Video game developers are testing the bounds of interactivity more than ever before. One hot topic in the future of video games is the segment of games that are trending towards becoming more serious. Serious games are thinking outside the box of how players can be informed or enlightened through gameplay, especially about real-world issues. Though these type of games are not necessarily the most fun or popular, as someone who prefers gameplay as my pastime it’s refreshing to be actually improved as a person or made smarter by playing a game.

A good example of a serious game  is “Tourette’s Quest,” which developer Lars Doucet created to explain living with Tourette syndrome.

Tourette’s Quest courtesy of fortressofdoors.com

“Tourette’s Quest” looks and feels a lot like the original “The Legend of Zelda.” You are a lone warrior, armed with a sword and later on spells, who must traverse a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. Sometimes you must solve a simplistic puzzle to proceed, such as having to kill all the monsters in the room to unlock the doors.

The catch is that Link has Tourette.

Tourette syndrome is a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by multiple physical tics and at least one vocal tic. These tics can be suppressed temporarily, and are usually preceded be a premonitory urge.

Encountering monsters, using your weapons and getting hurt will increase your stress level (quite understandably). As stress increases, it is more likely that a tic will occur. As described in the definition of the disorder, a tic is usually preceded by a prescient feeling — in the game, this is conveyed as a thought bubble. If you are about to blink, for example, an eye appears in a thought bubble and you know that in a few moments, the screen will go black for a second. It would be wise to be clear of danger when you see the eye in the thought bubble. Other tics include a hand spasm, where you use you weapons involuntarily; a leg twitch, where you jolt to the side, often running into harm’s way; or a cough, which can awaken sleeping monsters whom you then have to kill.

You can suppress a tic by pressing the space bar, but this will increase your pent-up stress and make future tics more frequent and severe. There are other mechanical aspects to the game, but they all contribute to maintaining this balance of stress level and tic management, while trying to traverse the dungeon without dying.

“Tourette’s Quest” was designed by Lars Doucet, a man who has been afflicted with Tourette his whole life.

Doucet writes in his blog, ”I want to show what the internal experience of a Tourette patient’s mind is like, with the core experiences being: premonition, compulsion, helpless panic and dealing with it.” While the game’s engineering is rudimentary, designed solely by Doucet on Game Maker Studio, it still does an intriguing job of conveying the daily challenges faced by someone living with Tourette.

The game itself is a cute and lighthearted way of looking at the challenges a person with Tourette faces every day. While awakening sleeping monsters by coughing may not be a reality, it does metaphorically suggest how coughing can annoy coworkers, for example, (and an irritable coworker can certainly bear monster-like qualities). Though “Tourette’s Quest” could not command hours of my life like my favorite games, it felt good to be left with a more meaningful awareness through playing a game than what part of a zombie’s head is most sensitive to bullets.

You can play the latest version of the game here.