Fight or Flight: The Neuroscience of Survival Horror

By Maral Tajerian

[How exactly do horror games work on the

brains of players? In this new feature,
neuroscientist Maral Tajerian, of  Thwacke!
Consulting, unpacks the mechanism behind
the scares in Amnesia, Dead Space and
Silent Hill, among others.]

Fear is one of the most primitive instincts in humans. Although it has been particularly useful
in keeping us alive in dangerous situations, it has also helped the entertainment industry
capitalize on our sheer joy of being scared. The video game industry has done a good
amount of scaring by taking advantage of these emotions and employing them in gameplay
narrative and design.

This practice is best exemplified by putting the player in a vulnerable situation with limited
resources to confront enemies. With proper execution, the genre can make your heart race,
palms sweat and make you go to sleep with nightmares. However, when executed poorly,
players feel as if they're simply "going through the motions".

Over the last two decades, several games (ranging from the early Resident Evil series to the
more recent Amnesia: The Dark Descent) have defined the survival horror genre by
successfully engaging fear and anxiety in players.

Although successful iterations of these games offer different enemies, gameplay mechanics
and plot, they all share similar ways of handling the human psyche. This article will discuss
how fear as an emotion has been employed in the gaming industry and discuss how the
balance between scares and gameplay can lead to success or failure.

The Science of Terror

Anxiety. Next to fear, anxiety is perhaps the most prominent feeling experienced in video
games. Unlike fear, which is a response to an imminent threat, anxiety is a response to a
future potential threat.

When perceptual systems are taxed, research has shown that a looming threat results in
anxiety that heightens attention and increases sensitivity to potential dangers. This implies
that solving a puzzle the character is presented with in the game does not take away from
the experience of fear and danger. In fact, according to many gamers, solving the puzzles
under dangerous circumstances only increases the feelings of fear. Consider how riddles and
puzzles in Silent Hill  excel in this respect.
 An example of a puzzle from Silent Hill 2 that needs to be solved in a dark and
dilapidated room.

While games like first person shooters are notorious for desensitizing players to violence,
games that raise the player's anxiety actually sensitize them to danger. This is simply how
animals behave, and it's a highly adaptive behavior, since it keeps individuals on their toes in
anxiety-causing environments. Raising the levels of anxiety in a video game will therefore
ensure that the player is sensitized to the danger in the game. In a game like Amnesia, the
entire experience teeters on anxiety created up to confrontation with an enemy since the
player has absolutely no means to defend himself.

Helplessness. As mentioned earlier, players in the survival horror genre are often faced
with terrifying and inescapable circumstances, with little means of self-defense. In other
words, they are truly and utterly helpless.

In Amnesia, some may remember locking themselves in a closet, or hiding in a corner

staring at a blank wall for several minutes, because you're convinced that if you move, even
an inch, a certain and horrible death will soon ensue. Furthermore, elements like rigid
camera angles, awkward control schemes (Silent Hill, and Early Resident Evil titles), lighting
(Alan Wake, Dead Space), etc. all serve to obliterate what little control the player might have
thought she possessed.

Helplessness is truly a powerful feeling. Studies have shown that animals that are faced with
situations where they're helpless develop strong feelings of fear and anxiety. This is also true
in the case of humans. You may remember this feeling from your last visit to the dentist.
Whenever you experience feelings of helpless and loss of control, you are bound to feel more
anxious and fearful. The same stays true in video games.

Priming. In psychology, priming is defined as the effect in which the response to a stimulus
is influenced by the exposure to a previous stimulus.
Consider the word-stem completion task, for example. Here, a test subject is exposed to
certain words, one of which is the word "lettuce". He is then asked to complete the following
word: "let----". The effect of priming can be seen when the subject fills the blank with "tuce"
due to the fact that he was exposed to that word earlier in the experiment.

Several games rely heavily on creating anxiety using this strategy, by using sounds that
remind the player of an encroaching yet unseen enemy. In Amnesia, visits to various torture
chambers (where he actually "hears" victims in an iron maiden, a brazing bull, etc.) leads up
to being locked in a cell. The fact that such priming took place (being exposed to the torture
scenes) clearly influences the way the player feels when he himself is locked up and dreading
the possibility of similar tortures.

A diagram in the Strappado torture room in Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

In addition to this priming, certain events characterized by unexpected novelty can, very
efficiently, startle a player. For example, events that can lead a player through a relatively
safe part of a level may lower our guard to new threats when revisiting the same
environment (i.e.: consider the first 30 minutes of Doom 3 or the hubs in the Silent
Hill  and Dead Space series).

These choices will often save time in level design while still maintaining progress and the
required ambience to startle and terrify.

Mirror Neurons. Mirror neurons are neurons in certain regions of the brain that are active
when an animal performs an action, or observes another individual performing that same
action.

Discovered a few decades ago, these neurons are argued to be the key in understanding
other individuals' intentions and feelings, empathy, and even imitating the actions of others.
It is very possible that mirror neurons play an important role interfacing our experiences with
a virtual avatar.
 PET studies highlighting similar clusters in the brain that activate between
individuals who are watching an action (listening to music) or partaking in an
action (playing music).

In most video games, moving in a three dimensional space is likely to trigger spatial
orientation mirror neurons. In the Silent Hill series, similar mechanisms would elicit anxiety
and disgust when players are given the choice to stick their hand into a hole in a wall or to
take something out of a toilet.
 James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2 asked to stick his hand in a dirty toilet, likely
eliciting disgust in the player, who mirrors this experience in her own brain and, to
some extent, "experiences" it herself.

Similarly the same can be said in Dead Space 2, where players are given the choice to crawl
in very confined spaces (where the right camera angle make the entire difference) or guide a
needle into the eye of Isaac Clarke.

And what's best is that the developers of these games are increasingly aware of these facts
and capitalize on it. As Thomas Grip of Frictional Games (Amnesia: The Dark Descent)
himself said at the Games Colloquium at Concordia University last year, the involvement of
mirror neurons is important when the empathy factor is high. In other words, you can't help
but put yourself in the protagonist's shoes.

Context and Environment. Naturally, our environment plays a large role in the perception
of fear and potentiating startle responses. In the right context and environment, our baseline
startle reflex shows gradual elevation over the course of aversive conditioning (antagonizing
the player).

This works both inside and outside the game. Out of the game, mood plays a large role in
getting the most out of the experience (consider the importance of playing in a dark room,
adjusting the gamma, and wearing headphones). Creating the right environment inside of
the game is equally important and capitalizes off of our own neurobiology. For example, our
fear of the dark stems from our evolved circadian rhythms that revolve around a diurnal
(day-night) cycle making us vulnerable at night. Similarly nocturnal animals like rats exhibit
very similar startle responses, only in the light.
 The use of light has always created a sense of helplessness and a shrouded and
mysterious environment creating ambience in the survival horror genre. Alan
Wake (top) and Dead Space 2 (bottom).

It should be noted that the appropriate context can also elicit fear in not so dangerous
objects or cues. Fear conditioning with auditory cues can still cause anxiety, with the
auditory cue and no immediate aversive stimuli.

An example of this is best exemplified by F.E.A.R.'s antagonist Alma, a little girl who can do
rather terrible things. Additionally the unpredictability of aversive stimuli (such as a little girl
vs. a man with a chainsaw) increases our perceived anxiety and fear.

In the case of F.E.A.R., game designer Craig Hubbard said that "...a guy in a mask chasing
co-eds with a meat cleaver can be scary, but on some level you're thinking to yourself, you
could probably kick his ass if you got the drop on him... But when a spooky little girl takes
out an entire Delta Force squad, how are you supposed to deal with that?"

Integrating Terror into

Gameplay
Achieving scares and interactivity in the horror genre is no easy feat. Whereas other games
challenge the player's ability to solve a puzzle or take down an array of enemies, the survival
horror genre challenges a hardwired and highly adaptive response to threats. To establish
one good startle, you need to take into account the ability for your design to establish a
baseline of expectations with your environment and the purpose of your character in that
environment, build anxiety, connect with the character, and remove any control the player
may have (consider the importance of the first 10-15 minutes of Dead Space and the
player's first encounter with an enemy).

This design often leads to the scripted scare (i.e. Pyramid Head's non-confrontational
spooky/disturbing appearances scattered throughout Silent Hill 2), which can remind us of
the linearity of gameplay and a lack of a personalized experience/choice and replay value.
 Top: Dead Space's first/scripted encounter with a necromorph does not give the
player a chance to fight back, but removes control and increases anxiety. Bottom:
Scripted moment with Pyramid Head omniously staring at James Sunderland
through impenetrable bars.

This raises the additional challenge of creating unpredictable moments while playing. For
example, in a game like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, certain events can cue an "ice-world
transition", prepping the player to run in order to avoid danger.
The first time, such an event can create anxiety but not as much after the third or fourth.
This does not mean that these events fail to create anxiety in the player, but they do not
achieve it to the same degree due to our own learning of what a player must do in order to
play/win.

Similarly in Dead Space, some players can plan their confrontations by prepping themselves
to orient their attack to nearby vents or gratings. In fact, once they do, their experience with
the game is not one of fear, but of confrontation and seizing power.

Top: Necromorph whack-a-mole in Dead Space. Bottom: Ice transitions in Silent

Hill: Shattered Memories = run.

It seems that with the growing tendency of video games to move towards more visceral
action/gore (Dead Space 2 vs Dead Space, or Resident Evil 4  and 5 vs Resident Evil 1 to 3)
signals that it is easier to design an action game based off of a terror franchise instead of a
true horror game that can succeed in the aforementioned principles of animal behavior.
Conclusions
As a neuroscientist, it is very rewarding for me to see science being used so elegantly in
video games, and I can easily see this trend continue to appeal to an increasingly smart
gaming audience. So, what can we learn from games like Amnesia, Silent Hill, F.E.A.R., etc.?
And in more general terms, how can we implement basic principles of neuroscience into
video games?

Clearly, the first step is to stay informed. Research in the sciences is extremely fast-paced,
and most of the findings don't reach the general audience until at least a decade later when
they're published in textbooks. The recent revolution in information exchange does not
completely solve the problem and is a double-edged sword. It helps spread knowledge
faster, but is often unreliable.

The second step is to be bold enough to experiment with new genres. Every now and then, a
game comes along that creates a completely new way of thinking about video games.
Although this is a risky approach, it is much needed in an industry that boasts literally
hundreds of games that follow the exact same recipe.

Finally, it is important to form a solid emotional bond between the game (or the main
character) and the player. RPGs do this beautifully by blurring the line between the gamer
and his avatar. For non-RPGs, the task is less straightforward.

One of the ways to establish/strengthen the bond is to elicit very strong emotions in the
gamer. Games in the survival horror do this using fear, which can be very effective.
However, it is not the only way. We have recently seen an onslaught of different games that
capitalize on a range of different emotions such as grief (Graveyard, Tale of Tales), love and
loss (Dear Esther, Thechineseroom), etc. It is clearly evident that the era of "one size fits all"
video games is long gone.

At the end of the day, it's important to know your audience before you can sell them a
product. With the abundance of game studios, whether it's the triple-A industry or the
budding indie games, no developer can risk making a game that will flop. Understanding
what humans find engaging/stimulating/addictive is necessary in making a given video game
a success.

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