A friendly open letter to FG, from a Psychologist

[psyclog]

I was going to send an email to the guys at Frictional Games, but since they're apparently already too large of a company to accept individual emails from customers, I'll just post it on the board as an open letter, hoping one of them will take notice.


I just finished watching the Uruguayan horror movie "The Silent House", which reminded me about my experiences in Amnesia. Similar mindgames, music and atmosphere shifting between melancholy and creepy, and the whole movie is seemingly shot in one continuous shot as the protagonist explores an old house with her torchlight.
I recommend watching, maybe you could draw some inspiration for upcoming sequels? I was especially thrilled by the use of flash photography as a source of light.


Well and I wanted to thank you for producing this visionary game. Your approach to first-person gaming was unique in that it got rid of so many established patterns. Patterns that had been taken for granted by developers (and gamers?) for many a years. I would say that you, and the success you've had, radically changed our conception of computer gaming.
From your blog entries, I can see that you focus your thoughts on just the right issue. The basic idea of all your considerations seems to be: How can we convey a certain emotional response (mood) in the player? And what could we do to enhance this mood? What would be detrimental? Everything else is never an "end in itself", but has to serve this one purpose. And you thought this through consistently, more than most other developers could do who wouldn't question their proven patterns.

This shines through in various aspects. Like when you just got killed by a monster, you won't meet it at the same spot after loading the game - it obviously wouldn't be the same scare, and your monsters aren't classical computer game enemies that need to be defeated to finish the level. The player has had his scare, and instead of frustrating him, it' time to move on with the experience.
I witnessed this during "the water part", when I was too slow to open the door mechanism in my panic, and got snatched by the monster.
Instead of having to repeat the ordeal, I stepped into eery silence as the dark room seemingly harboured no invisible water monster. After carefully stepping through the room and operating the door, I was greeted by the monster at the other side of the door, a new situation, only this time I managed to survive. So instead of forcing me to play through the same scene twice, the game actually gave me 2 different scenes, and both were intense.




I have only one issue that I'd like to address, one minor observation from within my psychological background: When playing Amnesia, the gamer soon learns to differentiate between the non-dangerous, atmospheric scary-noises, and the actually dangerous scary-noises, with the latter being the typical monster grunt that always plays when a roaming monsters enters the scene (spawns).
This has detrimental effects: It reduces the overall effect of your ambience scary-noises after a while, as the gamer gets conditioned to watch out for the standard grunt sound (Classical conditioning), and the anxiety response to the (eventually harmless) ambience scary-noises extinguishes as the game goes on.

Additionally, the moment the monster appearances get somewhat predictable to the player, they lose part of their impact. I noticed this for myself during the later stages of the game, and would have loved to suddenly bump into a monster that was just lurking in silence, instead of announcing its presence beforehand. That would have given me a good scare, after already getting conditioned (and somewhat hardened) to the grunt-then-monster routine.


Cheers, already looking forward to your next release!
Robin