Dredge: Why Your Brain is Your Worst Enemy and Best Friend

What Dredge teaches us about how the brain responds to threat

by Graham Walker; Professional Psychotherapist and Video Game Lover

Spoilers for the mechanics of Dredge's day/night system

Dredge is the fishing game of your nightmares. It's a cosy game where you bob about in a boat playing fishing mini games before taking your catch back to the town to sell. Only you best not stay out after the sun goes down...

Dredge's sea in the dark is a place teeming with terrors. You cast your line out and pull up abominations; fish too horrifying to describe. The calm and cosy coves become full of dread and danger as the water turns against you. You'll find your hull being battered by what lurks beneath the waves and the very terrain morphing around you. It is a place of cosmic horror designed to instil deep unease in the player, and you'd be advised to heed the advice of the ocean to go away and not return.

The fantastic video game documentarians, Noclip, recently released a film to YouTube outlining the development of Dredge.

It's excellent and once you're done reading here you should check it out.

The whole documentary is brilliant but a single line from one of the developers being interviewed stood out to me, as an interesting insight and one worth exploring further. Alex Ritchie is a videogame artist, and Creative Director at 'Black Salt Games', the New Zealand-based development team behind Dredge. In the Noclip documentary he says:

When you watch the documentary Alex here delivers this as a throwaway line; just accepted wisdom. And he's right, I think we all know that our heads can be our own worst enemy in conjuring all sorts of horrors that don't even exist. It's a big reason that a monster in a film is often scarier when you don't get a good look at them than when they are finally revealed. But why is this? What is going on in the brain that would make this happen? And why is the notion of our brain delivering visions of horror to us maybe even a good thing?

Ultimately, our brains have developed to try to keep us safe and alive. Evolutionarily speaking, a dead body is not super good at passing on its genes and ultimately that is the goal that the genes have.

The phrase "Survival of the fittest" is often attributed to Charles Darwin but was in fact coined by the philosopher, polymath and all-round excellent beard owner Herbert Spencer. It is an oft-misunderstood idea but one that helps get to the heart of the issue at hand. Because of his use of the word "fittest" this line is usually taken to mean that the strongest, fastest, biggest is the one that survives. But that is not what he meant. What he really means here is the animal that is the 'best fit'; the one that is the most suited or adapted to its environment. So, the animal that Spencer sees as most likely to survive and pass on its genes is the one that is most adapted to survive in the environment it is living in. That might be being big and strong, but quite easily it might be about being the smartest, the smallest, the nimblest or most determined.

Or... The best at identifying and responding to dangers before the danger kills you.

The brain is always trying to make sense of the world around it. It likes certainty; to know what is going, particularly in relation to the notion of being safe. When there is uncertainty- a lack of information about- the brain will often just look to suggest ideas to help us make sense of what is going on.

A neat and non-scary example of this is the blind spot test. As a reminder to something you were likely taught in school, this is the idea that we all have a blind spot; a point in our field of vision where we don’t actually see anything. But we don’t have a big black gap in our view of the world as we look around, so why is that? It is because the brain just fills in the gap; it says “well, this is what is probably there, so I’ll paint that into what you see” and voilà you perceive a full field of vision. This can be proved by a blind spot test, like so. 

Look at the image above. Now, close your right eye and have your head about 20 inches away from your screen. With your left eye, look at the + then slowly move your head closer to the screen while looking at the +. At some distance, the dot will disappear from sight. This works on a phone screen too, just move the phone towards you.

Now, when I was taught this example rather than seeing it as proof of the brain filling in the gap it felt more like proof that I was seeing nothing, as the dot disappeared. It’s not so much the dot disappearing as it is the brain filling the area with white as it decides that is what is likely there.

To show this more clearly, the following example helps:

 For this image, close your right eye. With your left eye, look at the red circle. Again, move your head closer to the image, or move your phone screen towards you. At a certain distance, the blue line will not look broken. The brain is filling in the missing information with what it believes should be there!

Moving back to think about what such gap-filling brain tricks mean for fear, what happens is that we take the idea that the brain wants the body to survive and add to this the idea it will provide information it thinks fits in the absence of definitive information (i.e. situations with uncertainty); multiply this with threat to safety and you’ve hit on the perfect equation for your brain becoming your worst enemy!

As much as the blind spot experiment is a nice little example of how the brain is always trying to make sense of things the same notion applies when the brain feels under threat. The brain is always on the lookout for uncertainty- and odd shadow, an unexplained noise, a strange movement- and will present all the wonderfully worst explanations it can. But though this can feel like your brain being mean reaally it is trying to be helpful; it is trying to be prepared for the worst and gets you mentally prepared to face up to them.

This brings us to thoughts about the fight or flight response. Back when we were cavemen, as we were evolving as a species it became helpful for the body to be able to ready itself extremely quickly for fighting an assailant- perhaps an enemy caveman or a sabertooth tiger- or running away from them. The caveman who responds slowly is the one who gets bonked on the head or eaten; either way not great for staying alive.

On top of this, often predators and enemies can be sneaky and try to sneakily sneak up on you. To  counter this the brain developed the ability to fill in the gaps and present you with what could be missing, thus that weird shadow suddenly becomes a warning that their could be a sabretooth tiger. Presenting this idea literally makes the brain scare itself into action and trigger the fight or flight response. All well and good when there is genuinely a sabretooth tiger- not so fun when you're half asleep in bed and your head starts telling you that the shadow cast by the dressing gown hung on the back of your door is a burglar and you need to start feeling terrified so you can quickly get up and bash them.

So, the brain will present scary things to make you scared because fear drives the body's fight or flight response- the mechanisms that quickly get us ready to fight or run away and ultimately stay alive.

Tacking back into thinking about games like Dredge (tacking is a sailing word for turning- it's clever wordplay, see?!) what this means is that purely by creating a sense of threat and uncertainty the brain will help out with the rest, as long as the sense of threat remains genuine. We can all think of a game where we've played it so many times that it stops being scary. We have diminished any sense of threat or uncertainty for ourselves when we know we can beat the game easily and know where everything is. Dredge manages to keep much of this uncertainty going by adding randomness into the mix, such as enemies locations not being fixed and even things like rocks and obstacles changing position in the water. Combine these factors with a very limited field of vision when night-sailing through dark and fog and it means that you can never be sure what is beyond just in front of you. But your brain will continue to happily give you horrifying suggestions of what might be lurking just out of sight! And so, Alex the Creative lead for Dredge is spot on when he says that the brain can do a lot of the heavy lifting in ramping up the horror.

These notions from a psychotherapy perspective have some interesting points worth dwelling on too. As discussed the brain working like this is the brain operating as intended- though not always wanted. We can call this intended functioning ‘adaptive’; it's being helpful to the best of its ability. However, when we start to buy-in too much to what the brain is presenting and treating all the thoughts that pop into our head as real we can then start avoiding things, or doing things to try and help keep us safe in response to these supposed threats. This in turn ramps up our fear and anxiety in the future as we treat the next scary thought as true and therefore our avoidance and fear kick in. The lack of nothing bad happening gets attributed to our avoidance or response rather than the fact the threat is not genuine.

This is what we would call ‘maladaptive’. It's like having a 'smart' smoke alarm in your kitchen that has learned that any particle of smoke means that there is a fire and so even when you slightly burn your bread in the toaster it sets off. It's good to have a smoke alarm in your kitchen, but you don't want it firing off over the smallest thing. We see this in many anxiety disorders where we treat the proposed threats in our head as genuine and respond like they are. In this way we teach our brain to give us more scary thoughts and make us feel more scared as this feels like part of what is keeping us safe. This is why certain people with OCD can end up washing their hands too much (as the idea of contamination has become so real and likely for them), or people with generalised anxiety disorder can worry about everything little thing that could go wrong (as it feels like the worry is helping us be ready for the inevitable negative future events).

Through talking therapies, like Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, we can help to identify where people’s beliefs about how threatening situations are have become excessive and too strongly believed as being true; we can work together on reducing this. In this way it’s like re-training that ‘smart’ smoke alarm to only go off when it’s really needed; we’re not taking it away or saying that the alarm (i.e. the emotion of anxiety or fear) is bad, but only that it needs to be re-tuned back to that helpful level.  

Thanks for trying to be helpful brain, but let's dial down the fear a little!

So the next time you find yourself playing a horror game and your head is filled with terrifying thoughts of things that aren't even happening, say "thank you brain for trying to keep me alive and doing a good job 👍".

And if you think your feelings of anxiety or fear are excessive- maybe more intense than other people and is restricting your ability to do things day to day- consider reaching our for support, as it could prove helpful!

 That’s how I feel about this. You might feel different and that is OK.

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Thanks for reading, now go and check out that Dredge documentary from NoClip!