Horror Games: The Need For Presence

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The magic of horror games is to make players watch every step, inducing a feeling of fear when they turn around a corner. Horror game designers use a variety of tools to encourage the sensation of fear. However, players should associate themselves with a character and attach meaning to their actions in order to experience a thrill while playing a game. A concept, known as presence or telepresence - 'a sense of being present in a remote environment ' (Held and Durlach, 1992) - helps to achieve the desired response. Many scholars have proven that a ‘Need for presence’, which is a tendency to enjoy experiencing presence, is a key element of the gameplay (Dalisay et al., 2012, p.3). Depending on how well presence is created by the media, it can …show more content…
Mardigan (2010) claim that presence depends on two factors: the richness of a mental model created by an environment and consistency of it. Lombard and Ditton (2009) conducted a research and concluded that there are several dimensions of presence:
• Quality of social interactions – refers to 'warmth ' of communications, created within mediated environment. Those, however, may include interactions with NPCs, such as an ability to speak or observe body language (Gackenbach and Bown, 2011).
• Realism – refers to 'how accurately virtual environment represents real objects, events and people ' (McMahan, 2003, p. 75). There is a distinguishing between social realism (when the mediated environment follows conventions of the real world) and perceptual realism (when the environment looks and sounds like the real world).
• Effect of transportation – when people feel like they were transported to another place Lombard et al. (2009) Identified three types of transportation: 'you are there ', 'it is here ' and 'we are together '. However, a traditional definition of telepresence covers those terms, with the only exception, that the last term covers environments with multiple users (such as MMORPG) and is not particularly useful for the analysis of the horror

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