Last year, a video game titled At Dead of Night was released and took the YouTube gaming community by storm. Left and right YouTube personalities like Markiplier, Kubz Scouts, 8-Bit Ryan, and a few others started uploading videos featuring their playthroughs of this wonderful mix of a game, and its popularity makes sense if you’ve managed to see even a single clip of it. Not only does the game feature live-action recordings of the characters—which was done very well—but the main antagonist, Jimmy Hall, is quite a character.

The game starts off on a secluded road in what is likely somewhere near the coast of Great Britain given the accent of the characters and the view of the Sea Side Hotel hovering off a cliff near the ocean. The main character that the player gets to control, Maya, follows her friends to the mysterious hotel. It is here that the player gets to meet Jimmy who, at first, seems like a well-mannered yet awkward older man who runs the hotel. Jimmy offers Maya a chance to view his comedy act as “Hugo Punch”, but upon Maya’s decline Jimmy starts to get upset. A voice then starts talking to Jimmy, who appears panicked and irritated before he completely switches to his alter ego Hugo. Hugo then rounds up Maya’s friends and locks them away in various rooms around the first floor of the hotel, but before he can get to Maya she runs downstairs to try to escape and get help. However, she finds the doors are locked, and she rummages around the front desk and finds the second master key to the hotel’s guest rooms. Just as she turns away from the desk, a strange box starts emitting static, and voices start echoing through pleading with Maya to figure out what happened with Jimmy.

This is where the game begins and where the player has to use what’s known as the Spirit Box to solve the mystery of Jimmy and the hotel. Maya has to talk to the spirits of those who Jimmy has killed—both directly and indirectly—in order for the player to complete the game’s story. The overall game involves a lot of moving around and sneaking by Hugo/Jimmy to gather items, talk to spirits, witness ghost events, and, at the end of the game, rescue Maya’s friends. However, the most interesting part of it is talking to the ghosts and figuring out the game’s lore. Especially the hints given that Jimmy has an alter ego dubbed Hugo Punch who controls him and hurts others simply for the fun of it.

As someone who likes to study psychology, I especially found this game rather interesting, but also rather disheartening. The hints that Jimmy possibly suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) follows a very familiar trend in media that paints people with psychotic symptoms as villains or bad people. Think of it: what do you imagine when you hear the word “sociopath”? Do you think of some crazy person who goes around killing others, manipulating people until they’re completely under their thumb before they take their life without a hint of remorse? While sociopathy does result in the patient experiencing a lack of empathy, and many who suffer from this disorder can be manipulative and often lash out violently, not all people who experience this are cold-blooded killers. However, the way media has portrayed sociopaths would have many believe the stereotypes to be true.

This issue with whether or not Jimmy’s character contributes to this hurtful portrayal is that he actually doesn’t experience DID: neither in canon nor even according to the symptoms. The creators of the game confirmed that Jimmy doesn’t have DID and even added it as a separate menu option on the title screen when you open up the game. Additionally, a lot of things we as the player see in the game show that Jimmy doesn’t experience the symptoms.

According to webmd.com, Dissociative Identity Disorder, “is a severe form of dissociation, a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity.” People with this disorder often develop it as a result of childhood trauma, and the dissociative part of it is often a coping mechanism to block out the memories of that trauma. The “alter egos” of people with DID are often referred to as simply “alters” while the person experiencing the disorder is referred to as “the host” or “the system”. Hosts can have at least two alters, but some people tend to have three or more, and alters are usually completely different from the host with their own history, ages, personalities, genders, and can even be a different species. Whenever an alter “fronts”—the process by which the alter takes control—the host loses all memory of what occurs while the alter is in charge.

As an example, say there’s a person who has DID named Jennifer. She is the host and is 33-years-old, and her alters are a teenage girl named Maddie and a 50-year-old man named Hubert. One day, Jennifer decides to go out on a camping trip with her friends. However, during the trip, Hubert fronts and spends the rest of the trip with Jennifer’s friends. As a result, Jennifer won’t be able to remember anything that happened during the trip after he fronted. She would only be able to remember what happened while she was in control.

By the very definition of DID, it’s clear that this isn’t what Jimmy suffers from, and we can see that in the game. For one, assuming Jimmy does have DID, he only has one alter. While it’s unclear if it’s possible to have only a single alter, the baseline for diagnosis of this disorder is to have two alters or more. Additionally, while alters don’t have to be completely different from their host, they typically are, and the player is given no indication that Hugo has a different life or age from Jimmy. The only way to tell the difference between them is that Hugo is the violent and impulsive one while Jimmy is the kind-hearted one out of the pair. Hugo still refers to Jimmy’s mother and father as his own and, in fact, acts as if he was Jimmy himself. Like they were one in the same. Lastly, we see at the end of the game Hugo talking to Jimmy in a hallway in the hotel after Maya and her friends escape. While Hugo is the one in control, it seems Jimmy is completely aware of what he’s doing and pleads with him to stop hurting other people. If Jimmy actually had DID, he wouldn’t be conscious of Hugo’s misdeeds at all while he was still fronting, least of all pleading with him to stop trying to hurt Maya. The only way he would be able to know was if he regained control and was informed of what happened. However, that’s clearly not what’s going on.

So if Jimmy doesn’t have DID, then what does he suffer from? Well, so far, there are two common theories circulating this story: (1) Jimmy actually has a different disorder like schizophrenia, and (2) his alter ego “Hugo” is a manifestation of Jimmy’s father’s abusive nature haunting him.

The first theory makes about as much sense as the idea that Jimmy has DID. For one, it still portrays people with mental illness as “evil” or serial killers. Secondly, the symptoms of schizophrenia still don’t apply. People with schizophrenia tend to have similar experiences of amnesia to that of people with DID, though perhaps not quite as extreme. Meaning Jimmy would still need to be unaware of what Hugo does while he’s in control. Not to mention people with schizophrenia don’t “switch” the way Jimmy turns into Hugo and vice versa. While, yes, they can hear voices in their head that don’t really exist, they don’t become a whole other person. At Dead of Night makes it clear that Hugo is a separate entity from Jimmy and is more of an evil nutcase who lives in his head.

The second theory, by comparison, seems much more plausible. It’s not too uncommon for people who have been abused to lash out violently towards others in turn, even in ways that are similar to how their abuser acted towards them. Ever seen that trope of the elementary school bully actually having a jerk father who constantly berates him, so in turn he picks on the nerdy kid at school? Well, Jimmy and Hugo would be a more extreme version of that. This theory also makes sense in that Jimmy’s father was also named Hugo, and if Hugo Punch was a manifestation of Hugo Hall’s abuse towards Jimmy it would likely be through some other psychological explanation not yet explained in the story or through the paranormal. I mean, the universe of At Dead of Night has ghosts in it. It wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to say that Hugo Hall’s ghost is haunting Jimmy in such a literal way, especially since Jimmy is shown to have acted violently since he was a child and Hall having died when Jimmy was still quite young. It all lines up pretty well.

Either way, whatever the cause of Hugo’s existence, it’s important for creators to be aware of how these kinds of portrayals of mental illness can affect people. Hugo and Jimmy’s behavior is not too far off from characters belonging to similar media such as Split or almost any movie remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—Mr. Hyde wasn’t originally portrayed to be purely evil so much as he was simply a manifestation of Jekyll’s instinctive, feral desires to do the opposite of what society wanted from him—so it makes sense how people’s first thought was that Jimmy suffered from DID. I, too, had fallen victim to such a trap that, upon hearing the creators confirm this information, I didn’t believe it until I dove deeper into what people with Dissociative Identity Disorder actually go through. After that, all the pieces started falling into place.

So next time you think of creating a character that suffers from a mental disorder, be sure to do proper research first, and while you can still have them as the antagonist it’s important to highlight that this person isn’t wicked or cruel because they suffer from their disorder, much less some crazed serial killer. Rather, they’re a victim to circumstances out of their control and their minds are only acting accordingly to their trauma. It’s time to end this idea that anyone who deals with psychosis or disorders similar to DID or schizophrenia is automatically a bad or evil person because, deep down, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye.