The Psychology of Horror Games

With the nights growing longer and the winds howling outside, it can be tempting to draw the curtains and immerse ourselves in the spooky world of horror games. In our play session, we can expect chills, tension, an accelerated heartbeat, even being frozen in fear.

But why? When the world can be such a scary place, why do we voluntarily sign up for an interactive medium designed to frighten us? In this article, I hope to explain several reasons why people like to play games that fill them with tension and fear. However, I’d also like to shine some light on why people don’t like playing horror games.

As usual, there will be a summary at the bottom if you do not wish to read everything. Now, let’s begin!

Contents

1. The Rollercoaster of Emotions
2. The Safe Room Effect
3. The F/Ear Effect
4. Flip the Script
5. Why We Don’t Like Horror Games
6. Summary
7. References

The Rollercoaster of Emotions

To explain why we can like horror games, our journey begins by exploring what happens when we play them.

Distinct from genres such as thriller or action, horror aims to shock, frighten, and perhaps even disgust the viewer with narrative devices such as infliction of pain and the supernatural (Cherry, 2009; Newman, 2011; Hanich, 2011). The goal of horror is neatly represented by the Goddess of Horror Phrike, whose very name translates as trembling due to fear.

Horror media can produce a range of physiological responses such as shaking, jumping, covering our eyes, and making us feel anxious or disgusted (Harris et al., 2000; Cantor, 2004). These effects can be more pronounced when playing rather than watching horror: in a study of those who played versus watched P.T, those who played had a greater heart rate and were more frightened (Madsen, 2016).

This honestly sounds a bit terrible, but let’s look at the biology of this. When we are frightened by something in a scary game, this can activate our fight-or-flight response which gives us a rush of adrenaline and other outcomes which I will discuss soon. But when we engage in fantasy horror, we don’t immediately jump out of our seat and run away from the screen: our brain evaluates its surroundings and realises that we aren’t in immediate danger (Ringo, 2013). In a way, you could think of horror games as like little rollercoasters in your home. You experience a range of emotions like anticipation and tension, then receive a rush of adrenaline while (usually) experiencing no danger to life. A recently published study showed that in recreational horror such as a haunted house, participants reported being very afraid but also having a lot of fun; this was reflected in their heart rate measurements which ebbed and flowed (Anderson et al., 2020).

The similarities between horror games and rollercoasters don’t end here. When trying to figure out why people sign themselves up to be frightened, a lot of the same arguments from rollercoaster fans are applied to horror fans. While the blanket term of ‘sensation seeker’ might be thrown around, psychologist Marvin Zuckerman deconstructed what it means to be a sensation seeker. Zuckerman (1988) argues that we may be interested in horror for reasons such as seeking adventure, seeking new and different experiences, impulsivity, and susceptibility to boredom. So if we play a horror game, this would serve purposes like taking away our boredom and giving us a titillating new adventure. This is supported in research by Edwards (1984), finding a relationship between sensation seekers and enjoying horror media.

Sensation seeking may be one explanation for why horror games are so enjoyable, but it’s by no means a perfect one if you’re the type of person who hates rollercoasters. So let’s keep exploring.

The Safe Room Effect

I previously described how being frightened by horror games gives us a rush of adrenaline and other outcomes. It’s time to take a look at these other outcomes.

Imagine you’re playing the wonderful Resident Evil 2 Remake. It’s been a while since you’ve last saved and you’re low on health with no healing items. Suddenly, Mr X comes thundering at you ready to sock you straight in the face. You frantically start running to try to get Mr X off your tail. You don’t think you have the health to withstand a hit from him. You don’t want to lose all your progress. Please Mr X, just go away!

And then you hear it. After barging into the nearest room you could find, you hear the sweet safe room theme of the game. The Resident Evil series is notorious for having safe rooms with no enemies where you can save your progress. Once you hear this sweet melody, you breathe a massive sigh of relief.

Aspects like safe rooms and overwhelming feelings of relief are actually a key aspect of why we find horror games so engaging. After experiencing a rush of adrenaline from horror and successfully escaping the danger, the accompanying release of dopamine relieves our tension and relaxes our muscles (Ringo, 2013).

I challenged myself to think of a time in my life where I experienced intense fear accompanied by intense relief. I recalled a time when I realised very close to a university deadline that a page of my report didn’t print. I ran out of my lecture and around campus to reprint and resubmit the report, breathing a massive sigh of relief when I just about made the deadline. Playing scary video games allow me to safely feel these massive feelings of relief without potentially jeopardising my grades or my future. But why?

The main theory used to describe this cycle of tension and relief is Zillman’s (1983) Excitation Transfer Theory. This theory argues that because tools in the horror genre are effective at making us feel afraid and unsettled, resolutions to the fear (or even the absence of fear) magnify positive feelings of relief. For example, dealing justice to Jack Baker in Resident Evil 7 who physically and psychologically tortures you is going to feel so much better than just beating a boss in an action-platforming game. As cheesy as it sounds, the pain magnifies the pleasure.

Excitation Transfer Theory relies on effective horror tools to terrify us and make rewards all the more satisfying. In the next section, I will discuss arguably one of the most important tools in horror, and how it may be influential in crafting personal connections to horror.

The F/Ear Effect

Note: This section references reproductive horror/trauma. Please skip to the next section if you do not wish to read about this.

One topic of conversation that I tend to stay out of is Silent Hill. It seems to be widely accepted that if you are interested in psychology, Silent Hill 2 is your favourite. With your degree comes an appreciation for the individual trauma and nightmares explored in the various characters in Silent Hill 2.

I’m sorry to disappoint my peers, but Silent Hill 3 is my favourite – for deeply personal reasons.

At the age of 15, I spent my summer in the gynaecology ward of a hospital while they investigated, diagnosed, and removed an ovarian tumour. I was easily the youngest person in the ward and I didn’t have my own private room, so I was always surrounded by elderly women vomiting after a hysterectomy and middle-aged women sobbing for reasons that I sincerely hope weren’t related to the adjacent labour ward.

I was just a young girl whose whimsical summer was stolen as she was thrown into the terrifying adult world of reproductive trauma.

Silent Hill 3 is known for being a coming-of-age story with reproductive themes, and I deeply related to playing as Heather Mason. When playing the game, I felt like I was playing a simulation of That Lost Summer that I was actively in control of.

This experience begs two questions:

1. Are there others like me who project their personal experiences into horror games?
2. If so, how does this happen?

Regarding the first question, evidence seems to suggest that people can indeed incorporate their experiences into horror. Let’s take a look at some science.

Research using brain scanning techniques has tried to determine which brain areas are involved in processing and reacting to horror. The brain area most associated with recognising fear is the amygdala (Martin, 2008; Straube, 2010; March et al., 2017), to the extent where horror monsters are named directly after the amygdala.

While the amygdala may be the most notorious brain region associated with horror, the hippocampus is also active when engaging with horror (Zelikowsky et al., 2014; Lynch et al., 2017, Stern et al., 2017). The activation of the hippocampus is interesting as it is often associated with memory recollection, so are we going on our own personal journeys when playing horror games? Better yet, when do we get the chance to?

This is where things like suspense and sound design come into play. Horror games aren’t jump scares and gruesome murders 100% of the time, the game likes to leave you in suspense. This suspense is aided by the accompanying music, as pulsing or eerie music can signal to us that we should be fearful of what’s about to happen (Bradley et al., 2018, Martin, 2019). If the sound design of the game is signalling to us that we should be afraid, yet we have few contextual cues for what we should be afraid of, our brain may fill in the blanks based on things that are personally scary to us.

One of my most terrifying gaming experiences happened during the original Silent Hill. While exploring the school, a banging noise was coming from a small locker that turned out to have nothing inside it. My heart was beating abominably fast while approaching this locker, fearing something grotesque was inside which was fuelled by my fear of reproductive horror. I ended up being terrified of literally nothing, but my imagination and personal experiences turned it into something.

A fascinating study conducted by Aubé et al. (2015) supports the power of sound design in horror. By simply playing music and sounds common to the horror genre, they were able to detect amygdala and hippocampus activation – the same regions that activate when watching horror. This means that we don’t even need something scary to be on the screen for us to feel fearful – our imagination may do the work for us based on eerie music.

I’ll conclude this (rather long) section by addressing a concern that people may have: if we’re injecting our own experiences into horror games, does this border on interactive trauma? Well, yes and no. I’ll touch on potentially yes in the concluding section, but I’d like to share some hopeful research for no.

According to Tamborini et al. (1990), an interesting component of empathy is something they call ‘fictional involvement’ – the ability to integrate yourself, your imagination and your experiences into a story. Clasen et al. (2019) found that the strongest predictor of engaging with horror was this ability to imagine and project your experiences into a story. While I appreciate that Silent Hill 2 tells interesting character stories, Silent Hill 3 felt like my story – and I love it for that.

Flip the Script

Throughout this article, I’ve shared research focused generally on the medium of horror. In this section, I’d like to discuss something very interesting that can separate horror games from horror movies.

If you’re like me or a couple of my movie buff friends, you might have trouble thinking of a horror movie that follows the perspective of the villain. It’s much more common to follow the protagonists as they work together to try to survive and/or defeat the big bad.

In comparison, it’s not as difficult to think of a video game equivalent. Dead by Daylight lets you play as a killer or a survivor. The Friday the 13^th video game gives you the option to play as Jason Voorhees. Resident Evil: Resistance pits survivors against a ‘mastermind’ player who tries to orchestrate their downfall. So why are there so many video games that let you be the murderous horror villain?

Back in my article on The Psychology of Video Game Mischief, I described how we are small scientists from a very young age. Our natural curiosity drives us to learn more about the world and find out what happens if we do something. However, something called Theory of Mind (Call & Tomasello, 1998) limits the type of experiments we conduct. Because we can empathise with others and understand their perspectives, we understand that our actions may have hurtful consequences, so we tend to just discard hypothetical social experiments and keep them hypothetical.

I can’t imagine a human being has ever been afraid of me. Even when teaching in a high school, I operated a strict no-fear policy where my classroom was a safe and comfortable place to learn and make mistakes. But when my friends encouraged me to buy Dead by Daylight, I instantly wanted to be a killer. I was curious about the strategy involved in hunting people down, keeping them separated, sabotaging rescue attempts, basically being a big scary nuisance.

As someone who reads a lot of video game research, I’m painfully aware of the stigma that could be attached to saying something like “gamers like to inflict torture in video games”. So let’s take a look at some research to figure out whether gravitating towards the killer in Dead by Daylight either makes me a bad person, or could turn me into one.

A study conducted by Haidt et al. (1994) invited a group of participants to watch footage that could be described as ‘real-life horror’ – unfortunate things happening to animals, graphic surgery of a child, things of that nature. 90% of viewers defied the experiment and switched the footage off because they simply couldn’t endure it any longer; the majority of those who remained watching reported being very disturbed.

A member of the research team would later theorise why – psychological distance (McCauley, 1998). In a fictional context, we could assume that this is CGI or practical effects used as a narrative device to make us hate the villain even more. While the scene unfolding in front of us may be hard to watch, we know it’s not real and no harm is actually being done. When we know something is real and there are real consequences to harm, many of us simply cannot bear to watch.

I’m a small timid chicken who has no problems with ‘hooking’ survivors in Dead by Daylight because it’s fiction and nothing bad will happen. But sometimes even the fiction can be too much, which brings me to my final section.

Why We Don’t Like Horror Games

After spending so much time talking about why people do enjoy horror games, I think it’s only fair to discuss why people may hate and stay away from the genre. For this, I’ll mainly be using three points.

Firstly, I discussed earlier how people may be thrill-seekers who love a good rush of adrenaline and interpret something shocking as new and exciting. However, those who spread awareness of thrill-seekers also talk about their counterparts – the thrill-avoiders (Zuckerman, 1988). Thrill-avoiders are theoretically people who perceive horror as noisy and unpleasant rather than something exciting. The idea of being scared and unsettled couldn’t be more unappealing to them, they just want to chill and feel calm. They may also have an overriding concern about the harm that is befalling the characters, reducing their enjoyment of the experience (Hoffner & Levine, 2005).

I feel that the final two points are best discussed in tandem – the idea of phobias and realism. A great appeal of video games are their interactive nature: you’re not just sitting back watching a story unfold, you’re directly in control of the story unfolding. However, this can be a blessing and a curse. If you are greatly terrified of something when watching a horror movie, you can close your eyes and cover your ears until that part is over. While you may be able to do this in a video game cutscene, you need your hands, eyes, and maybe even your ears free to progress in-game. If a game has crafted the most terrifying spider boss you’ve ever seen and you suffer from arachnophobia, you need to overcome it or you won’t be able to see the rest of the game.

This is where the point about realism comes in. Despite being raised on horror games, I peaced out of my first horror game in 2020. I have one particularly bad phobia that video games have certainly portrayed before, but they have done so in a cartoonish manner using canned sound effects that my brain has gotten used to. This particular game studio prides itself on realism, and they created the most realistic portrayal of my phobia with the most grotesque sound effects that I’ve seen in my entire life.

I immediately tabbed out of the game and closed it, the shaking taking hours to subside. I’ve been willing to pay modders to remove this animation and its accompanying sound for me, but so far nobody has been willing. I would love to go back and play this game, but I can’t go through that again. I absolutely can’t.

With games being an interactive medium that is increasingly pursuing realism, I fear that there will be more in-game roadblocks that are just too gruesome, too realistic, and too painstakingly crafted to nauseate and terrify you to proceed. And because it’s in-game, we can’t just cover our eyes and ears – we need our hands and eyes free.

I would like to end this section by mentioning the potential ethics of realistic video game horror. I have noticed that particularly in the past few years, a worrying amount of detail has been put into gruesome canned animations. For example, a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the gaming industry has been attributed to watching torture and mutilation footage to capture the essence of realism for Mortal Kombat 11’s fatalities.

While it is still a debated topic, there is evidence to suggest that fearful content can make someone disengage with what they are watching, potentially as a protective mechanism (Hastings et al., 2004; Borawska et al., 2020). Particularly for canned animations, this could mean that the mental wellbeing of game developers is potentially being compromised to create animations that players are looking away from, then looking back at once they hear that the sequence is over.

Moving forward, it is important for game development studios to respect the line between realism and harmful content that their audience may not even be paying attention to.

Summary

• Research indicates that playing horror games is even scarier than simply watching horror. Fear activates our fight-or-flight response which gives us a rush of adrenaline. People who are sensation seekers may seek out new and interesting experiences to keep them entertained and thrilled. As horror games safely provide an ebbing and flowing heart rate, they can be a great way for us to stay entertained and engaged.
• When a horror game terrifies us, escaping from or overcoming the danger fills us with a massive feeling of relief. This relief comes in the form of dopamine which can relax our muscles. This is explained using something called Excitation Transfer Theory: because the game was so successful at scaring us, overcoming the fear leads to satisfaction and relief. For example, defeating a boss that has been startling and torturing you for hours is going to feel so much better than simply beating a boss in an action-platformer.
• While the brain area known as the amygdala is commonly associated with processing fear and horror, the hippocampus – an area associated with recalling our memories – is also involved. This indicates that during moments of suspense (aided by eerie music), our imagination fills in the blanks of what we should be afraid of and this can be fuelled by our own personal fears and trauma. Research shows that sound design in horror can be just as influential in invoking fear as watching horror unfold on the screen. This can help us craft deeply personal connections to horror games if we volunteer our imagination and experience while playing.
• An interesting difference between horror games and horror movies is the readiness that someone can play as a killer or a villain. People who are completely non-threatening in reality may be curious to know how it feels like to be the big bad, or may even be interested in the strategy behind crafting a successful hunt. However, this doesn’t mean that the person playing the killer is a bad person. Research indicates that watching real-life horror and gore is deeply upsetting to participants, yet this is the type of content they may pay to see in a movie theatre. This is argued to be due to something called psychological distance: we know that this is CGI/special effects/a video game, nobody is actually getting hurt and we are just indulging our curiosities.
• While thrill-seekers may love the adrenaline and excitement of horror games, thrill-avoiders may instead view this experience as uncomfortable and avoid the horror genre completely. As video games are an interactive medium, phobia-triggering content may need to be overcome in order to proceed in-game; this is different than simply closing your eyes and covering your ears for a horror movie. Gaming’s increasing demand for realism may also lead to gruesome and grotesque content that is difficult to endure. Game studios should be mindful of this in the future as documented cases of PTSD have arisen due to the need to consume graphic content in order to deliver the demanded level of realism. As evidence may indicate that players look away when these gruesome canned animations appear, studios should consider the moral and ethical cost to their staff for something that players may not even be paying attention to.

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