and then afterwards he turned to me and said, &quot;This is what the inside of my brain is like. i think i have schizophrenia.&quot;<br><br>sure enough, two months later, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. i think, after watching him play this game, i finally, really understood him as a person.

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• RE

  @realname4625 · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tpu5PNF8mk&amp;t=546">9:06</a> those of us with mental disorders know that it&apos;s all in our heads. But that doesn&apos;t make it any easier. It&apos;s like if you broke your leg and I told you that the problem is just your leg. Saying it doesn&apos;t change anything, but the sheer number of people that say this and then expect you to be magically fixed has made this phrase have a very negative connotation

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• XE

  @XerxesTexasToast · 1 year ago

  You fail when you tell her it&apos;s all in her head because you are not a real person, you are one of her coping mechanisms. You are not another person talking to her. You are a single thread of her metacognition. You are playing as an entity that exists solely to help her get to the store, buy milk, and get home. Coping mechanisms exist to help us fight through the day and get things done. If you try to get her to ruminate on her condition, you have failed your task. You&apos;re supposed to help her get the milk with minimal mental friction. She can think about her condition when she gets home, after your task as a coping mechanism is finished and you have ceased to exist.

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• RE

  @realkingofantarctica · 1 year ago

  Milk inside a bag of milk made me realise that I have no empathy towards people who suffer from anxiety or crippling introversion, which is something that I am now doing my best to rectify.

  30

• EL

  @electronic_rat · 1 year ago

  Something that I&apos;m not sure was intentional about the ending that I really like is that it&apos;s kind of unsatisfying and anticlimactic, which is often what &quot;little victories&quot; feel like when you&apos;re mentally ill. Sure, I got out of bed today, but I didn&apos;t actually do the things I was supposed to. Sure, I brushed my teeth today, but my room is still a mess. Sure, I managed to get the milk from the store, but there&apos;s still something wrong with me. I often find myself discounting any small movements in the right direction because they feel insignificant compared to all my other problems, and often it doesn&apos;t feel like a &quot;victory&quot; just to get closer to normal baseline existence (as opposed to being &quot;great&quot; or &quot;going above and beyond&quot;)

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