My mom has schizophrenia. I made a game about my experience.

I realized my mom was sick when I was twenty, though I had suspected something was wrong for years. I'm nearing 50, and I'm still struggling to understand her lived experience. To the best of my knowledge*, she suffers from schizophrenia: she hears voices, she believes people are spying on, stealing from, and generally trolling her, and she will show sudden mood swings when one of those perceived phenomena trigger.

At some point, decades ago, she started keeping her documents in a rolling suitcase. The suitcase only gets heavier each year as she packs more into it. Most of it, I suspect, are just copies of the same document, a paper trail of recursive thoughts that can't escape themselves.

As her stack of documents got thicker, her persecution story got thinner. Initially, she claimed that an organized crime circle was harassing her; lately, she refers only to a vague "them." Always, though, my father is the central figure. His presence in her stories, too, has morphed from a specific human to a  literal absence - a blank space in the letters she writes me, sentences with a gap where a subject should be.

I made this game as an attempt to empathize with her experience.

I wrote that last sentence with care because I don't purport that this game portrays schizophrenia accurately. I'm not qualified to do that. What the game does do is ask the player to take actions consistent with what I'd just described, in a very concentrated dosage.

I get that creating this game doesn't give voice to my mom, nor to the millions of people worldwide who experience schizophrenia. It is, at best, a self-ish expression of MY experience relating and attempting to care for her over these decades. Think of it, perhaps, as a memoir written in the second-person vernacular of a solo journaling game.

* The closest my mom has gotten to a formal diagnosis (that I'm aware of) was ordered by a court perhaps 25 years ago. In the United States, it's quite difficult to compel someone to seek diagnosis or treatment without their consent.