Boo!!

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear."
--- H.P. Lovecraft

It was an hour past midnight and I was playing Raveholme chapter in Half life 2. I was wearing my Sennheiser HD202 Headphones. The fast zombies and the poison crabs are appearing out of nowhere. Suddenly the main door of our house burst open and my heart almost came through my mouth (it turns out that my father as usual has forgotten to close the main door)

Welcome to the oldest trick and the selling point of latest games and movies – Horror.

I had been playing games for eight years now. While I cannot call myself a hardcore gamer, I am certainly not a novice. I have completed my share of games (around 84) and have some good collection of games (on the last count it was around 204).Yet, after playing all these games I still feel scared when playing horror games. I see games like F.E.A.R and call of cthulhu rated higher and get tempted to buy these games. But after playing for few hours I felt so scared that I dare not play it again. After some days I gain some courage and try to play it again. Though somewhat confident than the first time, I still will not be able to complete the game. Finally I will give up and uninstall it which will in another set of horror games piling up on my desk.

While games like F.E.A.R and Jericho can be called as scary, Far cry is no where near the horror genre. Yet I get the same sense of spookiness while playing it. Horror games have never really appealed to me because I'm not the sort of person who enjoys being scared. As I am already scared of many things in life (failures, being alone).

Am I the only person who is afraid of playing these games? Am I the only person who is scared of fighting the zombies and aliens and all the other severely disfigured monsters? Am I really that faint hearted?

Determined to find out, I googled the internet and found some interesting facts.

1) It seems many faint hearted gamers (aha!) find it very disturbing when playing horror games. Some of them are not afraid to watch horror movies but they are afraid to play horror games. The reason, when watching the movie the viewer have very little interaction with the T.V (except of course turning it on and off with the remote). But this is not the case with games. Player immersion has been the new mantra for latest games. Game companies try everything from realistic animation to inventive story telling. For example the Gears of War franchisee hired writer, Cliff Bleszinski for Gears of War 2.

While immersion will help in achieving success of the game, it may hinder the game occasionally (in my case frequently). When playing call of cthulhu there is a part where you have to escape from a group of murderers who will be chasing you throughout the town. I was never able to finish this stage even after playing it for 10 to 12 times. The fear of them catching me was greater than the reality that I was playing only a game.

It seems fear is subject to change from person to person, and this affects the gamers when playing games(While I was able to finish ravenholme chapter in HL2 with little problem, other gamers had the extreme difficulty with it).

2) Exposure therapy

"The effectiveness of the inexpensive hardware and software used in this study shows that VR technology is sufficiently advanced for VR exposure therapy to move into the clinical mainstream," they write in a paper published in the October edition of the journal Cyber Psychology and Behavior.

Popular computer games like Half-Life and Unreal Tournament could provide a cheap and effective treatment for people with debilitating phobias, say Canadian computer scientists.

Specially made virtual reality (VR) equipment is already used to treat certain types of phobia. Exposing patients to the source of their pathological fear within this controlled and safe environment can be an effective therapy.

However interesting these facts are, it doesn’t seem to answer my question completely.

Everyone has fears, either we live with them or we pretend not be afraid of it. Has there, ever been anything that you have experienced within a game that has ever frightened you, but should not have? Has anything ever stopped you from finishing a sub-quest, level, or even an entire game? Have you ever developed a real-life fear because of something in a game, or vice-versa?