The Psychology of Saga Anderson

Video game characters can inspire us in many different ways. They can motivate us to try new gameplay classes and styles of play, inspire us to write fanfiction, or even give us the courage to try out a new haircut. Or if you’re like me, they can inspire you to share mental wellbeing advice with the world.

This is what happened when I played Alan Wake 2, The Game Awards 2023’s winner of the Best Narrative category. While playing a gameplay sequence towards the end of the game, I found myself reaching for my notebook and scribbling down notes. I was engrossed in the game and its narrative, yet I still found myself planning out a future article while the game was in front of me.

This gameplay sequence involves Alan Wake 2 co-protagonist Saga Anderson. While the titular protagonist Alan Wake is a brooding artist fighting to overcome his inner and outer demons, Saga is an FBI agent sent to Bright Falls to explore a case surrounding a murderous cult. Where Alan finds himself spiraling, Saga has a confidence anchored in a delightful combination of compassion and deductive reasoning. But can she maintain this confidence 100% of the time?

In this article, I would like to share practical tips that we can use to take care of our mental wellbeing as inspired by Saga Anderson. I want to set the correct impression right away that this will not be a character deconstruction similar to video essays. Instead, the focus will be on Saga’s gameplay loop, a particular moment in the narrative, and what the combination of these two can teach us about taking care of our mental wellbeing.

My aim is to keep this article as spoiler free as possible while tiptoeing around certain story moments. Where possible, I will make up story beats rather than discussing actual story moments. And as usual, there will be a summary at the end if you don’t wish to read everything. Now, let’s begin!

The Character of Saga

As described above, Saga Anderson is the co-protagonist of Alan Wake 2 alongside the titular Alan Wake. Saga is an FBI agent who, along with her partner Alex Casey, has been sent to the town of Bright Falls to investigate a string of ritualistic murders conducted by the Cult of the Tree. During her time at Bright Falls, she investigates these murders with Casey to uncover more information about the cult and to find out who’s behind these murders.

As you explore the town, speak to residents and gather more information, the game’s depiction of an FBI agent collating evidence is one that will stay with me forever. Saga and Casey stay at the Elderwood Palace Lodge during their stay at Bright Falls, and physically entering their hotel rooms shows a mess of files and coffee cups (well, Casey at least!). So how does an FBI agent stay organised on the go?

Why, escape to their Mind Place of course.

Saga’s Mind Place is a key component of her gameplay in Alan Wake 2. While in the game, you can press a button to escape to Saga’s visualisation of the Elderwood Palace Lodge’s Recreation Room. In this Mind Place, Saga has filing cabinets and case boards of information that help her to deduce the events unfolding around her. This room also has items precious to Saga such as photographs of her daughter — remember this.

I want to give an example of how Saga’s Mind Place works while being mindful of story spoilers. To avoid touching upon spoilers, I’ve made up a completely fictional example to illustrate how the case board in Saga’s Mind Place works.

Let’s say I sit down to a quick lunch of a sausage sandwich when the doorbell rings. I put my sandwich down and open the door to receive a package. I put the package on the kitchen table and return to my lunch, only to find that my sandwich is gone! Who could have terrorised my lunch like this? It’s time to go on a clue hunt. If I were to use Saga’s case board to solve this mystery, it may look a little something like this:

As you can see, Saga collates evidence in her case board to drive her evidence-based conclusions. From a narrative perspective, this is a direct contrast to Alan who is often quite brooding and emotional, even catastrophising at times. Since Saga relies heavily on evidence, facts and deductive reasoning, that means she’s always calm and rational, right?

Right?

Once again I’m going to try my best to tiptoe around story content, but for the sake of clarity I will need to mention one or two small story components. If you want to avoid this as much as possible, you can skip directly to the next section.

To greatly oversimplify and tiptoe around spoilers, let’s say that Saga’s Mind Place becomes ‘tampered with’. This tampering comes at a time when Saga is at an emotionally vulnerable state and her fears and worries are through the roof — remember this. Her anxieties begin to impact the case board itself, with pieces of ‘evidence’ entering the case board such as ‘you’re a terrible partner to Agent Casey, you should just quit’ and ‘you’re a bad mother’.

This is a very tense gameplay sequence where a character’s sanctuary is compromised. Instead of being confronted with gruesome monsters that you can shine a flashlight on and shoot, Saga has to defeat her inner demons. But how can she do that? What is the psychological equivalent of a flashlight and shotgun?

She challenges this evidence. She’s not a terrible partner to Casey, here are examples where she has been there for him not only on duty, but off-duty when he was going through a rough divorce. She’s not a bad mother, she cares deeply about her daughter and her daughter looks up to her. When confronted with faulty evidence, she confronts it right back.

I was in complete awe at this sequence and immediately began scribbling down notes during it. I’m definitely not giving this sequence enough credit while tiptoeing around spoilers, it’s incredibly effective and impactful as Saga battles with self-doubt, deep-seated fears and flawed logic. It’s a gameplay sequence that I’ve regularly thought about since playing.

I asked above what the psychological equivalent of a flashlight and shotgun could be, so let’s explore this.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Cognitive behavioural therapy (or ‘CBT’ as it’s commonly abbreviated as) is almost definitely something you’ve heard of before, but you may not be as familiar with it as you would like to be. So let’s take some time to explore this.

Cognitive Behavioural Theory is a powerful tool for helping people to challenge their negative thoughts and behaviours and to replace them with healthier, more constructive thoughts and behaviours [1]. It’s easy to look at the name and think that it involves fixing how you think which will subsequently improve how you behave, but I think that not only undersells the value of CBT, but leaves out an important component of CBT – how we feel.

CBT can help us to escape a ‘vicious cycle’ of negative thoughts, beliefs and behaviours [2], but in order to understand how it breaks the vicious cycle, we need to understand what this vicious cycle looks like. Diagram time!

From this diagram, we can see how thoughts such as ‘I’m not good enough’ can lead to feelings such as stress, anxiety and upset. However, these feelings can then inform our behaviours, such as how someone who’s afraid of failure might be too anxiety-ridden to complete an exam, which then leads to thoughts of “See! I knew I’m not good enough!” and they get caught in this vicious cycle.

The reason why CBT is viewed as such an effective wellbeing intervention is that it doesn’t just aim to change the thoughts, feeling and behaviours outlined above, but strategies are provided where the arrows are placed to challenge our thoughts and feelings directly.

Let’s stick with the example of a stressed-out student thinking they’re ‘not good enough’. This thought may overwhelm them with anxiety and their heart begins to race, so their fight-or-flight response kicks in [3] and they choose to ‘take flight’ in skipping the exam. While the student’s confidence can be built up over time, the immediate thing to deal with right now is the racing heart and the influx of adrenaline and cortisol circulating their body.

A strategy that could fit in the arrow between ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ could be Box Breathing, a technique where you breathe in for four seconds, hold the breath for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, remain still for four seconds and repeat. While this is a relatively new relaxation technique, it’s already showing itself to be helpful for soothing anxiety and relaxing the mind [4] – and is even being incorporated into virtual reality games [5]!

By initiating Box Breathing and helping to calm down, the student may have the clarity and presence of mind needed to take their seat in the exam hall. It turns out that they do fine in the exam after all, and this acts as a piece of evidence that can be used to counteract the belief that they’re not good enough – yet another tool that can be squeezed into the arrow between ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’.

While I appreciate that this example is a bit of a segue, I wanted to make sure that everyone had enough context to understand that Saga’s gameplay sequence is a brilliant example of what Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tries to teach us.

In this sequence, Saga is initially presented with intrusive thoughts such as ‘You’re a bad partner to Agent Casey’. As Saga is already emotionally vulnerable at this stage, these intrusive thoughts overpower her and she becomes upset, temporarily turning her from an expert in deductive reasoning to someone who can’t parse fact from fiction.

But by exploring her Mind Place and viewing evidence to the contrary, she uses this evidence to break the vicious cycle she becomes trapped in. It’s no longer a case of ‘I’m a bad partner (thought) and that makes me upset and powerless (feeling)’, it’s ‘Actually I remember this specific example of when I was there for Agent Casey and he told me himself how much it meant to me (thought), and I’m proud to be his partner (feeling)’.

I alluded to this earlier, but building someone’s self-confidence and their personalised strategies for breaking this vicious cycle can take time – it’s called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for a reason. But I appreciate that getting to spend time with a qualified professional to receive this personalised therapy can be a luxury to many. I’ve previously written about how anxiety is now considered to be an epidemic [6], with over 300 million people worldwide posited to suffer from an anxiety disorder [7].

So with all of this in mind, what can Saga Anderson teach us about taking care of our mental wellbeing and how we can break vicious cycles of thoughts, feelings and behaviours?

What We Can Learn From Saga

Create Your Mind Place

As an FBI detective, Saga finds herself travelling across America solving cases and trying to keep people safe. Despite having a travelling workplace, I couldn’t help but smile at Saga’s approach to her Mind Place.

The physical location of Saga’s Mind Place is based on the Rec Room of the Elderwood Palace Lodge where she stays throughout the duration of the case. That means that Saga grounds herself in her environment when trying to solve a case, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t add some personal touches to it. Where you might see a filing cabinet with nothing on top in the real-life Rec Room, Saga uses that space in her Mind Place to put a picture of her daughter. She’ll use similar spaces based on the real-life room to fill it with framed photos and cards from loved ones. It is ultimately these personal touches that help Saga to break out of the vicious cycle of negative thoughts that she finds herself in.

We can learn two important things from Saga’s Mind Place: the importance of our environment, and the value of what grounds us.

I’ll first start with our environment. Research demonstrates that anxious people are more likely to evaluate neutral objects in our environment as threatening and anxiety-provoking [8]. I’ll throw myself under the bus here and use myself as an example of what this means. Probably the time in my life where I least used my gaming PC was when I had a particularly mean boss. I was finding that I didn’t want to play a game on the same monitor that I had just read an email artistically crafted to be as horrible as possible.

During this time, I was retreating a lot more to the living room. I kept nice candles in there, my softest blankets, seasonal plants, and pictures of loved ones I knew would help me in a time of crisis. These are all things that helped me unwind after a day with my boss and even helped to bring me back to reality when I thought I was a horrible screw-up.

While I no longer work for that boss, it taught me the value of having a space to retreat to when I was feeling anxious. I highly recommend everyone to, if possible, create your own equivalent of a Mind Place where you can have a clear view of loved ones, cards that make you smile, memories that you cherish, or even items that help you to feel safe. We’ll be discussing one of these potential items in the next section, so let’s get to it.

Build Your Own Case Board

In the first section of the article, I described how Saga’s case board is a space for her to collate and organise the evidence she has collected throughout the game. This evidence is then used to inform her behaviour such as who she should talk to next or where she could explore — basically a healthy version of the cognitive-behavioural cycle.

Again, there are two recommendations I can make from Saga’s case board. Firstly, when we feel negative emotions like fear or doubt creep in, I highly recommend taking a deep breath and trying to visualise the events unfolding like a case board.

Let’s say you’re waiting for a friend to show up. The friend is ten minutes late and they’re not answering your texts, so you fear that you’ve been stood up and that your friend hates you. But if you step back, take the focus away from yourself and lay evidence out on the case board, you’ll begin to see that your friend did tell you that they were doing something beforehand and so that probably overran. And the reason they haven’t texted you back is because it’s raining and they probably just want to get to you ASAP so you can both get out of the rain. It means you’re countering the catastrophising with evidence, both based on their previous texts and your knowledge of the weather that day.

The second recommendation is the one people may be least likely to use, but I’ll be happy if even one person considers it based on this article. In the previous section, I hinted that it would be good to store something in the space that helps you to feel calm, and this would be a Compliment Journal.

As an anxious person filled with lots of self-doubt and Impostor Syndrome, I keep a Compliment Journal. This is basically a little notebook where if someone sends me a really kind email or says something really heartfelt to me, I keep a log of it. This has been a recent development in my life after decades of closing my ears any time I received a compliment, but now I have tried to become more open to them. Sadly I haven’t found a lot of academic work on the benefits of keeping a Compliment Journal, but I have found other people online describe their Compliment Journal as “a source of support during times of intense self-doubt” [9].

I feel like it’s really easy to confuse a Compliment Journal for an Arrogance Booklet, with narcissists pouring over every word of their brilliance. But not only can it be a wonderful way to honour the people who have taken time out of their day to show kindness, but it can be an effective tool to inject evidence into your case board.

I’ll use myself as an example again. There was a time semi-recently where I was having an existential crisis over not working as hard as I wanted to — cue those reliable feelings of Impostor Syndrome. But something in the Compliment Journal that I threw into my case board actually helped me overcome these bad feelings. A few weeks beforehand, I was working with a Senior Lecturer who described me as “a powerhouse”. This is someone with decades of experience who has worked with hundreds of people throughout their career, and you’re just going to ignore their assessment of you? Don’t be disrespectful to them!

This is an email I could have just let drift into the annals of history, but instead it is being used as evidence in my self-doubt case board to help defeat my Impostor Syndrome. It would make me so happy if others could do the same.

Become a Wellbeing Detective

When setting the scene for this article, I asked my dear readers to remember two things: that Saga had filled her Mind Place with personal mementos, and that Saga’s compromised Mind Place came at a time when she was emotionally vulnerable. I paid off the mementos part by talking about building our own Mind Place, so now it’s time to revisit this second memory.

Saga is a delightful protagonist who approaches her duties with an abundance of clarity and compassion. After around a dozen hours of thorough and evidence-based case solving, it’s no coincidence that the time when Saga’s clarity becomes compromised is when she herself is emotionally vulnerable. Her feelings in the moment begin to cloud her judgement, subsequently leading to more upsetting thoughts and feelings.

We’re all human, and I’m not going to pretend that it’s easy to bring ourselves out of an emotionally compromised position right in the middle of it. But just as I recommend more automated behaviours like moving to a new room and looking at pre-prepared objects, is there anything we can do to deduce when our thinking has been compromised and what we can do to help snap ourselves out of it?

Yes, yes we can. For this section, I want to provide two examples (including PDFs and printables) for how we can become our own wellbeing detectives and what we can do to help solve the case.

The first example is what is called a Wellness Recovery Action Plan (WRAP) [10]. Recovery plans are created particularly for those in treatment for conditions that have a high relapse rate such as addictions. The client in treatment will work with their therapist to create a recovery plan that details key factors such as their personal triggers, who they can reach out to for help and more. An example of creating a recovery plan comes courtesy of an NHS Foundation Trust, turning this plan into a handy workbook that the client can easily grab at any point.

The important thing to note here is that the recovery plan is created when the client is in a good place emotionally. This makes it a highly personalised guide the person can turn to during a moment of crisis in order to overcome their vicious cycles and faulty thought processes.

The second example is one that takes the philosophy of a recovery plan — preparing a guide for solving your own wellbeing case — and injects even more detective work into it. To emphasise the detective work behind it, I want to provide a real-life anecdote that was shared with me to explain this.

A teacher shared a story of how a child being a bit mischievous in her classroom ended not only in a visit to the principal’s office for the child, but in tears for both the child and the teacher. Rubbing her temples, the teacher says “There was no need to let it escalate that much, I was in a bad place that day and it shouldn’t have ended like that”. The teacher knew that they were the problem factor that day, they just wished they had the skillset to recognise it before reacting the way they did.

This is where our Detective Plan comes into action. The premise of the Detective Plan itself is simple — rating how you feel in the moment between 1 and 5. But what if every number between 1 to 5 was a guide into how you deal with situations, how you treat others, how you treat yourself and more?

Now let’s expand on this notion of 1 to 5. Rather than 1 being the best possible mood ever and 5 being the worst possible mood ever, it’s explained like this:

Feeling in control of your emotions, your wellbeing and the situation around you.
Beginning to feel slightly unsettled, fidgeting behaviour or pacing might start here.
Beginning to disengage from the environment around you. This is where the low-intensity negative behaviours can begin such as snapping at someone, holding a grudge with someone, ignoring instructions etc.
The emotional ‘tipping point’. This stage doesn’t last very long as someone is on the precipice of losing control or is able to maintain control using coping strategies.
Losing control of your emotions and the situation around you, fight-or-flight responses begin here.

Using these definitions, we can begin to fill out our own Detective Plans. I have provided a blank Detective Plan as a printable, but it’s easy to make your own with these headings: ‘Wellbeing Stage’; ‘How This Stage Looks; ‘How This Stage Feels; and ‘I Can Try To…’.

For example, someone at Stage 2 may be seen absent-mindedly scratching their palms. They have a level of anxiety that’s creeping up on them but they can’t quite pinpoint what’s wrong. They can use their case board to figure out what they were thinking about before they started scratching their palms and to work through their thoughts on the underlying anxiety.

I use the Detective Plan in my workplace and it has been so helpful for communication and looking out for our wellbeing. Simply asking someone “What level are you at?” helps us to take care of each other and helps us to monitor our own wellbeing, whether it’s avoiding incidents like snapping at others or overloading someone with work when they are not in the best place to receive it.

Simply having that presence of mind to recognise that we’re not doing too well at that moment can help us not only to avoid situations like the teacher’s, but to stop negative thoughts before they creep in too deeply. Saga could use the plan to deduce that she’s at a high level at that moment, so any fears or doubts she has at that moment could be attributed to how she’s feeling. She could then use strategies written in her Detective Plan such as reading cards from her mother and looking at photos of her loved ones to calm her and ground her, helping her to descend the levels and think more rationally.

Summary

In Alan Wake 2, the co-protagonist of Saga Anderson escapes to her Mind Place filled not only with personal items and memorabilia, but case boards that allow her to collate and organise evidence. While Saga uses evidence and deductive reasoning throughout the game, events towards the end of the narrative see false and hurtful pieces of evidence enter Saga’s case board. This evidence fills her with fear and doubts, but she is able to overcome these falsehoods by systematically deconstructing and countering each faulty thought that enters her case board.
Saga’s challenging of faulty thoughts is a brilliant example of the application of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT helps us to challenge negative thoughts and behaviours and replace them with healthier and more constructive ones, helping us to break the vicious cycles that we can become trapped in. While these faulty thoughts initially upset Saga, she is able to challenge them with evidence and regain composure, a strategy that is often taught in CBT.
Both Saga’s gameplay loop and her ability to combat the false evidence entering her case board can teach us three important lessons in taking care of our mental wellbeing.
It is helpful for us to craft our own Mind Place, a place where we feel safe and can remind us of the people we love and who we can rely on. This can not only help us to challenge negative thoughts like Saga did, but can help us to escape a physically stressful environment such as where our work laptop resides.
In a similar vein, it is also helpful for us to break our thoughts and feelings down in a case board. Instead of jumping to conclusions and assuming our friend is late because they secretly hate us, breaking the sequence down in a case board helps us to remember that they may be running behind from their last meeting. A piece of recurring evidence that can be helpful for our case board is keeping a Compliment Journal. Having a record of the kind things people have said about us can help counteract faulty thoughts that creep into our case board with evidence.
Finally, there are steps you can take to become your own wellbeing detective and not only identify when your wellbeing has become compromised, but what you can do to bring yourself out of it. I have provided a link to a template and have created a printable you can use to create your own wellbeing plan. These plans encourage you to recognise how, when and why you may begin to think and behave differently, what this looks and feels like, and what you can do to overcome this stage.

Credits

A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image and to LoopyGc for drawing the header art.

This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, redKheld, Austin Enright, Shaemus, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Tobias Svensson, Pot, Hulor and A471. Thank you!

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References

[1] Vernon, A., & Doyle, K. A. (Eds.). (2017). Cognitive Behavior Therapies: a guidebook for practitioners. John Wiley & Sons.

[2] Fisher, K. (2021). About Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: What we think, can impact on what we feel and do. Retrieved 03 November, 2024 from https://www.centrallondoncbt.co.uk/about-cognitive-behavioural-therapy

[3] McCarty, R. (2016). The fight-or-flight response: A cornerstone of stress research. In Stress: Concepts, cognition, emotion, and behavior (pp. 33-37). Academic Press.

[4] Andas, A. M., bin Sansuwito, T., Said, F. M., Puspitasari, I., Prima, A., & Andas, N. H. (2023). The Effect of Box Breathing on Sleep Disorders in Elderly at Tresna Werdha Social Institution. Malaysian Journal of Medicine & Health Sciences, 19.

[5] Wang, S. Y., Cheng, C. Y., Huang, S. M., Chan, W. I., Huang, Y. H., & Lin, J. W. (2023, April). Breathero: Not Another Slow Breathing Game—Exploring Faster-Paced VR Breathing Exercise Games. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7).

[6] Rosen, L. D. (2017). The Anxiety Epidemic. Retrieved August 17th, 2018 from https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/rewired-the-psychology-technology/201706/the-anxiety-epidemic.

[7] World Health Organisation. (2023). Anxiety disorders. Retrieved Oct 29, 2024 from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/anxiety-disorders

[8] Suarez-Jimenez, B., Balderston, N. L., Bisby, J. A., Leshin, J., Hsiung, A., King, J. A., … & Ernst, M. (2021). Location-dependent threat and associated neural abnormalities in clinical anxiety. Communications Biology, 4(1), 1263.

[9] B is for Being. 051: Why I Started Keeping a Compliments Journal. Retrieved Nov 2, 2024 from https://bisforbeing.com/p/051-why-i-started-keeping-a-compliments-journal

[10] WRAP. (2024). What is WRAP? – Wellness Recovery Action Plan. Retrieved Oct 3, 2024 from https://www.wellnessrecoveryactionplan.com/what-is-wrap/