How I channeled my trauma into games, because making a game is easy and stress free, right? Oh dear.

⚠️ Content Warning: The game discussed in this article contains depictions of the abuse of power and religious trauma, inspired by real-life experiences.

We’ve all done it, haven’t we? There we are, age 10, telling a doctor that, yes, we would prefer to die than accept medical procedures that god said were forbidden. It’s just a regular part of growing up, isn’t it.

No? Well you must have been locked out of the house by your parents while they scream at you, telling you how god is going to kill you at Armageddon because of what you did wrong, but because you’re an undiagnosed autistic child (going to a “worldly” psychiatrist for help with this was a big no-no), you have no idea what you did. Also, autism is caused by demons, and demons can live in second hand furniture so we’d best burn the chairs we bought to cure the weird behaviour.

Oh come on, that’s a childhood staple. Happens all the time, right?

Next you’ll be telling me that you didn’t have to keep quiet about child abuse because it would make the religious group you grew up in look bad if you went to the police. Um… you mean it’s also not normal to have to sit in a soulless hall as a closeted queer, listening to men telling you how great it’ll be once all the lesbians are dead?

Maybe my childhood was slightly atypical. Yes, I use humour as a coping mechanism. I’m not claiming it’s a healthy coping mechanism, but at least I’ve got one.

Hello, I’m NikkiJay and I grew up in a cult that forbade friendships outside of the group and would shun you completely if you left, totally cutting off your social network and support structure, leaving you absolutely alone. And all that stuff I said above, too. So how did I end up the level headed, well balanced individual I am today?

IT WAS THE VIDEO GAMES.

Oh hang on, I’ve been told by my editor (me) that I need to mention that I am making a video game that uses humour to explore themes of religious trauma and coercive control in a fantasy setting where there’s a dancing skeleton who can see through time. It’s called Quantum Witch and it’s presented like a saturday morning cartoon made out of retro styled pixels where you are in control of how the story unfolds. The vast majority of the characters in it are some flavour of queer. Write what you know, right? More about that later though. Let’s talk about escapism, mental health, and the absurdity of reality.

I knew I wanted to make video games the moment I played one back in the 80s. It was called Trashman and all you did was collect bins, empty them into a truck, and try to help the people you met on your way up the street. It wasn’t amazing by today’s standards, but it was a self contained coherent world that captured my imagination. The fact that someone created this world inside the computer entranced me. I wanted to do the same.

As I grew up and had to deal with bullying at school due to the isolationism the cult forced upon us, I needed an escape. My summer holidays were spent indoors, learning to program and create ridiculous little text adventures to amuse myself and my siblings on that most charming of 80s microcomputers, the ZX Spectrum. Creating my own worlds gave me an outlet, a way of pretending that I wasn’t actually in the absolutely upside down, fear filled, hate fuelled world that I was actually in. This was my holding pattern for about a decade, the computers and consoles might have changed, but the life around them was the same. Wake up, school, study cult materials, go to cult meetings, repeat until the weekend when we’d go out and try to recruit for the cult. Every spare moment I had was either watching Red Dwarf, or holed up in my room playing games, escaping into their worlds.

Eventually I managed to get a job, unsurprisingly in a video game shop, where Satan took control of my mind and the spirit of the world swallowed me up and took me away from The Truth™. If you need a translation of that, it means “I started thinking for myself and made some friends”. Bonding, of course, over a shared love of video games. At that point, they were still very much a needed form of escapism – I was physically out of the cult and had stopped participating in their meetings and recruitment drives, although mentally I still had the ingrained fear, depression, and judgement they had installed. It’s much easier to take the girl out of the cult than get the cult out of the girl.

It was when I came out that everything fell apart. The penalty for being yourself when you aren’t what the cult considers right is the total loss of all friends and family.

There’s a group you can find in Quantum Witch called The Shadies. When I was a kid I’d make games just for the love of them and the desire to world-build. But with Quantum Witch, I wanted to do more. I wanted to put my experiences and learned lessons into the game, surfacing as absurd characters and situations through the lens of a Douglas Adams trained sense of humour that let the game deal with heavy subjects while keeping things as cozy as possible. The Shadies will be instantly recognizable to anyone who grew up in the same group as I did. In fact, I’ve had messages that start with “I think we grew up in the same group…” and that’s immensely satisfying. My highest hope for Quantum Witch is that someone who is going through similar things to my experiences, plays it and knows they’re not alone. I’d want to give them some hope that others have been through this and come out of the other side.

It’s a scary thing taking your first step into the world completely by yourself. I left my family home knowing I really had nowhere to go. All I had was a backpack of clothes, a guitar, my love of video games, and the programming knowledge I’d built up with the primary aim of making more video games. Thankfully, that last item was actually of some use and allowed me to find a job, which let me find an actual place to live in. I expanded my knowledge with supplements from the local library. I owe so much to the books I found there. Support your local library, folks.

When you have nothing, you still have your mind. It’s the most valuable thing you can have, so fight for it. Fight for your right to think, to feel, to be yourself. No matter how hard others can dig their claws into it, your mind is both your weapon against that influence and the treasure you gain.

Cults want to take your thinking and agency away, and so agency and choice is a major theme in Quantum Witch. I wanted players to have a real sense of ownership of the story. There are no Game Over screens. The choices you make take you to an ending, whether it’s the one you wanted or not. The more times you play and the more you choose differently, the more you learn about the backstory of the world and the characters. Perhaps some folk aren’t quite what they seemed to be on your first playthrough. Perhaps some are more sympathetic than you thought. Technically, yes, it’s a platformer in the sense that there are platforms and you jump on them. But it’s not a platformer, really. It’s a plotformer. You have choices, and your choices combine into the eventual fate of your world and the characters you meet. Sometimes a valid choice is just to reject all the ones that seem to be on offer. It’s like if the Stanley Parable had a single story weaved throughout all the options open to you, but in 2D and with low resolution sprites. And a dancing skeleton who can see through time. And everyone is gay.

Losing all sense of purpose and meaning was probably the greatest loss I suffered leaving the cult. It used to be all laid out for me, and then suddenly… it vanished. There was no great story I was part of. There was no higher purpose, no ultimate meaning, nothing was worthwhile, everything was absurd and meaningless. I became very aware that I had held two opposing beliefs at the same time – one saying that there was this plan I was definitely a part of because I was a member of the group chosen by god, and the other belief that knew I wasn’t a part of it simply because of who I was. The things that would have to happen to lose either of those beliefs would have left me empty, and I’m grateful I chose the path I did. Eventually I came to the conclusion that there was no higher purpose set by an all-powerful being and the universe was not created specifically for me. There was no intrinsic meaning in anything, it was all going to end and our obsessions, cares, hopes, dreams, and endeavors were all absolutely absurd because they were taking place on a tiny blue dot lost in the infinitely expanding universe and nothing was going to alter the fact that eventually the universe would suffer heat death and be over forever.

And I was happy about it.

If there is nothing dictating meaning to me, it means I get to decide what’s meaningful. If there’s nothing telling me what my purpose is, I get to decide that. This new attitude reminded me of creating games as a kid. The games didn’t exist as entities in and of themselves at first. The universe was in a state of gamelessness until we decided to think of rules, and ways of playing, and create the games. From that point, they had intrinsic meaning. We had brought meaning, the possibility of fulfilment, and goals into existence. So what if it’s going to end one day? Is a game any less fun because you’ll eventually stop playing it? I’d argue it’s even more fun. It’s to be savoured because it will end. The meaning comes from how special each moment is.

To me, details matter. The little things that add up to something special. We, as humans, are far more than the sum of our parts, and if there is a soul, then perhaps it’s that part which is the difference between the sum of all the chemicals fizzing away in our brains and the extraordinary things we can achieve with that brain. Details matter because they combine into something greater than any individual detail could be.

For example: the shadows in Quantum Witch. Each character’s sprite has a shadow that’s displayed when they’re on the ground. But if they’re on the edge of a platform and the shadow would extend into thin air, then the engine hides the shadow. It’s a tiny detail that I don’t think anyone playing would consciously notice. If it wasn’t there though, everyone would notice. A nice easter egg comes later in the game where two characters meet each other and they’re both wearing the same coloured bracelet. The bracelet is literally a single pixel on each sprite, but the meaning it has in the story could send shivers through the players if they’ve been paying attention. Two pixels, placed with intent to make something more than two randomly placed pixels could. The game is full of tiny details like this, multiple endings that expand the world’s lore and backstory of the characters. There’s a lot more to it than a silly dancing skeleton sprite might imply.

That’s not to say I magically came to these conclusions overnight and suddenly felt great. Many years of therapy, reading about critical thinking and philosophy, medication, and self examination had to happen to get rid of the constant dread and the cult-like thinking. Even writing the story of Quantum Witch has been a journey and forced me to think about my own backstory. I hope I’ve made something that both resonates with folk who have been through similar things, and entertains those who haven’t. From the feedback I’ve got so far, I think I’ve got the balance right.

Balance. Not just an important value to me, but also a callback to the intro of this article. I’ve seen ex-cult members leave one cult and dive directly into another group where their sense of special belonging is fulfilled and they can be just as judgemental and superior as they felt before. From everything I’ve written here you might have thought I would have gone the same route, albeit with an anti-religious bent. For a while, I did. But I needed to find balance, and the point I’ve ended up at is that I’m absolutely, 100 percent, for freedom of religion. That’s because freedom of religion also means freedom from the religions of others. Am I talking about my own life or the plot of Quantum Witch at this point? Well done if you said “both”!

If any of this has felt familiar to you, there is help out there. There is no shame in seeking therapy, and there is quite literally nothing to lose and everything to gain. You’re not alone in your experiences and feelings. You can make the choice.

NikkiJay
NikkiJay is the developer of Quantum Witch.