Even though zombies don’t exist in reality, a realistically rendered representation of a walking, rotting, infectious, homicidal corpse combines stimuli that evoke strong fear-and-disgust emotions in players. Strikingly, though, they found that graphic realism (the quality of a visual representation) is more important in scaring players than is manifest realism (how likely something is to occur in the real world). Our fearful instincts evolved to protect us from dangers in the real world, so why do horror video games use patently unrealistic stimuli such as zombies and other supernatural monsters? The researchers found that perceived realism in horror video games is important in producing fright responses. This makes psychological sense because all these features target our evolved defence mechanisms. The game features that participants identified as particularly scary included darkness, the unknown, and disfigured humans (including zombies). The game objective is to survive while overcoming a number of challenges, such as finding concealed resources necessary for progressing in the game. These games typically use a first-person perspective to situate the player in a game world that teems with danger, usually from hostile non-player characters (monsters, more often than not). The list of games that had produced fright reactions in players is dominated by so-called survival horror games such as Slender: The Eight Pages. The researchers used a combination of forced-choice and open-ended questions. Most of the respondents (97 per cent) were 18-24 years old. They were asked to indicate which games had scared them, identify the game stimuli that scared them, and list the kinds of fright reactions they experienced during and after gameplay. The researchers had 269 undergrad students complete online forms on their experiences with frightening video games. Moreover, the researchers found that horror video games can have strong spill-over effects, causing disrupted sleep and increased fearfulness after playing. They also found that: horror games produce these fright responses by targeting our evolved defence system (evolution has shaped us to be easily scared by the dangers that threatened our ancestors) that there are predictable individual differences in how likely people are to seek out and be scared by horror video games and that interactivity is crucial to these effects. Teresa Lynch and Nicole Martins of Indiana University looked at college students’ experiences with horror video games and found that about half of their sample (53 per cent) had tried playing such games and been frightened by them. What are the effects of horror video games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Resident Evil, how do they work, and why do people play them?Ī new study addresses these questions. While researchers in media psychology have been busy investigating and discussing the effects of violent video games, another peculiar and persistent game genre-horror-has attracted very little empirical research. In 2014, US consumers spent more than $22 billion on game content, hardware, and accessories.
#PEOPLE PLAY HORROR GAMES IN MINECRAFT MOVIE#
The video game industry outpaced the movie industry several years ago, and video games remain a rapidly growing market. Horror video games target evolved defence mechanismsīy confronting the player with fright-inducing stimuli
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