The Alters Made Me Feel Like I Was Talking To Myself

I’ve got a particularly compartmentalized mind: I like everything to be in its own little box. This has caused me some trouble in my life—I’ll forget important dates if I’m not reminded of them regularly, I can struggle to switch from “fun mode” to “work mode” and vice versa, and I’m almost never as outgoing in a professional setting as I am in an explicitly social one. For better or worse, I’ve mostly accepted this rigid psychological structure as part of my life, but The Alters made me second-guess it.

My life has almost nothing in common with Jan Dolski’s: I’m a writer, not a builder, I have a great relationship with my father, I’ve never gotten a divorce (fingers crossed), and I’ve never been stranded on an alien planet, forced to clone myself to survive (fingers extra crossed). But Dolski and I do have at least one significant commonality, in the sense that we are both harangued by the occasionally clashing values of our various alternate personas. No, I don’t have a fleet of interdimensional clones competing for my attention, nor do I suffer from DID or any similar mental fragmentation, but I am a collection of parts, running the mobile base that is my body through everyday life. In this way, I can relate to The Alters‘ leading man, far more than I thought I would have.

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The Alters Presented an External Reality that Mimics My Internal One

All of Jan Dolski’s Alters deviate from his life path in some significant way. Maybe one of them stayed with Lena, his ex-wife, while another decided to hang back and take care of his dying mother, rather than leaving her alone to pursue the passions of youth. These deviations are just one of countless life-defining events and choices, which results in each Alter being radically different from one another in terms of personality, temperament, goals, and values.

The differences between each Alter are realized perfectly by Jan Dolski voice actor Alex Jordan, who voices the entire principal cast, aside from the likes of Lucas, Lena, and Maxwell.

And in a way, Jan’s otherworldly adventure reflects my own psychological topography. There’s a version of me that never got into games journalism, who sometimes berates me for not making enough money and encourages me to always earn more; there’s a version of me who never pivoted away from pre-med in college and, to my mind at least, is a lot more responsible; there’s even a Nick Rodriguez who never played The Alters, and probably thinks I’m making too big a fuss over a video game.

These are all just theoretical avatars, of course—it’s just me, at the end of the day. But then again, maybe that’s not true: a lot of modern psychology is built around the notion of the mind being ridden with different psychic models, with Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes and Freud’s theory of the ego being the most similar to my own understanding of the psyche. I find myself agreeing with these dusty old psychologists on at least one thing: if these distinct psychological components do exist, then they ought to be integrated as much as possible. It would appear that The Alters agrees with this as well.

Without giving too much away, The Alters has a lot to say about the integration of disparate internal personas. Each Jan Dolski is a puzzle piece, represented literally via the Lessons Learned mural, that comes together to create an ultimate whole. In a sense, that’s how I view my compartmentalized mind—at least, that’s how I ought to be viewing it. I’m not the Nick Rodriguez that went to med school, nor am I the one who stayed on the easy, non-games-journalism path, but that doesn’t mean that these deviations are mistakes. I made decisions that brought me to the place I’m at today, and while I can learn from these varied internal personalities, I’ll never be wholly defined by them, and that’s for the best—if we can all coexist peacefully, that is.