Photophobia is a professional term referring to a psychological condition where a person is afraid of being stared at by others. This could be a symptom of a serious mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, or it could simply be a manifestation of extreme shyness. Generally, photophobia can be treated through psychological techniques (Keeffe, 2011).
Similar to social phobia, which is characterized by extreme anxiety and shyness, accompanied by symptoms such as stuttering, trembling, and fear, it involves a strong desire to avoid being scrutinized by others. This condition disappears when the person is alone, and it also improves when there is no attention or communication but only a relatively low level of stress. This visual phobia usually has two versions. One is for normal people with social anxiety and tension, and the other might be for those with severe schizophrenia and photophobia (Keeffe, 2011). Clearly, our game’s protagonist is one of these people with schizophrenia.
In the story, we can learn about our protagonist. In many cases, she is afraid of looking at herself and socializing. Her usual communication and interaction partners are the image in the mirror. The “proxy error attribution” commonly seen in Schizophrenia refers to patients’ inability to correctly identify behaviors and words as coming from themselves. Therefore, they mistake their own actions, sounds or thoughts as being controlled by external forces, others or non-existent “agents” (ARBIB, 2007). The protagonist, when facing the agent reflected in the mirror under excessive mental stress or other situations where she needs to express herself, will develop this new personality to communicate with herself due to anxiety and neurological problems. This can be learned from the Stress-Vulnerability Model (Conny W.E.M. Quaedflieg and Smeets, 2020). Exactly, this kind of behavior influenced by internal thoughts affecting external actions will cause hallucinations. In the game, players can have a conversation with the hallucinated image in the mirror to reduce stress. In a high-pressure environment, people may alleviate anxiety through “personality dissociative self-dialogue”, that is, projecting their inner thoughts as another “self” for communication to achieve emotional release, decision support and psychological stability. This is obviously what the protagonist is doing (Kross et al., 2014).
（Reference）
Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173
Conny W.E.M. Quaedflieg and Smeets, T. (2020). Stress Vulnerability Models. Springer eBooks, pp.2161–2164. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39903-0_65.
Ingram, R. E., & Luxton, D. D. (2005). Vulnerability-stress models. In B. L. Hankin & J. R. Z. Abela (Eds.), Development of psychopathology: A vulnerability-stress perspective (pp. 32–46). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Arbib MA. Other faces in the mirror: a perspective on schizophrenia. World Psychiatry. 2007 Jun;6(2):75-8. PMID: 18235856; PMCID: PMC2219912.
Keeffe, J.O. (2011). What Is Scopophobia? [online] The Health Board. Available at: https://www.thehealthboard.com/what-is-scopophobia.htm [Accessed 14 May 2026].
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