Creeping doom and scary games

What is horror games? Does it make you feel afraid or does it just scream in you face?
Horror games has the last years had a really dull view of fear. The game industry thinks that simply a monster in a closet will get us happy and content with the scare factor. And while monsters can be scary, just having them chase us is not enough to make a good horror game. Dead Space wants to call itself a horror game, bah. Now, Dead Space is a good action game, the horror sucks. Jumpscares will not carry a game, the atmosphere will. Amnesia went in the right direction, but ultimately failed because of AI failures and the last area being a quest.

The reason why the subject today is horror is because it relates to my homework for Friday. We’re supposed to write an essay on how we would design a game of creeping doom. The restrictions are:

1. Players can’t move
2. Players cannot win the game
3. The players will lose at the end
4. There must be a theme of Creeping Doom

Since the essay is supposed to be super academic and stuff, I’ll post some of my thoughts on the design here.

Approaching this design challenge, I thought about what the game is about. Fear is the thing we’re working with, but what different kinds of fears are there. I found a link with a professor talking about the shared fears we all have (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainsnacks/201203/the-only-5-fears-we-all-share)

I also took into consideration the story my teacher told us about the shaving game. Last years a couple of students made a shaving game where you have to shave before you go to work, and that broadened my view of the assignment. I started thinking about bullying, since we’ve been working a lot with Sissyfight recently.

I’m not completely finished with the essay yet since I got sidetracked with the fear line of thinking (which I cannot use in the essay since I lack the sources and it’s kinda off-topic) but once I finish I will put up the idea here and discuss the forks in the road to completing the design of the game.

Takeaway
Horror games can be much more than just super scary. Creating a frightening environment can be enough if you put the right characters and situations in place. The goal of this assignment was to get us to think outside the box, since movement is not an option, how are you going to feel scared? To finish this assignment we need to look within ourselves and see what we think is really scary, instead of guessing what other people think is scary. So maybe it’s more inside the box than we thought.

About Simon Lundgren

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