Survival Horror Game Research Articles

The effect of players' ability to resist monsters on immersion and fear in survival horror games

Horror survival games, as a crucial segment of the video game industry, are highly regrded for their ability to evoke excitement, suspense and the challenge of overcoming obstacles and fears through wit and skill. This study delves into the impact of players' ability to confront monsters in horror survival games on their level of immersion and fear, and how these two psychological states mutually enhance the gaming experience. This research applies Python for natural language processing analyses, including sentiment analysis, keyword frequency analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, and K-Means clustering to uncover the main trends in player feedback, which is based on 5,000 user comments scraped from the Steam platform on two famous horror games, "Resident Evil 7" and "Outlast 2." Additionally, data on players' personal experiences of fear and immersion in the games are collected through surveys. The results show that the sensation of fear and successfully confronting monsters significantly enhances players' immersion of being completely engaged in the game, highlighting the importance of balancing challenge and player's ability to make choices in game design. This study provides valuable insights into understanding the psychological dynamics of players in horror survival games, guiding game designers and developers on how to create more engaging and satisfying gaming experiences that meet players' requirements.

Enhancing Gaming Engagement through the Integration of Game Design Document and Finite State Machine: A Study on Optimizing Non-playable Character Responsiveness

Non-playable Character (NPC) is a prominent terminology within the gaming domain. While players do not directly control NPCs, their role significantly influences the gaming experience. Enhancing NPC responsiveness becomes imperative as NPCs' passive nature can lead to monotonous gameplay. To address this concern, a computational model, namely Finite State Machine (FSM), is implemented to elevate NPC responsiveness during interactions with the main characters, whether as adversaries or allies. This research uses the Game Design Document (GDD) methodology to design a survival horror-themed game. The resultant Survival Horror Game undergoes Alpha testing to validate its overall functionality and the successful integration of the FSM computational model. Findings indicate that enemy NPCs can pursue the main character from any position, with an average arrival interval of 68 seconds. Additionally, allied NPCs promptly respond when the main character approaches. Subsequently, the Beta testing results reflect an 80% average score interpretation based on percentage responses, implying the game's favorable suitability and acceptability on the Likert scale.

An Examination of Memory Performance in a Fearful Virtual Reality Gaming Context

Background The emotion of fear bears a survival significance enabling animals to be highly vigilant in contexts of uncertainty. Expectedly, not all information available in the environment can be processed. Given that a major goal is to get rid of the source of fear in a fearful situation, the current study therefore hypothesized that information relating to the fear source would be better attended to and recalled than contextual information, which was validated by comparing participants’ recall of different types of information presented in a fearful VR gaming context. Methodology Fifty-four participants were divided into two groups and finished a specific segment of a VR game with different fear levels. Results No significant difference in recall performance on the questions about the appearance of the fear source and the questions about the interaction with the source was observed between the fear and less-fear groups. Yet, contextual information was better recalled than information related to the fear source in both groups. Regardless of whether the contextual information was provided beforehand or not, participants still tended to focus primarily on the environment in the gameplay. Also, the immersiveness of the gameplay was positively related to participants’ fear level. Discussion The tendency of attending to contextual information was speculated to be unconditional, in line with the risk calculation observed in prey when situated in less familiar contexts. It was suggested to further validate the present primarily findings by adopting VR headset with eye-tracking function in future studies. Lastly, an understanding of fear’s effect on memorization might also provide some information for developing future survival horror games.

Perancangan Survival Horror Game Out Of Sight Menggunakan Unity 3D Engine

A game is the result of the creative expression of a game maker that has an element of entertainment, can be played and has an end goal. In horror games, it is still divided into several more types of games, one of which is a survival horror game that requires players to live against enemy attacks that come their way. This game was created to enrich horror-themed domestically made games. Designing games using the unity 3D engine with the process of applying the MDLC (Media Develpoment Life Cycle) model. A method suitable for game design, starting with the preparation, design, collection of materials, testing and distribution. Out Of Sight game has gameplay with a first-person perspective combined with the survival horror genre. Made with the C# programming language this game is able to run perfectly with various features. There is also a unique feature, namely slowmotion which serves to slow down time to make it easier for players to shoot enemies. This survival horror game has been successfully created and completed. This game conducts testing using black box testing where all features function normally except for the key that serves to open the door. Based on respondents 18.5% said that the door lock had a bug. This game was created to enrich horror-themed domestically made games.

A Survival Horror Game RIDE OUT

Abstract: In the Field of Software Engineering, Gaming is the fastest growing field and even more rapidly growing sector of game development the coming years are difficult to predict. Survival horror video games (SHVGs) are among the fastest-growing genres for independent video game developers. With horrific cinematic elements and fear-inducing characteristics, survival horror video games create a terrifying experience for users within a virtual environment. There are various game engines where we are able to create such amazing games such as in Unity3d, Unreal Engine, Game Maker, Godot, and more provide access to the identical technologies and tools available to large game developers. Unity3D Game Engine is an integrated development tool which is used to create interactive contents like video games, architectural visualization and real-time 3D animations. This paper studies about the Horror Survival game ‘RIDE OUT’ which we attempt to build for people to experience the horror and thrill within the virtual environment and hence the way it’s designed with horrific cinematic elements and fear-inducing characteristics. For the survival horror game, the plan goes: everything from building a scene and lighting, ending with battle mechanics and the design of game menus, create graphical effects, control the physical behavior of objects or even implement a custom AI system for characters in the game and much more. Keywords: survival horror video game, game development, AI, fear, game design, gameplay.

Exploring the possible mental health and wellbeing benefits of video games for adult players: A cross-sectional study.

There is mixed evidence on the psychological effects of video games. While excessive use can be harmful, moderate use can have emotional, psychological and social benefits, with games successfully used in treating anxiety and depression. More data are required to understand how and for whom these benefits occur. This paper aims to identify correlations between video game genre, player demographics, wellbeing, and the in-play psychological processes for adult players. Adult gamers (n = 2107) completed an anonymous cross-sectional survey canvassing play style, genre, perception of psychological impact and mechanisms (wellbeing, self-determination and flow). A multivariate multiple regression model explored correlations. 88.4% of participants experienced emotional benefits from gaming, with stronger benefits experienced by younger players in all categories. The genres most strongly correlated with psychological benefits were music games, role-playing games and survival horror games. Multiplayer online battle arena games had lower scores for psychological and emotional wellbeing. Certain genres have stronger correlations with beneficial mechanisms, while some may be detrimental to players. These results may guide experimental studies to measure the directionality and strength of these correlations and can also impact practical aspects in development of therapeutic games to treat mental distress.

America is Dead. Long Live America! Political Affect in Days Gone

This essay models a method for understanding political affect in video games by analyzing the American action-adventure survival horror game Days Gone (SIE Bend Studio, 2019). Through an examination of its rendering of the Pacific Northwest landscape as ideology, much is revealed about a deeply troubled and oppositional worldview. While this research addresses matters of representation—particularly notions of fraught masculinity and a struggle for recognition—its focus is on how the game functions as a window onto a fantasy of American self-reliance and populism that strongly resonates with a Trump-era nationalist turn in the U.S. The essay also gestures toward a methodology of experiential close-reading, one focused on working-through and sitting with a difficult aesthetic object that may at first seem entirely generic. In this essay, the author reaches through the offending, formulaic image to grasp the political affect that emanates from a sustained aesthetic experience of playing Days Gone.

Fear and loathing in VR: the emotional and physiological effects of immersive games

Compared to traditional screen-based media, virtual reality (VR) generally leads to stronger feelings of presence. The current study aimed to investigate whether playing games in VR resulted in a stronger sense of presence than playing on a TV, and whether these feelings of presence affected players’ emotional and physiological responses to the games. Two experiments were conducted among 128 students, comparing the effects of playing either a survival horror game (N = 59) or a first-person shooter (N = 69) on a TV or in VR on physiological and subjective fear, hostility and enjoyment. Results showed that playing games in VR resulted in a stronger sense of presence, lower heart rate variability and a stronger subjective sense of fear. The feeling of presence thereby mediated the effects of VR on fear. The effects of playing a first-person shooter in VR on hostility were mixed, and gaming in VR was not more enjoyable than on TV. Regardless of the type of game or display medium, hostility increased significantly post-play. This study provides evidence that commercial VR games can affect feelings of presence and the physiological and emotional state of players.

Evolution of the YouTube Personas Related to Survival Horror Games

The indie survival horror game genre has given rise to some of the most famous game streamers on YouTube, especially titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games 2010), Slender: The Eight Pages (Parsec Productions 2012), and Five Nights at Freddy’s (Scott Cawthon 2014). The games are strongly focused on horror tropes including jump scares and defenceless protagonists, which lend them to displays of overemphasised emotional reactions by YouTubers, who use them to build their online personas in a certain way. This paper retraces the evolution of the relationship between horror games and YouTube personas, with attention to in-game characters and gameplay mechanics on the one hand and the practices of prominent YouTube personas on the other. It will show how the horror game genre and related media, including “Let’s play” videos, animated fanvids, and “creepypasta” stories have influenced prominent YouTuber personas and resulted in some changes in the common processes of persona formation on the platform.

TINJAUAN VISUAL PADA PERMAINAN DIGITAL INDONESIA BERJUDUL “DREADOUT”

<p><em>Game development is growing rapidly in this digital era. The graphic is also increasing more and more, especially in Three Dimensional space (3D). 3D game development is spreading around Indonesia. Now there are more local companies which making 3D games. Indonesia is one of the countries in Southeast Asia that have good enough game revenue to be the biggest one. One of the popular genre in Indonesia is survival horror. That’s because horror Indonesian stories is still have many unsolved mysterious things which can attract either domestic or foreign society. This study is including research about visualization such as 3D object from the environments and character designs. Furthermore, game also getting influenced with its system which is played by user, and its storytelling as well. The game’s layout (user interface) will categorized as a good one if it match with its theme and being consistent in visual and control. Good game must paying attention with all of those points. The conclusion of this research is to prove if 3D survival horror game visualization in Indonesia can be rated good enough in creative game industries.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><p><strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong></p><p><em>Game, Survival Horror, Visual Research</em></p>

So scary, yet so fun: The role of self-efficacy in enjoyment of a virtual reality horror game

Enjoyment of frightening content is a paradoxical issue in communication research. Revising Zillmann’s model of suspense, we propose a three-factor model examining the audience appeal of horror content in a virtual reality (VR) survival horror game. In a laboratory study, participants played a VR horror game. The results show significant effects of the three-way interaction among horror self-efficacy, physiological arousal, and fear on enjoyment and future intentions to play similar games. Horror self-efficacy interacts with fear to affect enjoyment only among high-arousal participants. Among high-fear participants, higher horror self-efficacy leads to significantly greater enjoyment than lower horror self-efficacy. We measured enjoyment through self-reported ratings, future intentions to play similar games, and the behavioral choice of subsequent games to demonstrate the appeal of horror content. Horror self-efficacy in coping with mediated fright is the key to explaining the conditional positive association of fear and enjoyment in the gaming context.

Scarcity and Survival Horror: Trade as an Instrument of Terror in Pathologic

This paper questions the extent to which the relative scarcity of both gameplay options and in-game resources in survival horror video games can be read as a subversion of the metaphorical and idealised capitalist systems that underpin many forms of gameplay. While survival horror games do tend to offer an alternative to the usual rhythms of work, reward and empowering reinvestment found in many video games, the dystopian absence of common resources, gameplay and features (particularly that of an in-game economy) can just as easily be read as creating a nostalgic longing and appreciation for the norms of more conventional gameplay. Ice-Pick Lodge's Pathologic (2005) is considered as a rare and potentially subversive example of a survival horror game that creates an atmosphere of terror and uncertainty for the player through the fluctuations and predatory movements of its in-game economy, rather than through the absence of this feature.

Fear in virtual reality (VR): Fear elements, coping reactions, immediate and next-day fright responses toward a survival horror zombie virtual reality game

This study explores players’ fright reactions and coping strategies in an immersive virtual reality (VR) horror game. Based on Slater’s theory of virtual reality, two dimensions of fear elements in the VR game−the fear of place illusion (PI) and the plausibility illusion (PSI) −were identified by playing a virtual reality survival horror game with a sample of 145 students. Participants reported greater fear toward PSI elements than toward PI elements. Fear of PSI elements positively and strongly predicted disengagement coping strategies and overall fear. Among coping strategies, players mainly adopted approach strategies, followed by avoidance (disengagement and denial), and self-help strategies. A “self-talk” strategy, newly identified in this study, has been reported as an effective means to cope with mediated threat in VR games. Regarding individual differences, sensation seeking and neuroticism influenced participants’ coping strategies and fear. Additionally, males and females employed different coping strategies. Very few students experienced next-day fright, which consists mostly of cognitive reactions and VR-related reactions, such as the Tetris effect and the fear of being attacked from the back. Theoretical frameworks regarding fear elements and coping reactions are proposed to aid future research. Implications for academia, fear conditioning for training, and marketing campaigns are discussed.

Location-based game to enhance player’s experience in survival horror game

This paper aims to explore the possibility of implementing location-based game using the smartphone’s GPS to enhance the player’s experience. With the GPS technology, the player can play in a real world as well as in the virtual game world. We postulate this thus will enhance the player’s experience. To test the hypothesis, a horror game genre with location-based features was developed. The game was evaluated to thirty participants. The results demonstrate the game allowed the participants to explore a new place with fun. In addition, the participants claimed that the game allow them to enjoy a new experience in playing horror game. The participants described that playing the game was giving them more tension compare to playing a conventional horror game. Moreover, the participants claimed that they feel more familiar with the place they’ve explored during the game. Finally, some improvements could be done to improve the experience enhancement to the game. First, more variation in the storyline, quests and the enemy. As the game evaluated in this paper is served only as a prototype, the variation of the storyline, quests and the enemy (i.e. the ghost) is limited.

Noise into play. Disonancias e indeterminación de lo sonoro en lo lúdico

Este artículo pretende plantear un estudio relacional entre el concepto de ruido sonoro y aspectos indeterministas de la lúdica interactiva experimental, centrándose en losSurvival Horror Games. Partiendo de la capacidad del sonido para desbordar la interface pantalla y conectar con el espacio real en el que se encuentra el jugador, se establece una conexión con el concepto de ética en los videojuegos desarrollado por Miguel Sicart. La propuesta atiende tanto a los aspectos experimentales de la producción sonora que se encuentran en el diseño del juego, y su relación con el campo del arte sonoro, como a las posibilidades de abrir el campo de lo político y la acción común desde de la experiencia de los jugadores, a partir de un movimiento semántico en el concepto de terror que puede transformar la experiencia del mismo en el espacio real.

An analysis of player affect transitions in survival horror games

The trend of multimodal interaction in interactive gaming has grown significantly as demonstrated for example by the wide acceptance of the Wii Remote and the Kinect as tools not just for commercial games but for game research as well. Furthermore, using the player’s affective state as an additional input for game manipulation has opened the realm of affective gaming. In this paper, we analyzed the affective states of players prior to and after witnessing a scary event in a survival horror game. Player affect data were collected through our own affect annotation tool that allows the player to report his affect labels while watching his recorded gameplay and facial expressions. The affect data were then used for training prediction models with the player’s brainwave and heart rate signals, as well as keyboard–mouse activities collected during gameplay. Our results show that (i) players are likely to get more fearful of a scary event when they are in the suspense state and that (ii) heart rate is a good candidate for detecting player affect. Using our results, game designers can maximize the fear level of the player by slowly building tension until the suspense state and showing a scary event after that. We believe that this approach can be applied to the analyses of different sets of emotions in other games as well.

Uncanny behaviour in survival horror games

This study investigates the relationship between the perceived strangeness of a virtual character and the perception of human likeness for some attributes of motion and sound. Participants (N=100) were asked to rate thirteen video clips of twelve different virtual characters and one human. The results indicate that attributes of motion and sound do exaggerate the uncanny phenomenon and how frightening that character is perceived to be. Strong correlations were identified for the perceived strangeness of a character with how human-like a character's voice sounded, how human-like the facial expression appeared and how synchronized the character's sound was with lip movement; characters rated as the least synchronized were perceived to be the most frightening. Based on the results of this study, this article seeks to define an initial set of hypotheses for the fear-evoking aspects of character facial rendering and vocalization in survival horror games that can be used by game designers seeking to increase the fear factor in the genre, and that will form the basis of further experiments, which, it is hoped, will lead to a conceptual framework for the uncanny.