The Horror of Immersion

Among the many things showcased at this year’s Web Summit, there was a particular emphasis placed on the rising technologies of Virtual and Augmented Reality — hardly a surprise, given that a number of VR and AR devices will be launched next year. Samsung’s Gear VR has just been released, and the Oculus Rift, HTC/Valve Vive, and Sony’s Playstation VR will be coming out in 2016, earning it the tentative title of “the year of VR”, while Microsoft’s HoloLens will lead the charge for AR. To explain the difference between these two technologies, virtual reality presents an artificial 3D world through a headset, which tracks the user’s head movements to create a sensation of full immersion. Augmented reality, embodied in Microsoft’s aforementioned HoloLens product, enhances your view of the real world by overlaying a virtual one on top of it.

“Eventually AR and VR technology will converge and combine. You’ll wear it all the time or carry it around with you all the time […] it’s going to be more ubiquitous than the smartphone,” said Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, during his talk on Web Summit 2015’s Centre Stage. “I’d be very surprised if fifty years from now we’re still all carrying around slabs in our pockets when you can just project a virtual environment.”

While still believing that VR and AR have huge potential, Dr Mads Haahr of the School of Computer Science and Statistics here in Trinity offers a more cautious take on things. He harbours certain reservations about AR, in particular: “Many major players have (or will have) offerings in this space, and as opposed to the VR we saw in the 1990s, the technology is really mature enough to pull it off this time. […] In comparison, AR has been taking a long time to catch on — a lot longer than anyone would have predicted 4-5 years ago when there was a lot of excitement around smartphone-based AR and later Google Glass. […] Only Microsoft really seems to be making a big investment in AR tech at the moment with the HoloLens technology. HoloLens looks extremely exciting, but I think a widespread adoption is further out than a widespread adoption of VR is.”

oculus rift
VR has proven to be an effective tool for immersing players, with particular advantages for the horror genre.

I’m not sure either platform will change the entertainment industry per se, even if they are successful, but there is most certainly a place for them.

However, he’s not quite as ambitious as Luckey with regards to VR and AR’s future. “I’m not sure either platform will change the entertainment industry per se, even if they are successful, but there is most certainly a place for them. If we go back to the last generation of consoles, the big innovation was motion controllers (WiiMote, Kinect, Move) which looked like they were going to change the way games are played a lot. However, motion controllers really seem to have taken the back seat on the current generation of consoles. For this reason, I’d be a little careful about heralding revolutions on the basis of VR and AR yet.”

With Sony branding their VR headset as the Playstation VR, it’s not surprising that the future of VR has been heavily connected with video gaming. As more and more VR and AR systems are rolled out at conventions, it’s also become very clear which particular gaming genre will make the most of the new tech: horror. You’ve possibly seen some demos of people trying out horror games on VR devices — Alien: Isolation, for example, or maybe Slender: The Arrival — and the true horror of this medium quickly makes itself clear: immersion. With a horror movie, you passively view the action on the screen — you are a voyeur, with no control over the events before you. It’s much the same with horror literature; while it involves a little more action on your part, through the act of reading, your role in relation to the story is still passive, still outside the action, and limited to the power of your own imagination. However, with conventional horror games action is required, as you take control of a character and steer them through the events of the game, making a conscious choice each time to forward the narrative. A film will progress without you — a game, generally, won’t. “When done right, games can provoke a sense of fear and dread that surpasses anything possible in books and movies,” said Thomas Grip, creative director for Frictional Games, claiming that games are the best medium for horror that we have.

“I agree video games do horror extremely well,” Dr Haahr agreed. “And there are some really key titles in the history of horror games, such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and more recently The Last of Us. If you look at fiction, I think one of the things horror writers like Stephen King does extremely well is put you in the head of the characters, get you to sympathise with their thinking, even if it’s the antagonist. In a similar fashion, games can put you in the body of a character, but there’s still a challenge to convey the character’s thinking to the player, or perhaps more accurately, get the player to think and feel things that are aligned with the story progression.  Games do this through game mechanics and environmental storytelling, which is a very different way to tell a story than pure description, which of course doesn’t work so well in games.”

In the previously mentioned videos of people trying out horror games on VR devices, the terrified gamers can frequently be seen attempting to clap their hands over their eyes, to shut out the terrifying images, only to find the headset in the way. They then place their hands over their ears, but since they’re wearing headphones, this act is just as futile. While they can close their eyes and await the inevitable, there’s no escaping the noise, and in many cases, the audio lends more to the terror than the visuals themselves. After all, what would Psycho have been without Bernard Herrmann’s iconic score, or Jaws without John Williams’ ominous, minimalist theme?

until dawn
Sony’s Until Dawn will feature VR compatibility for extra-dimensional chills.

When done right, games can provoke a sense of fear and dread that surpasses anything possible in books and movies

Often, this results in the inevitable reaction — the gamer tearing the headset off, and pulling the headphones away from their ears, breathing heavily, heart racing, terrified. “By playing a game we extend ourselves into the virtual world,” Grip also claimed, but with the introduction of VR technology, we not only extend ourselves into that world, we immerse ourselves. This can lead to a form of terror that we’re unfamiliar with, as, despite ourselves, we feel as though we’re in real danger in these virtual worlds. Indeed, the immersiveness that VR has the potential to create has led developers to concede that death-by-horror-games will be an inevitability. “When the commercial version comes out, somebody is going to scare somebody to death — somebody with a heart condition or something like that,”  Denny Unger, the Creative Director for Cloudhead Games said, during the VR panel at Unite 2014 in Seattle. “It is going to happen. Absolutely.”

However, Dr Haahr dismisses this idea. “I don’t think there’s a real risk that horror games will become too horrifying. Horror (especially Gothic horror) has always tried to blur the boundary between fact and fiction — it is one of the hallmarks of the genre. […] Dracula takes the form of a collection of evidence, and Blair Witch Project was presented as found footage. VR and AR simply offer a new way to do this, which is very exciting for people working in horror games.”

Horror games have risen in popularity over the last five years, as games like SOMA and Until Dawn have all achieved mainstream status. With the introduction of VR and AR, it’s likely that the horror genre will only grow in popularity, and there’s already signs of companies moving in this direction, with Sony announcing the VR spin-off Until Dawn: Rush of Blood. “VR is a science fiction technology,” said Luckey during Web Summit 2015. “It’s right up there with space travel and time travel and artificial intelligence and flying cars.” And the line between science fiction and horror can so easily be blurred, as we’ve seen so often in films like Terminator and Alien, and in games like SOMA, Doom and Dead Space. It all depends on how you use it.

Illustration by Aisling Reina.

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