When I was young I had a pretty severe fear of heights. When I was a kid, we had a multi story mall that had a toy store on the 4th floor. The problem was the floors and elevators were all glass. I couldn’t physically walk on the glass floors and had to literally crawl (to the annoyance of my buddy), the vertigo was insane.
That fear of heights got less intense as I got older and finally ended after I went skydiving (as a way to end my fear of heights). Skydiving was terrifying to me in a way that “terrifying” does not adequately describe. It was true terror on a level that I didn’t know possible. So I agree with you, maxing out the fear scale is something most people don’t comprehend. The effect was so intense that it lingered for weeks after. Every day life had an intensity level of zero. It did work. I’m nervous around sheer drops now, but it’s on the normal scale not the phobia scale. The experience had a permanent effect on me.
That said, it’s looking at those things that we’re hard wired to be afraid of, the things that make us deeply uncomfortable that is at the heart of “creepy”. Avoiding that for fear of alienating some audience is why very, very few games (and even movies or books) are actually truly creepy.
Is inducing physical vertigo in the player pushing it too far? Maybe. Maybe not. It certainly needs to be expertly executed.
I do think fear of freefall is under utilized in horror, perhaps because it’s such an intense and visceral feeling. I’ve also never seen it done well in any medium, it’s generally only used in movies to accentuate action sequences or shown as “approaching the edge” with fake vertigo effects.
I remember right when Skyrim was released someone made a mod that replaced all of the giant spiders with wolves and bears. Several forum commenters thanked this person specifically. There were actually some people who really wanted to play the game, but their fear of spiders put them off from even buying it.
Hearing but not seeing something that is dangerous to me
Half Life 2 did this pretty well in their zombie level. You’d hear the sounds from one of those things in a nearby area and would have to figure out if it was down the next bend or shuffling outside. The guesswork heightened the tension
Previewing the danger
Another take on the same thing - when you see something through a window and know it’s waiting on the other side.
Loss of power
It’s an FPS and you ran out of bullets. It’s an RPG and you don’t have the special whatist to hurt the monsters. It’s Silent Hill and you are pretty certain even having weapons is a trap. Knowing that if I encouter the monster I can’t deal with it head on is huge and something missing from a lot of FPS horror games.
LOL! I understand and kudos to you for facing your fear head-on. That’s great stuff.
Yeah I also don’t know if it is a good idea to try to really throw phobias into people’s faces in a game although movies surely do it a huge amount.
I often thought it was interesting to maybe explore playing with peoples’ heads with things like shadows and such. Perhaps have their own shadow occasionally move but only for an instant. A tree seem to take the shape of something but again only briefly and always extremely subtle. Basically feeding a player’s imagination so they actually start seeing things that aren’t even happening at all.
I still get mild vertigo when playing assassins creed games. I know that its all fake. I know that the character controller won’t let me misstep. I’l still slow down to a crawl while walking along high ledges.
Nothing like what you’ve experienced. But it is a device that can be used in games.
My dumb phobia isn’t anything to brag about (although skydiving was a hell of an experience), just saying that, just because people have phobias doesn’t mean entertainment shouldn’t explore those fears.
Not all entertainment needs to ‘feel good’ - and exploring the things that make us feel the worst is interesting material. Every decision you make in game design is going to displease/lose some portion of the potential player base, literally every single decision. Just make sure that you pick the right ones for your target.
About a month ago I tried to write some short horror stories and posted one on reddit, my story got deleted because it was about mental instability in the first person and that was a little too much for the subreddit I picked (they really wanted more traditional scary stories). To each their own.
We are fans of garry’s mod’s multiplayer horror maps; although you would expect the fear to diminish in a group, it can often result in people picking straws as to who goes first down a hallway or crawling into a vent. I think as long as there is some form of fear and suspense, players can be scared even when with someone else.
The game we are working on aims to creep players out to try make them stick together and then have in game events force a split. There will be jump scares but not the cheap image-on-screen kind. More intercomms squeeling and TVs turning themselves on at random when you are near. We are taking a lot of inspiration from maps such as GM_Ghosthunt2 as well as games like outlast.
Players will NOT have any form of defense, no guns, no ghost vacuums or anything, just themselves and a camera/lamp.
