Hello! It's mentioned in the influences section of Deathbed that you have a masters in medieval studies!! That is so immensely cool. I'm really curious how you moved from that pursuit to writing ttrpgs? Does it impact your writing do you feel? Outside of taking historical inspo for Deathbed of course!
The thing about higher education is that it is a scam and will also change your life. I was lucky enough to get a significant scholarship and was able to get out without massive debt, so it mostly changed my life only for the better.
I ended up writing TTRPGs because my medieval studies degree didnât help me get a job in any sort of actual history-focused field like research, museum curation, etc., because it turns out those job markets are extremely competitive. There are very few job openings.
Fresh out of my degree program i could only get a job teaching, which was totally miserable, and then I ended up doing archival work (which is a job my degree actually did help me get).
TTRPGs and game design in general were things I always had an interest in, and Eureka started as something just for fun. But when that archival work dried up, it became a way for me to take control of my own career by utilizing a skill I am both good at and enjoy using. I have never had hardly any success with any other more conventional jobs. I struggle with interpersonal work because Iâm socially inept, and I struggle with manual labor because Iâm physically disabled, so A.N.I.M. is kinda my last shot.
As for using my college education, I actually use it all the time in my line of work, in Eureka, not just Death Bed. I happen to also have a Bsc in psychology and MA in psychiatry. Most branches of psychology are 80-90% pseudoscientific woo-woo, but my focus was on behavioral psychology, which is only maybe about 50% pseudoscientific woo-woo.
Having a basic understanding of behavioral psychology is a great asset to game design, because it focuses on how the environment encourages and discourages individual âbehaviors.â (No, this isnât âmind control, itâs just knowing that people are less likely to want to do something if the process or result sucks.)
Studying psychiatry helped me learn that the field is about 80% pseudoscience and at least 70% concentrated evil. Psychiatric research is almost always more concerned with eliminating mentally ill people, rather than eliminating the suffering mentally ill people endure. I also learned that âmental illnessâ is a very nebulous category and âmental illnessesâ donât even really exist half the time.
In theory, any given âmental illnessâ is supposed to be a shorthand term for a particular pattern of symptoms appearing together, so that treatments that worked on previous people with that specific collection of symptoms can be tried on the person receiving the diagnosis. But in practice, this isnât how a lot of researchers or medical professionals really treat it. They treat it like a physical virus or bacterial infection that can be eliminated from the body entirely to produce a perfectly healthy normal person, not acknowledging that these symptoms are behaviors, personality traits, and perceptions. In other words, they often *are* the person, or at the very least itâs hard to separate âthe personâ from these undesirable behaviors, traits, and perceptions. (And another thing, what traits are âundesirableâ is a delineation that is very rarely in the best interest of the patient.)
A lot of these themes appear in Eureka, particularly with the Vampire Trait. For instance, how quite a lot of the Vampire Traitâs features which embody classic âeverybody knows vampires act like thisâ things are heavily implied to be learned behaviors in response to how other people treat them for being a vampire. Also, the implication that the vampire you see is an illusion, an effect created by something you canât see. Because you canât see the true source, the only thing that can be studied and reacted to is the effects. Treating the effects as the source themselves, or pretending you can see the source when you canât, is bound to lead to erroneous conclusions. This is how I feel about much of psychology.
Also, my medieval studies MA is super helpful for, like, knowing what people actually used to think about vampires and werewolves and how they interact with historical Christianity and stuff.
The character of Comtesse Yvette Preux is, like, the culmination of all of this. She represents the themes of the major flaws in much of the research under the umbrella of psychology, how mental illness develops, historical Christianity and its interaction with the othered, and an educational representation of medieval culture in general. I couldnt have written the Vampire Trait or much of Eureka in general, at least not as well as I did, without this education.
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