Formalising suspense from immersive environments Pablo Delatorre1, Manuel Palomo-Duarte1, and Pablo Gerv´as2 1 University of Cadiz, Spain [email protected], [email protected], WWW home page: http://esingenieria.uca.es/ 2 University Complutense of Madrid, Spain [email protected], WWW home page: http://informatica.ucm.es/ Abstract. Survival horror video-games have acquired great acceptance in recent years. Immersion, ease of play, virtual reality gadgets and emo- tional intensity have helped to popularise them. Famous youtubers still perform their videos based on these games, counting millions of viewers even if the design of them is very similar in terms of atmosphere, limited actions and mapping. Usually conceived as suspense-evoking threaten- ing environments to explore and escape, this similarity may lead to think about automatising the generation of products of this genre. In this pa- per, suspense definitions are reviewed from the view of emotional e↵ects. Further, we propose a formula relating suspense to dimensions valence, arousal and dominance. Finally, we present an experiment that supports its application for a horror game. Keywords: suspense, emotions, survival horror, video-games 1 Introduction Popularity of games based on horror and suspense has boomed in recent years. Both 2014 and 2015 were defined by critics as “a great year for horror games” [52] and “the year of horror games” [38]. The amount of games of this genre o↵ered in Steam has almost triplicated from 2008 (3.65%) to 2015 (8.49%)3. Most followed youtubers have used this sort of games to induct their fame, what has helped to the expansion of the genre. From the list of twenty more followed youtubers4 [70], half of them dedicated to video-games have based or are basing its slide-shows on fear and frights5, counting about 84 millions of subscribers. In addition to this, recent simple engines and tools have influenced video-games new developers. Thereby, a thousand of non-professional products have been 3 Information obtained from the list of o↵ered games of Steam store web site [66]. 4 Excluding Vevo channels. 5 Eight out of twenty of the most followed youtubers play and comment video-games. The half of them, pewdeepie (first position), elrubiusOMG (5), JuegaGerman (17) and Markiplier (19) usually play horror and suspense games. released for the community in recent years, and many of them have been played by mentioned youtubers in their videos. Amplified by our then-current fascination with the possibilities of virtual reality environments (VR) [4, p. 2], new technologies as Oculus Rift, Samsumg Gear VR or Google Cardboard di↵use even further the genre. Immersion is mainly oriented to a first person environment, where the game can create virtual spaces in which the player performs an actor [60, p. 80] that engage the player psychologically [64, p. 176]. For example, in 3D Monster Maze (survivor First- Person Shooter precedent and probably the first 3D game [7, p. 30]), the walker is supposed to go and can preview the route to take. From a first-person point of view, player is forced to navigate in order to learn what the structure of space is and to make a mental map of it [18, p. 75]. Beyond mere fun, the aim of these games is that players experiment just the same sensations of fear and anxiety that the character performed would feel. This type of paradigm is used to generate increasing engaging out-of-the-body and body substitution illusions [56, p. 1]. In this way, the genres naturally adapted to virtual reality are simulators, FPS and the sub-genre of first-person horror and suspense survivor adventures (mostly FPSs with limited use of weapons and aim, or even without options to attack, as it happens in games like Outlast). These applications require a high level of immersion while they try to produce a “sense of presence” [5, p. 37] by means of monopolising the own senses [11, p. 60]. Despite this increasing popularity, horror and suspense games are not usually among the best games of each year, and barely a few of them have been elected among the main games that you-may-not-miss6 [1, 22, 28, 21]. Only Doom, BioShock, Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2 and The Last of Us are mentioned, and not in ev- ery list. Nevertheless, in the memory of many players remains titles like Slender, Fatal Frame, Dead Space, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Alan Wake or aforenamed Outlast as fundamental games in the history of the interactive entertainment. However, although a di↵erence is observed between the successful acceptation of horror and suspense video-games, and users and reviewers ratings, we may see that their o↵er keeps increasing, videos where people play them get a lot of audience, VR new technologies perfectly fit them in terms of immersion and many titles become part of the collective knowledge. Consistent with this acceptation of a wide community of gamers and YouTube viewers, experiments in video-games industry conclude that players prefer sus- penseful games, finding them more enjoyable than non-suspenseful ones [31, p. 31]. Results support the assumption that suspense is a driver of video-game en- joyment [p. 29], even for people who dislike horror and suspense genre in litera- ture or movies. Since the relationship between gamer and game is fundamentally di↵erent from that between a film viewer and a film, it may be expected that films and video-games excel at generating di↵erent types of emotions [20, p. 13]. Elements that influence these preferences have been broadly studied. Atmo- sphere plays a fundamental role in terms of illumination, sound and aesthetic to provide a di↵erent environment for expressing a way to see the world. Quite 6 Sources: Metacritic, GamesRadar+, IGN and Game Rankings. frequently the simulated environment influences more than the game argument, relegating it to a second plane. Unlike narrative and drama, its essence lays on a basic assumption: change is possible. It does not deal with what happened or is happening, but with what may happen [19, p. 233]. For example, Slender: The Eight Pages successfully represents the simplest way to illustrate this idea. The player is situated in the woods with the objective of collecting eight pages of paper scattered randomly around ten areas while avoiding being captured by the Slender Man, an invincible faceless creature who passively stalks his targets until they mentally break down and disappear [65, p. 45–46]. Whilst video-games di↵er from cinema in their digital origin and their interactive and typically immersive environments, the premise of creating fear for a player within the survival horror game genre can be attributed to the confrontation with grotesque, non-human-like beings, and in this, is no di↵erent from horror cinema [62, p. 4]: lighting alternates between illuminated places and a complete darkness, and the character has only the help of a lantern to see while moving around open landscapes or inside of labyrinthine buildings; encounters are not the same when the player cannot clearly see the enemy or the surrounding environment; player is embarked upon a lengthy exploration in a hostile environment [45, p. 133]. In this context, the fact that elements to search are pages, pictures or coins is secondary: the game is uniquely based on the environment and making the player jump, as it is not possible to predict the scare nor barely defend from threats. Both, environment and sudden attacks contributes to the emotional immersion: in a 3D environment, antagonists can appear from all directions [67, p. 100]. Further, this context of uncertain outcome led to greater enjoyment, and this e↵ect is mediated by suspense [2, p. 1]. This model of primitive mechanisms based on threat of jump scares, feeling of vulnerability and immersed on an evocative atmosphere are common in many modern horror and suspense games7. In this manner, the importance of this style of video-game is remarkable, as much as to be worthy of having their own sub-genre in the survival horror classification. The concept of this sub-genre is so simple that products could be candidate to be generated by computer. We propose that the threat of jump scares, feeling of vulnerability and atmosphere can be created by automatic mappings and plot generators, taking into account an external configuration about each particular aesthetic concept. However, none remarkable initiative has been released to this respect: excepting the discrete Zeoworks Horror Game Creator & HD Free Indie Games (a Kickstarter project released in September of 2014), existing tools often used to develop horror-games are conceived for generic games design8. Aiming to get this automation, in this paper we put forward a criteria to measure a game aesthetic. Actions are fixed and limited, map generation is a 7 For example, Amnesia: the Dark Descent, Outlast, A↵ected (developed for Oculus Rift), Insanidade, Mental Hospital, Layers of Fear, P.T., Doors of Silence or Kraven Manor, originals and sequels, in their cases. All of them were developed from 2010. 8 Even if Unity 3D is nowadays a popular tool to develop survival horror games, it is not specifically oriented for it. Released assets neither cover automatic generation. solved enough issue [10, 59, 27] and growing sophistication of artificial intelligence programming techniques has contributed greatly to adding variation in enemies behaviour [20, p. 26]. However, beyond its natural creative conception, there is a lack of a formal model of suspense which may help to generate and predict the atmosphere scope based on its emotional e↵ects. In fact, although several authors have discussed scenarios in which video-games generate emotions, little attention has been paid to a detailed understanding of the emotions in question [p.