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The Psychology of Horror In Video Games and Movies
Hugh Pickens writes "Jamie Madigan writes in GamePro that psychologists and experts on fear are trying to understand why so many gamers enjoy being terrified by horror-themed video games and movies. Researchers say some people are sensation-seekers attracted to any emotional high, be it from sky diving, shark-punching or horror films. Other personalities are drawn to situations showing the disruption of social norms in ways that will probably never happen in real life. But a more encompassing explanation of horror's inherent appeal is how it helps us master our fears. 'Watching a horror film gives us back some control,' says Dr. Andrew Weaver. 'We can experience an adverse event through film, and we know that it will end. We'll survive it. We'll go on with our lives.' Interestingly, horror only seems to work if the player or viewer knows that what they see is fake. In one famous experiment, researchers had subjects watch a movie featuring authentic scenes of live monkeys having their brains scooped out and of children — I kid you not — having their facial skin peeled away in preparation for surgery. 'The vast majority of the study's participants refused to finish watching the films despite that more grotesque movies playing at the theater down the street could outdo those scenes,' writes Madigan. 'We seem to need to know it's fake.'"
People are human, and react humanely when subjected to imagery consisting of people actually suffering.
-- I am the Monkey Guru.
but after reading that sentence (you know which one), I'm not sure I want to anymore.
Gimme a grant - I'll also like to do some "water-is-wet" studies!
(I suppose that its only these researchers who had no idea that people enjoy a thrill, no so much actual suffering. Sigh.)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I can relate to the "sensation-seeker" aspect. I don't feel very many emotional highs or lows in normal life, and enjoy actually feeling something... anything... sometimes. No, I'm not an emotionless robot, it just takes a lot to arouse my emotions :)
However, I don't like horror games. I don't get really freaked out or anything (although particularly good games have occasionally had that effect), I just am discouraged from continuing from something inside me. For example, I played the demo of Dead Space 2 a few days ago... I played for about three or four minutes. Killed a couple of creatures and I had enough. Wasn't too scared to continue (the bit I played wasn't much different from any other shooter with scary monsters)... it was something else.
I got the same feeling playing Half Life 2 - I think I got about 80% through that because the gameplay was great, but I also kind of lost interest in the story there. It has that horror atmosphere, though, that doesn't sit well with me. The Ravenclaw sequence didn't really bother me - I had heard it was supposed to be really scary - but most of the rest of the levels did.
The thing is that I really, really love movies that can evoke emotion. I don't generally watch a lot of horror films (they don't evoke anything in me unless they're really excellent), but I love suspense films and dramas (and even good romances). When I do watch films that are supposed to be scary, I never get that negative feeling I get when playing scary games. I'll watch the film, possibly be genuinely scared by it (and maybe even jump when the killer pops up), but I don't get that desire to shut it off (unless it's just a bad film, which is often the case). The horror films I like are mostly Asian ones, for what it's worth.
So, being interactive or not is a major factor I think. Naturally I didn't read TFA, but the summary seems to make it sound like they're interchanging the experience of playing a game and watching a scary movie. I think it's fundamentally different, and hope that further studies look into it.
Also, the study where people were shown gory films seems a bit odd to bring in to this. It's about context... a video game where you brutally kill hundreds of people, with blood and guts flying everywhere, is not particularly disturbing. But a video game where you scoop out monkey brains and peel the skin off of childrens' faces, with no reason for doing either thing, would certainly disturb a lot of people.
In looking at people suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Freud surmised from their compulsive re-living of a life-threatening event that they were trying to somehow "master" it and make it no longer a danger to them. Human beings have a strong desire to only die on their own terms. You can extend the same feeling to people who watch scary movies or seek out disturbing news stories. They are defusing these things as potential threats to them, either by convincing themselves they wouldn't get into that situation in the first place, or by coming up with a "better" response (and maybe shouting it at the film screen). Because this is a survival mechanism, there is a "thrill" involved in doing it.
I think it's unlikely that Freud commented on PTSD per se, given that the term was coined thirty years after he died.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"...of children â" I kid you not â" having their facial skin peeled away"
I see what you did there.
But seriously... there's a lot of people that hate horror movies and video games, myself included, with a few exceptions.
I liked Shaun of the Dead, and will play Left 4 Dead, but they're zombies, so it's okay. But I won't play Silent Hill or Watch the Hills Have Eyes. I have better things to do with my life than watch horrible things happen to people.
having their facial skin peeled away in preparation for surgery
I used to watch stuff like that on PBS and TLC/Discovery (back when those two channels ran more than just "reality" shows -- though I do love Dirty Jobs). I remember them literally having the face of a baby removed because he had some kind of deformation in his skull which needed to be surgically corrected, and I couldn't stop watching. Creepy as all get out, but also unequally interesting. Also saw a former Playboy model (then 50+ years old) get the outer layer of her facial skin singed off with a LASER.
There's a big difference between malevolent actions depicted in horror movies/games and things that are just unusual to see; reality or fiction does not have as much to do with it -- you know that the guy with the chainsaw is a psychopathic murderer, and that the doctor on the TV special is truly trying to save the life of the individual under his knife. They both cause equal or equivalent amounts of pain ("suffering" through surgery recovery is surely no comfortable process) but the intent and will of the actions, or at least our interpretations thereof, determine how we react and are excited or interested by such things.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
My favourite horror game of all time has to be Silent Hill 2. It worked on so many levels, the entire town becoming the James' own personal hell until he was finally able to confront the truth of what had really happened to him.
It was a game that genuinely terrified me at times, but not due to the gore, which there was not that much of, but the psychological fear it evoked, often making me wish that I could make James just turn around and drive away from that place.
I found myself not wanting to boat across the lake to reach the hotel, knowing it could only result in something utterly awful for him.
And that plot twist. Wow. Just... wow. Sounds weird, but I'll never forget staring at the TV screen, open-mouthed not believing what I was seeing.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Will someone wake me when there's an article that discusses videogame horror without mentioning horror movies?
I don't enjoy horror games at all. I want to. But i don't. I get too scared.
Tried to play Amnesia Dark descent. Had a friend over, projected the screen, we each had headphones. We made it to the watery basement. I won't spoil it for anyone but my friend was screaming for his life and kicking. We had to ALT-F4 and stop. I never started the game since.
"In one famous experiment, researchers had subjects watch a movie featuring authentic scenes of live monkeys having their brains scooped out and of children — I kid you not — having their facial skin peeled away in preparation for surgery."
Link?
& if that doesn't work, we have the stuff (exploding) that all the murder&mayhem 'games' we're made from/wanna be like.. to note; almost nothing of real value can occur until ALL the babies are clearly being appropriately cared for. no more smoke&mirrors. no more fauxking phoniness. if you really saw what's really happening all over the globe, you wouldn't be able to play (feel good/happy) the 'game' any more.
The words horror and gore seem to be getting used more and more interchangeably these days, though we need to remember that they do not mean the same. Horror does not need skin ripping and blood to make us terrified, only our imagination of what terrors lie on the other side of the door. Likewise, gushing blood is not always a terrible sight, as Leslie Nielsen's Dead and Loving It proved. What works so well in horror, what will always work... is the unknown. The gnawing darkness of ignorance at the outer edge of well-lit areas. Nothing can ever terrify us more than the notion of dying suddenly without even knowing why.
'We can experience an adverse event through film, and we know that it will end. We'll survive it. We'll go on with our lives.' Interestingly, horror only seems to work if the player or viewer knows that what they see is fake.
Geeze you'd think he's talking about starting a war on the other side of the planet with the excuse of evidence everyone knows is false, not some silly plot-free fictional movie.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I like horror - games and film. Or at least, I think I do. I do find myself increasingly wondering, which I think is exacerbated by some of the current trends in horror.
Now, I fully accept that, as implied by TFA, different factors may affect different people. But for me, one of the big factors that affects how I go away from a horror movie or game feeling about it is the ending. I like a horror movie/game that scares the life out of me, but then presents a resolution. What really irks me is the current trend to make the endings of horror movies/games as bleak as possible. For some reason, this seems to be seen as more "artistically credible" these days. I can tolerate an ambiguous ending, but an outright downer "everybody dies" ending just leaves me feeling "well, that was grim and depressing and now I'm not sure why I watched it at all". It was clever and novel when Night of the Living Dead did it, but it seems to be pretty much de rigeur for any horror product these days. I think it reduces the cathartic value of the genre pretty massively.
Actually, there was a recent well-known horror-themed game that provided a welcome exception (not going to name it for spoilage reasons). Although even that made sure to leave the door open for a sequel.
Oh, and again, just my personal tastes, but while "scary" is great, watching people doing nothing more than pretending to be in pain or to inflict pain on others actively disgusts me. There do seem to be whole new subgenres of "horror" which aim for disgust rather than fear and - while perfectly happy to defend the right of others to watch it - I want nothing to do with it myself. Alien - fantastic movie. Saw - you can keep it.
Researchers say some people are sensation-seekers attracted to any emotional high, be it from sky diving, shark-punching or horror films.
My girlfriend (German) got hit by a car when she was a child, and had to undergo some nasty operations on her leg, which left her with "Frankenstein" scars on her leg. On a business trip to Austin, Texas, she tagged along. She was concerned about how she should describe to the local yokels, what happened to her leg. I told her to tell the folks, that she was attacked by a shark, but that she fought off the shark, buy punching it in the head. It worked for five minutes, until she started giggling, and one of the guys that I worked with screamed, "Bullshit!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Eschil, Euripides, Sophocles. This is old as man itself.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
In one famous experiment, researchers had subjects watch a movie featuring authentic scenes of live monkeys having their brains scooped out and of children — I kid you not — having their facial skin peeled away in preparation for surgery.
That's not scary, that's just gratuitous gore. A lot of people can't watch those surgery/ER tv shows; not because they're scary, but because the people can't handle the gore. They are horrified by it, it makes them sick, but they are not afraid of it. True horror means you do not know what happens next, you are afraid to continue. Horror is a psychological reaction, not a physical one. Watching Saw 27 and seeing a bunch of people chopped up into little pieces by demented contraptions isn't scary, because you expect it to happen. To genuinely invoke fear in people, they have to be unable to predict what is going to happen. You can leave clues as to what MIGHT happen, and allow the audience to scare themselves as their imaginations run wild with all manner of possible scenarios. You want to scare someone, you make it so they CAN"T distance themselves from what is going on. That's one of the problems with most of today's "horror" films; things get so over the top that people can just sit there and know it could never happen to them.
Basically, horror is not blood and gore. A true horror movie(or game) does not need a single drop of blood or dismembered limb. If you want to scare someone, don't allow them to distance themselves from what is going on. Make them think it actually COULD happen to them, and make them scare themselves. People are afraid of the unknown. If they know what to expect, you lose the horror effect./P
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I've been scared by horror movies (especially more psychological stuff like The Shining, Session 9, etc.). I've even been scared by novels. But I've never once been scared by a videogame (aside from the cheap "jump a little by a surprise" variety). I've played a lot of games *promising* scares, but I just don't get it. I always feel that I'm in control, and am constantly reminded that it's a game, not real life. So I guess it just doesn't get to me the same way that a movie or novel can.
Everyone else keeps talking about scary games. Am I alone on this?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The need to know it's fake might have some sympathy with the uncanny valley phenomenon. If we know that something is not real, but looks almost real, we have a visceral reaction to it, since we can detect that there's no mind there.
Might it be similar here, but in reverse? We can detect that there's no mind in the fake violence, so it's placed in the (positive) uncanny valley and our reaction ceases to be what it would be if we could detect a mind?
I personally look to horror games because I believe its the easiest tone to set in a first person experience. Game companies have overdone it with their attempts to humanize warfare by making every game 'raise the stakes' by plagarizing Saving Pvt. Ryan.
The problem is that game developers have a really tough time establishing any sort of narrative that engages the player. They are too swept up in the "bigger, badder, shader" game that for the most part, games eschew good writing for immersive environments.
The issue will not be resolved until you have award winning writers writing non-linear scripts to be developed into games. Until then, we're dependent on boogeymen jumping out of the shadows to make us pee our pants for entertainment.
While I don't choose to watch slasher type films, and don't play FPS games, I do watch some shows with pretty graphic content. Ever watch an episode of Bones? It doesn't phase me in the least. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a show on PBS regarding sectarian violence during the US invasion of Iraq. It show footage of a number of individuals firing upon a pickup truck on a city street and clearly killing the driver. That image disturbed me deeply and it took many days for me to stop feeling depressed and angered by what I had watched.
It became quite clear to me that our minds process images differently based upon whether the are known to be fiction or truth. Or at least I hope that is the norm. Perhaps psychopaths don't differentiate in the same manner.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZqrG1bdGtg
A horror movie is not the same as a violent movie, but something needs to threaten violence to be scary.
Michael Haneke ("Funny Games") thinks there is too much violence in the media and we're wrong to enjoy it. That's a lot less convincing knowing viewers don't like seeing real violence. Even though that's common sense - that this stuff is nothing more than entertainment - it's reassuring to see a study back that up.
Probably people from 100-200 years ago would not feel as bad, even if seeing it live. In this TED talk is argued that we feel more the violence than before, that somewhat empathy is more cultural than, well, being human. And we feel less empathy, specially the suffering part, on non real characters, unless you do the "based in a real story" trick.
I need the link to the monkey brains! Maybe I should try youTube...
Jamie Madigan writes in GamePro that psychologists and experts on fear are trying to understand why so many gamers enjoy being terrified by horror-themed video games and movies.
Because they are spoiled and live comfortable & safe lives.
Those struggling to survive have no need for horror movies or games since real life provides enough "excitement."
It feels a need missing from their regular routine. It is another way of saying these people lead boring lives.
In a sense, it is a sign of progress, yet also proof of how mundane the luxuries of modern life can be.
Researchers say some people are sensation-seekers attracted to any emotional high, be it from sky diving, shark-punching or horror films.
My girlfriend (German) got hit by a car when she was a child, and had to undergo some nasty operations on her leg, which left her with "Frankenstein" scars on her leg.
On a business trip to Austin, Texas, she tagged along. She was concerned about how she should describe to the local yokels, what happened to her leg. I told her to tell the folks, that she was attacked by a shark, but that she fought off the shark, buy punching it in the head. It worked for five minutes, until she started giggling, and one of the guys that I worked with screamed, "Bullshit!"
I don't understand this. I know they grow them big in texas, and they have some stupid people there, but are they stupid enough to not think that the person had major surgery on their leg at one time of another?
I had a GF that had big scars on her chest from heart surgery and scars going down her legs from getting hit by a car and breaking both. She really had "Frankenstein" scars covering large parts of her body. And guess what? It didn't really doesn't need to be explain. It's pretty obvious how she got them.
I think it more that your GF was really, really self concious about her scars and making more a deal over it then needed.
Be seeing you...
I think it was Faces of Death 1 that had the people eating monkey brains in it.
Funny how that video affected people back then. I should rewatch them since I haven't seen them since the late 80's.
I know the later ones had too much stuff I thought was fake, but the first one wasn't bad.
Be seeing you...
I like horror movies, probably because I know they are fake.
But serious, the stuff that scares me is real life stuff. Like the government becoming more of an ass then it is. Corps making the laws.
I'm scared that my fellow humans will stop thinking of others, and only think of themselves.
I'm scared how man can say they are doing things for the good of humans, while they are purposely doing what they can to just make money & power.
I'm scared that my fellow humans are going to sit around while we lose more of our rights, and that they won't do anything because "it's okay because it's for our protection".
What i'm really scared is the crappy scary future I imagined as a kid, is actually happening.
But get scared over some slasher dude? Or some entity you can't see doing crap? Sorry, ain't happening. The video game isn't going to scare me either, mainly if it's just shit jumping at you, might startle me, which makes me laugh, but not scare me.
Probably the scariest thing I know is, if I really do reincarnate, I forget everything and have to learn it all over (not to mention go thru puberty again!)
Ah well, what can you do? I should mention, I stopped having "scary" dreams when I was in like 6th grade, I realized that my dreams were like movies and it couldn't affect me. After that, if I had a rare "bad" dream with monster or crap, I enjoyed them.
Now of course, my bad dreams now are any that have my dad's ex bitch in them, or my sister in them. I mean, shit, leave me alone, will ya? That is scary.
Be seeing you...
Mr. King wrote an article some years ago comparing horror movies to roller coasters. The point of both, of course, is not reality but ability: that one can "ride this" experience (whether physical or mental.) If a roller coaster were real, it'd be called a natural disaster. If a horror movie were real it'd be called a tragedy or a crime against humanity.
Horror games probably have the best balance between ease of creation and hands on interactivity.
With a movie, you can turn it off. With a game, you can die and come back, survivng what happens.