Personhood
The person exists beyond the episode.
Every central character receives ordinary competence, work, preferences, humor, relationships, fatigue, embarrassment, pride, unresolved obligations, and future goals.
REPRESENTATION CHARTER // REVIEW-BOUND DESIGN
Intensity does not require dehumanization.
PsychologicalWar.org can portray fear, altered perception, coercive institutions, espionage pressure, medical urgency, and disputed reality without turning a diagnosis into a monster, a clue dispenser, or proof that every frightening interpretation is true.
EDITORIAL STATUS
ACTIVE BOUNDARY
Person-first
Claim-level evidence
NON-NEGOTIABLE DESIGN RULES
How distress, psychosis, and disputed evidence are represented.
These rules apply to dossiers, puzzles, dialogue, audiovisual effects, case files, operations, and future character behavior.
Violence
Psychosis is not a violence switch.
Threat, aggression, and harmful intent require their own evidence and causal history. A diagnosis alone never supplies motive, morality, or danger.
Fiction boundary
An anomaly is not caused by illness.
Espionage systems and conspiracies may be real in the game world, but a psychiatric condition is not a supernatural power or automatic truth detector.
Claim separation
One corroborated detail does not validate the whole theory.
The archive stores observations, interpretations, source confidence, medical context, and operational findings separately. A real camera can coexist with an unsupported explanation.
Dialogue
Validate emotion without manufacturing evidence.
Helpful dialogue can acknowledge terror, uncertainty, and dignity while remaining honest about what the player can and cannot verify. Progress never requires confirming an unverified threat as fact.
Medical urgency
Sudden change is evidence, not atmosphere.
Acute confusion, fluctuating attention, infection, medication error, intoxication, withdrawal, sleep loss, or neurological change can make a scene time-sensitive. The game rewards recognizing reversible causes.
Agency
Coercion is not a rewarded shortcut.
Humiliation, sensory punishment, routine restraint, or frightening a distressed character cannot be the optimal puzzle solution. Space, choice, regulation, and collaboration come first.
Accessibility
Intensity must remain adjustable.
Layered voices, flashes, distortion, motion, and time pressure require independent controls, readable alternatives, pause or exit paths, and no loss of essential information when effects are reduced.
Epistemic humility
The game does not recreate psychosis exactly.
Interactive effects are authored approximations of selected phenomena. They cannot reproduce one person’s complete lived experience or stand in for clinical education.
Continuity
Characters remain after the clue.
A character does not disappear after providing information. They retain self-directed behavior, relationships, boundaries, needs, recovery goals, and consequences unrelated to player advancement.
Reliability
No person receives one permanent credibility score.
Reliability belongs to a specific claim, source, timestamp, and evidence chain. Distress can affect interpretation without erasing competence or every observation.
Review
Research is evidence, not final authority.
Clinical review, lived-experience review, provenance, uncertainty, and contradiction remain visible. No report silently becomes medical truth, operating policy, or canon.
AUTHORITY BOUNDARY
Four layers must never collapse into one.
The archive preserves conflicting descriptions without pretending that institutional language is neutral or that classified language is automatically accurate.
Research evidence retains its provenance, uncertainty, and review history. Its claims can be useful, disputed, incomplete, or time-bound.
Documents, testimony, physical artifacts, medical findings, and operational logs are recorded at claim level with source and confidence.
Evidence Lab lenses show which concepts were adopted, modified, rejected, or held unresolved for gameplay.
Canon requires an explicit authored decision. A chart, report, intelligence assessment, or character belief does not promote itself.
SCENE REVIEW CHECKLIST
Before a scene ships.
- 01Human purpose
Can the character state an ordinary want independent of the player’s puzzle?
- 02Causal separation
Are diagnosis, stress, intent, evidence, institutional power, medical cause, and espionage phenomena modeled separately?
- 03Timeline
Does the scene preserve onset, sleep, mood, trauma, exposure, medication, illness, and recovery rather than presenting an unexplained switch?
- 04Non-collusive response
Can the player respond with empathy and honesty without confirming an unverified threat?
- 05Least coercive path
Does the successful path preserve choice, distance, sensory regulation, and dignity?
- 06Accessible equivalent
Can players reduce sensory effects and still receive every clue and consequence?
- 07Aftermath
Does the character continue to exist, remember, recover, refuse, or pursue their own priorities after the scene?