We are working on a cooperative horror game that is focused around investigating a series of different paranormal events. We have been brainstorming within our team but I think there can be a lot of benefit from hearing what other developers and more importantly gamers have to say.
Here’s a screenshot of what we have been playing with so far:
Have you had some moments in games? What bits of movies get you going? Any scary events in real life?
For me, here are a couple;
I find the thought of being hunted terrifying, it’s what made alien isolation one of the best horror games out there for me personally.
The bit on the conjuring where she is playing blind man’s bluff was also pretty creepy for me, I’ve had some bizarre experiences as a kid, one of them was very similar to this and it really spooked me. For those that haven’t seen it;
So the question is this, what creeps you out, scares or un-nerves YOU ?
My view has always been fear is not real. It’s just in your mind and people give power to these fears by thinking about them. Although there seems to be actual phobias so I am not making light of that. Though I do believe they are in our control. Anyway the point of that is since it is in our mind and not rational I would think there must be thousands of fears. There are probably even people out there who are deathly afraid of trees and other things the majority wouldn’t ever give a second thought.
When I was a kid I had an extreme fear of heights so much I would get dizzy / lightheaded when up just a ways and looked down. I made myself climb higher and higher and look down til finally I no longer felt lightheaded etc when looking down from even very high up.
Anyway not sure if people would appreciate it but I suspect if you had a 3D game where the view changed to show the ground far below it would be disturbing for some people. On the bright side it might also be a very safe way for them to get rid of that fear. Oh and I have needed to “save” multiple women in my life from a spider so that might be good too. I know people who are crazy spooked by clowns for some reason. I think maybe they watched IT one too many times. Lol
Dying and not having my family taken care of (which is why I’m currently in the process of getting life insurance)…and exactly like Murligod, death of the Earth. I was just thinking about that last night. If it was announced tomorrow that a meteor would hit Earth while my children were still young or Yellowstone was about to blow, I legit started having a mild panic attack trying to figure out how I would manage my children.
You want to know what scares parents of young children? Check out Babadook. I barely made it through that movie. If it had been a game, I would have uninstalled in the first 30 minutes. I woudl then spend the next year re-installing and trying to get further each time before stopping.
Hmmm, also the anxiety and crushing defeat of having your company shutdown unexpectedly when you are responsible for others. It’s happened to me twice now and the fear is a core part of me.
I usually don’t feel scared playing a game or watching a movie. For example, jump scares don’t have the intended affect on me.
What does feel scary is being powerless. Not having an adequate weapon is an obvious example. Beyond that, a player can feel powerless when there is a lack of useful information. Reduced lighting can restrict information, which can make the player feel powerless.
Alan Wake did a decent job of making a player feel powerless at times. In addition to being dark and creepy, there was the gameplay mechanic of requiring a light to allow enemies to be vulnerable to gun fire. That made the guns feel powerless at times.
Another form of powerlessness is reduced mobility. Slow running and weak jumping can make a player feel very weak and vulnerable, especially if a player is used to power fantasy games where the player can quickly sprint and jump really high.
Another way to play on the powerlessness aspect is to reduce the players power. Riddick did this well. It started off with the player running around with a machine gun. For the majority of the game the player uses fists against enemies that are armed with machine guns. You know exactly how deadly your opponents are for the rest of the game.
The only game that managed to scare me is F.E.A.R, thanks to little Alma’s similarities to Sadako and other japanese/asian ghosts… Doom’s Hell Army? Meh… DeadSpace Necromorph? Repulsive maybe, but not scary… L4D’s Witch? Okay, maybe her cry is not something you’d like to hear in the middle of the night…
Don’t make player slow and clunky as hell. Just make the boogie monster faster and stronger. Derned if I ain’t tired of slow-ass horror games.
Ahem, sorry. Yeah, for me just let the boogie creature remain unseen but let it kill player real fast if it spots you – and give it legit senses. Alien Isolation is the only game that ever scared me (that I remember anyway.) If you respect the monster, you fear the monster.
Another good example of terrifying horror creature : the night mutant monster things in Dying Light. They’re dangerous as hell, and only come out if you make lots of noise – like set off explosions or shoot guns. You don’t even have time to look at them. You hear them coming, you have to go as fast as you can to a safe spot. Very hard to escape = terrifying.
Noises and visuals don’t have to be over the top gruesome and all that. In fact, when horror becomes a caricature of itself, that’s not scary at all. Gruesomeness does not equal horror. Just a basic dark environment, uncertainty, and swift punishment for carelessness is all it takes to get into a horror game for me.
Adding to this, you can actually make the player as mobile as you want, if you make sure that the stakes are high in any encounter with the enemy. Can the player vault over walls? The monster can smash through them or climb over them. Can the player jump? So can the monster, only it might jump to try and intercept the player over pits. Making a situation feel threatening is more important than just making the player feel limited.
Horror does not work while the players can communicate.
Cooperative? You want fear? Separate them and cut all communications except very subtle ones (like shadows on windows from other players, etc). It’s important that you should make it clear that it’s not technical issue, like internet problem, but it’s in the game (like radio static noise, some talk coming through, etc). And on the top of them try to scare them with your stuff.
I know my people, whom I play with, if we can communicate, we joke out from the horror, it becomes comedy big time (which is not a big problem for us, but if you take your game and your stuff seriously it becomes kind of sad).
Afaik the process of eliminating a phobia through gradually exposing the subject to the trigger and teaching them that it is “safe” is called “flooding”. What you did for yourself with heights sounds pretty much like that. I think in games that only has a chance of working in VR, at least for heights.
Regarding a horror-game context and having “flooding” or “desensitization” occur as a byproduct in a horror-game, that is not going to happen according to what I’ve read/heard on the subject. To the contrary, if the trigger is presented in a context of fear (e.g. legitimate threat in the game context), then it does the opposite, it reinforces the idea of “trigger = danger” in the brain and further entrenches the phobia.
I think games that rely on phobias to scare, are not actually scary, because they only work that way on people with the specific phobias, and might be completely dull for those that aren’t affected.
If I recall correctly it was in the audio of a video-recording of one of the anti phobia VR apps for the occulus go, where you go through slowly increasing “levels of exposure”, that you can pace yourself. They stressed that for success of the treatment it is very important to not “quit mid-level because of your fear”, because that would reinforce the phobia. They said the correct way is exposing yourself to each new level of exposure to the phobia trigger long enough till the fear response that you have goes away. So, apperently every time you run away from the phobia trigger in panic, it makes it worse.
They also went to great lengths to make sure the user knows what is coming next and won’t get surprised in any way.
I would research common phobias for that.
I really hate a game that use jump scares, is a cheap trick, but youtuber’s seen to love it, so i guess it would help to have a few videos of the game.
To me, is all about in how immersive is a game, if i forgot my surrounds and get focused in the game, even a door slowly opening can be scare to me.
That scene is fantastic and deeply creepy. But why?
Most people are hard wired to be deeply sympathetic of others who are unaware of danger. There’s a certain kind of innocence or naivety, especially in the face of danger, that affects us. So, it’s important that she’s smiling. She’s innocent and having fun while something horrible is waiting for her just around the corner.
This is a weird vicarious creep. We aren’t creeped out for ourselves, we’re creeped out for someone else.
The sensation is even stronger because she is wearing a blindfold, it’s so easy for her to avoid the danger. She just needs to be aware of it. I think this is a key role in many horror flicks. The potential victim being completely unaware of the danger lurking moments away. This is when someone in the audience yells out “don’t open the door!”.
This combines both the characters vulnerability with our powerlessness. We know what’s going to happen, we don’t want it to happen, it’s so easy to prevent, but we can’t do anything about it. This trope works because it renders the audience powerless. Instinctively we want to stop the terrible thing from happening, but we can’t. We are forced to…painfully slowly… watch as it unfolds.
I think @Kiwasi hit the nail on the head with the “impossible to understand” thing. Once you understand how the threat works it just becomes a mechanic. This can be threatening and scary, but creepy is different.
I tend to think that “creepy” is powerlessness + phobia. What you want to look at is what kind of phobias are so common and so deep that we don’t call them phobias anymore. They’re just “human behaviour”. Being afraid of being powerless is so common that we don’t call it a phobia, its just part of being human.
There is a veeeeeeeeery wide gap between a phobia and a regular fear (like e.g. fear of death). Unless someone has a proper phobia, I don’t see how they’d be capable of remotely grasping the extend of fear that a severe phobia can trigger. You typically don’t experience things in life that max out the fear scale, so most people don’t even know how far it goes.
I think phobia triggers will rather turn people with severe cases of that phobia away from the game entirely. You can occasionally see examples on steam forums of games, where people inquire about specific game content to know whether it’s something they can play or not. There are websites that do that for movies to. There is nothing pleasant about having your worst fears triggered by a game. Regular scary games like Alien Isolation, Outlast, or Amnesia work on an - imho - much more suitable level of creating tension without relying on specific phobia triggers.
