Fear and DOOM

The Psychology of the Horror Unique to Videogames//

Tags: Emotions/ neurology/ DOOM

My name is Graham Walker and I am a practising psychotherapist. In this blog I want to explore reasons why videogames can uniquely elicit a fear response in us.

Recently I was playing through the original DOOM- iD Software’s 3D first person shooter (FPS) game that basically gave rise to a whole genre. I hadn’t really played it much before though for no particular reason; I was around 6 when the game first came out so missed the boat for that initial wave and never hopped on at any point later down the road. But recently, I have been trying to catch up on some older games as part of my self-imposed gamer homework; I feel that having a strong sense of the history is an integral part of understanding the current and future landscape of the games industry. Also, FPS is outside of my usual wheelhouse so I see it as trying to broaden my horizons on what I think I might like, because if you always stay in your lane you might just miss out on your next favourite game! 

There is a lot of info on this HUD** for a brain to try and make sense of!

So, I play through the first few chunky, pixelated missions of episode 1 of DOOM and get my bearings in the game; get a sense for the controls, try and accept the fact that you cannot manually shift the aim of your gun on the y axis, as its fixed (the bullets magically know when to aim up or down, which is very clever of them), get an understanding that we are making our way through some sort of military base that has been over-run by some evil guys ands some monsters. Shooty, shooty, find colour-coded keys, open colour-coded doors, shooty some more and find an exit to progress to the next area. It’s not complicated; it’s 1993 and it’s just the birth of the genre.

Your health metre for DOOM was a picture of the player character’s face in various states of health.

iD software, when developing this first version of what would later become known as the DOOM engine*, managed to pull off some highly impressive technical feats for the time to use in the game; enemies (nearby or in other rooms) will react to the sound of your guns and come find you; very detailed-for-the-time wall textures; lighting effects allowing them to make areas lighter or darker, or even for lights to flicker on and off.

Highly impressive stuff and supposedly the world rightly lost its collective mind at the sight of it in 1993. But this is 2024 and, though I can look back with some sense of appreciation, graphics and what developers can do in games has moved far past these humble beginnings.

To me, these graphics will always look good!

And yet, and yet… As I begin playing the 5th mission of this very early, very rudimentary by today’s standards shooty shooty game I notice something completely unexpected. I explore a certain section of the map; it’s dark and shadowy. The corridors are narrow creating a claustrophobic vibe. Suspenseful music plays in the background (a song fittingly for this level titled ‘Suspense’). It’s all accompanied by growls and groans of nearby nasties. All at once, the enemies start appearing. They are in high numbers. Among them are a few demon monsters that have some sort of invisibility making them show up as a merely flickering disturbance of the environment. They come at you quickly and I find them tricky to target. They are just so difficult to make out in the dark, and I begin shooting wildly in response to this, spraying bullets in every direction. Suddenly, I notice my jaw tensing; I hold my controller a bit tighter; my breathing is a little more shallow and I can feel my heart beating in my chest.

Wait… Am I scared?

This three-decade old game made for hardware about as powerful as a microwave. This software that has been modified to run on everything from calculators, fridges, ATM machines and yes even a literal microwave- is actually giving me a palpable sense of fear? How in the world is it managing this?

I press pause on the game- primarily to save for the 10th time in the last 10 minutes- and I notice the fear dissipates almost instantly. I feel the built-up tension drain from my body and am left utterly confused by what just happened.

I don’t find the images on display particularly scary to look at, I know that I am in no danger and I know that I can click save whenever I want so I don’t even have to be scared at the prospect of losing any progress So, how can something so completely unrealistic-looking by today’s standards manage to conjure such powerful emotions in me?

To make sense of this we need to seek to understand how the brain works and how it processes incoming auditory and visual stimuli.

As we know, humans are just evolved apes; we became cavemen and developed further into the homo sapiens of today. This means that we come with a lot of evolutionary baggage, for better or worse, and a lot of limitations in cognitive functionality that we can’t just patch out like so many game bug fixes.

The evolved brain comes built-in with a bunch of safety mechanisms to ultimately keep us alive. The caveman who could spot danger early and respond accordingly was less likely to get eaten by the sneaky, slinking sabretooth tiger (and therefore far more likely to pass on their ‘respond to danger quickly’ genes). This goes for all things that look like dangers: better to respond to a mysterious shadow as someone coming to kill us rather than cuddle us. This is why now when we wake up in the middle of the night and see a creepy looking shadow you’re head screams “burglar”, rather than whispers “that’s your dressing gown hanging on the back of the door, you’re OK to go back to sleep”. The modern brain cannot shake these old, evolutionary habits.

The main ‘fear centre’ within the limbi system is the amygdala.

Another built-in system feature (it’s not a bug!) is responding to all incoming stimuli (be it audio, visual, touch, etc.) as if they relate to us and to a greater extent like they are things possibly happening to us. The brain then creates an emotional and physiological response appropriate for this something possibly happening to us.

This goes for everything, including videogames; ultimately the cavemen never had PlayStations and so the human brain has not evolved well to be able to differentiate real threats from made-up ones.

This is why scary movies work so well. When we see the spooky ghost or crazed murderer a part of the brain thinks “Ahhh! This thing is going to get me; I need to get all worked up and panicky so I’m ready to run away!”

Note that I said part of the brain in that last paragraph. Obviously, I’m not saying that we wholly and completely believe that what we see on a screen is real and even happening to us, but when we understand how the brain evolved we can start to make sense of this idea.

The brain is made up of several inter-linked sections; the sections that we are interested in here are the ‘limbic system’, sometimes referred to as the feeling system and the ‘neo-cortex’, known as the thinking system. They do not exist in isolation from each other but they do go about doing their own thing a lot of the time. Imagine two house mates; sometimes they do things together like cook a meal and they are generally focussed on the same task and outcomes at the same time. But, sometimes they go off and do their own thing a bit more; perhaps in the evening they both sit on the sofa whilst one reads and the other watches TV. Then as they sit there there’s a loud noise from upstairs and one of the housemates jumps out of their skin and screams:

“What was that noise? I think someone is trying to break in upstairs!”, the first one says.

“It’s nothing”, replies the other calmly, “I left my window open and that’s the noise it makes when the wind blows it shut.”

“I’m not so sure”, the first one replies still somewhat nervous, “maybe I should go and check it out to be certain!”

And this is how the limbic system and the neocortex can operate together, but apart; they experience the same things but may give simultaneously different responses each. So, to briefly go back to the scary movie analogy this is why for some people they sit smiling and eating popcorn to the scary film. Their limbic system induces terror while their neocortex is saying “man, I love feeling scared, it’s such a rush, but that monster doesn’t even look that scary or real.”

And so, if we go back to me playing DOOM, as I pace round the tight corners, with the scary noises, dark lighting and suspenseful music my limbic system is saying “this looks pretty dangerous, maybe something bad is happening; let’s push a fear response in case we need to fight or run away.” The limbic system sees scary shapes, and a scary atmosphere, not knowing that none of it real or dangerous, it just responds like it is and creates fear. What triggers fear and to what degree differs from person to person but there is always something for everyone.

This lighting for the time was excellent, and even now helps to create some level of uncertainty

There’s a few extra things that are worth thinking about here before wrapping up. Firstly, some people will be thinking “DOOM has never scared me” and that may be true; despite coming from evolved functions of the brain the response changes from person to person. But have a think about watching a film or playing a game that includes something that you would consider a phobia for you, say snakes, deep water or spiders perhaps and think about how your body responds to these things; I imagine despite being not real they create quite a real fear response in you.

Secondly, couldn’t the neocortex just tell the limbic system to chill out and that none of it is real? Well, possibly and that might help but these house mates are not on the best of terms and don’t always listen to each other. But, when I think about this situation specifically- this is my first time playing DOOM and I don’t play many shooters. The controls, the level design, the systems and mechanics are all pretty new to me and new things all take a higher cognitive load and have higher demands on attention. I’m having to concentrate on which buttons to press, how to control my aim, how to navigate around the level, my strategy for addressing the baddies and what their attack patters are far more than a seasoned DOOM player. A bit like your PC; when your neocortex is handling a lot of things it is much slower to then start a new task, or maybe it won’t even start doing it at all. So for me here, my neocortex was so busy it didn’t even notice that the limbic system was starting to activate the fear centre thus didn’t do anything to try and calm it down. This then makes sense of why pausing the game had such a strong effect on how I felt; not only did the scary pictures and music go away, but my neocortex could suddenly start noticing the fear and talking to the limbic system.

As an add on to this point, the role of uncertainty is worth mentioning. As a CBT therapist the impact of uncertainty on anxiety is well-known point to me; addressing an intolerance of uncertainty is often a kay part of treatment when working with someone with generalised anxiety disorder so I have seen first-hand how crippling uncertainty can be for people. Now, think of a scary film or a game you have watched or played hundreds of times. Does it elicit such a strong response in you now as it did that first time? I doubt it, and uncertainty has a big role in this. To varying degrees for individuals the brain interprets uncertainty as a threat. In CBT we often describe situations as uncertain when they are novel, ambiguous or unpredictable and videogames can manipulate these concepts to ramp up a sense of intensity in them. So, if you have played through DOOM a hundred times and you know the location of every imp and cacodemon you get no sense of uncertainty; no sense of “what am I going to see around this next corner” and therefore no sense of unease.

I recently listened to the Second Wind podcast ‘Dev Heads’*** where they talked with the creative lead for the horror game “Amnesia: The Bunker” who showed how this idea can be used. He said that they purposely made it so every new run of the game, item locations moved, consumable pickups changed type and quantity and enemies would appear in different times and places, because in changing these elements up it kept things unpredictable for a player even on a second, third, or fourth playthrough. This is a great example of how uncertainty can be fostered to maintain the unease and another reason why my first playthrough of DOOM felt so scary. It also helps to illustrate how unique this is to videogames, as no other medium can use strategies of overloading a brain’s processing capacity to hijack its fear centre. Only interactive media can hope to achieve such a feat, even with graphics of very low quality by today’s standards. It makes me think of the story that when filming Jaws Spielberg was so unhappy with he quality of the shark model and worried that no one would find it scary that he decided to only use it as minimally as possible in the movie. This is just not something that a videogame has to worry about in the same way.

Amnesia: The Bunker has much more modern graphics but still relies on many of the old tricks.

And that’s why DOOM made me scared 30 years after its creation; the rational part of my brain was too busy doing unfamiliar tasks in an unpredictable environment leaving the feeling part of my brain to run amok treating this ancient game as a real threat that I needed to be literally fighting or fleeing from.

So, the next time you notice that creeping sense of fear coming over you maybe try telling your monkey brain to chill a bit as nothing bad is truly happening. Or perhaps you can lean in and enjoy the experience all the more now.

That’s how I feel about this. You might feel different and that is OK.

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*A game engine is software that allows you to build games; it comes with a suite of functions and tools that developers use to create the games we play. A game might be developed in its own engine, or one it got from somewhere else, with frequently used ones being Unreal or Unity as examples.

** A HUD is a ‘heads-up display’ and is the visual representation on screen that shows information that the developers feel that the player needs to know, such as health status, weapon being used, ammunition left, etc.

*** You can watch this episode of Dev Heads here: The Challenges of Designing Horror (ft. Fredrik Olsson - Amnesia: The Bunker) | Dev Heads Podcast (youtube.com)