University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Harvest: first person psychological horror game

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Harvest: first person psychological horror game

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Content HARVEST
FIRST PERSON PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR GAME
by
ROAHITH RAJENDIRAN
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(INTERACTIVE MEDIA)
MAY, 2021
Copyright 2021 Roahith Rajendiran
Table of contents
List of Figures iii
Abstract iv
Project Description 1
Motivation 2
Inspiration 3
Prototypes 9
Objectives 11
Narrative, Progression and Levels 13
Art Direction 18
Gameplay 20
Challenges 23
Possible Solutions 25
Overall Reflection/Conclusion 26
References 27
ii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Moodboard 3
Figure 2: Screenshots from the architecture of The Shining 4
Figure 3: Screenshots from The Triangle 5
Figure 4: Screenshots of the game Naissance 6
Figure 5: Screenshots of the game Outlast 7
Figure 6: Screenshots from the final project of my Directed Research Course - Spatial Narratives 9
Figure 7: Screenshots of the Character Switching Prototype 10
Figure 8: Game Design Flow - How the designer intent of Psychological Horror influences all
components of the game.
12
Figure 9: An illustration showing the different emotional arcs of Stories from Kurt Vonnegut’s
Thesis
13
Figure 10: A series of graphs from the paper mentioned, which plot the happiness levels of the
audience across various stories.
14
Figure 11: The Kübler-Ross Model of Grief 15
Figure 12: Emotions and their corresponding level progressions 16
Figure 13: Art Direction Research of the hotel interior 18
Figure 14: Art Direction Research of the Hotel’s exterior features 18
Figure 15: Art Direction Research of the Topology of surrounding landscape 19
Figure 16: Screenshots of final game 22
iii
Abstract
This thesis is a design exploration of adapting how the human psyche deals with trauma and turning it into
emotional metaphors in an immersive 3D First Person Psychological Horror game.
Emotional metaphors are structures and sequences of conceptual, visual, mental, and/or narrative
montages that parallel deep-rooted psychological systems in the human mind. This thesis borrows from and
extends two particular stages from the Kübler-Ross Model - specifically denial and confrontation. It
explores how the game, narrative, and level design can be manipulated through a unique combination of
puzzle gating and architectural non-linearity to evoke a particular stage of the psychological journey of
dealing with repressed trauma.
iv
Project Description
A First-Person psychological horror game developed as part of Thesis for the Interactive Media and
Games program at the University of Southern California.
You play as Carden, a night security guard who must find a way to escape the hotel – The Aeolus, as it
warps reality and forces Carden to confront his repressed guilt. Through Carden, the players experience
Anxiety, Disempowerment, and Vulnerability.
1
Motivation
It was in 2010 that I watched the movie Inception and was excited by the complexity of the narrative. That
movie impacted me in many ways, and I realized that such pieces of media were what I liked to consume -
complex, narrative, larger-than-life puzzles.
Inception was a good combination of all of these elements that I liked individually.
Puzzles: I like puzzle games, I especially enjoy finding solutions to them. I am not a completionist. To me, the
“goal” of a puzzle is not to solve the individual puzzle, rather understand the nature of the problem and
the problem space. I am very interested in solving the pattern using the scientific method. Solving the
nature of the puzzle, meant that I could solve any puzzle of that type. I am always fascinated by the
conceptual space of puzzles.
Heavy Narratives: I am a huge fan of heavy, sad narratives. Partially because it resonates with a part of
me, and partially because I liked seeing characters get caught up in extremely sad and difficult situations,
with little hope for any positive ending. “How low can you go?” I find it satisfying to watch how one lands in
such difficult situations, how dark one’s mind can get. What are the bounds of our morality? It allowed me
to know and learn the darker parts of my mind. This is also why I am drawn heavily towards the horror
genre, and especially towards horror movies without a “Happy Ending”, even more, so where humans were
forced to deal with problems due to some misfortune of their own doing.
Reality Warping Narratives: These are stories where the reality of the media is widely different/larger
than the life we live. I like how in fiction, reality can be overwhelming and beyond life. I was drawn to
movies that augmented, modified, and changed reality in which characters dealt with the abstract nature
of their reality.
To summarize, I loved puzzle-solving, narrative worlds with heavy and dark themes, and reality-warping
abstract pieces of media that were borderline beyond human comprehension. These interests culminated
into my decade-long consumption of media within the psychological horror genre.
After being sufficiently fascinated by Inception, I decided that when I make media (had not decided then
what kind of media I wanted to make), I would make the kind that satisfied me the most - psychological,
narrative-driven, larger than life, reality-warping stories.
I love psychological horror as it both terrifies and challenges us to think about ideas within ourselves that
we would otherwise not have had a chance to explore. To me, psychological horror is/was never just about
fear. It is about a moral dilemma, being pulled by forces I didn’t know existed in my mind, about a very
primitive fear of facing something overwhelming.
While I watched and consumed many movies of the psychological horror genre, and read works that were
adjacent to it, I couldn’t find a comparatively satisfying experience in a video game. What I found were
games, with traditional/pre-existing gameplay and mechanics, set in a psychological horror
2
narrative/background. The gameplay, mechanics, and the game itself weren’t psychological horror. This left
me unsatisfied and prompted me to ask
What is psychological horror gameplay? What is psychological horror simply in terms of game mechanics?
I don’t mean a traditional game set in a psychological horror narrative background, I mean the very
mechanic itself is the horror - not just the narrative it is set in.
In an attempt to answer this question, I set out to deconstruct the movies, games, and media that elicited this
particular emotion and feeling in me, so that I can learn from those structures and build my own
psychological horror game and gameplay.
Inspiration
Over the span of the last 10 years, there were a lot of movies, and the media-inspired me. I watched and
deconstructed how these stories work, so I can design a gameplay mechanic with a similar structure.
Fig. 1: Moodboard.
3
Out of all of them, there is a handful that most influenced this Thesis.
1. The Shining - Movie, 1980
Apart from arguably being one of the best horror movies of all time, what caught my attention was
Stanley Kubrick's set direction. I watched a video on the impossible architecture for the hotel that he
crafted in the movie through cinematography and set design. The floorplan of The Overlook hotel was not
linear, with staircases leading to nowhere, and seemingly entire hallways propping up where there was
previously a wall. I read that this was one of the ways that Kubrick tried to access the human subconscious
mind, and make the audience feel uncomfortable. This inspired me to explore the relationship between
Space and the emotions it evokes within us - conscious or subconscious.
Fig. 2: Screenshots from the architecture of The Shining.
Another aspect that stood out to me was how the hotel was treated as a character, as an abstract entity
feeding on people’s emotions, amplifying them, driving them mad, without their knowledge, and trapping
them there.
4
2. Triangle - Movie, 2009
Triangle was one of those movies like Inception, that I had to watch multiple times to understand. It presents
a depressing and cold reality of a character dealing with guilt, and how that guilt has trapped her in a
looping reality of constantly paying her dues.
Fig. 3: Screenshots from The Triangle.
The movie presents the audience with multiple versions of the protagonist, traveling through time, meeting
her past and future selves, and dealing with each of them trying to survive and escape a luxurious cruise
ship. The only way to escape is when a loop “resets” and the only way to “reset” a loop is to murder
everyone else (side characters who board the cruise ship with the protagonist).
Due to this logic, the protagonist often ends up having to confront her past and future selves, where they
present themselves as obstacles, constraints, and goals.
I liked the idea of guilt relating to a version of us from the past, and I wanted to translate that metaphor
into mechanics that the player interacts with - where you run into your past self, and your future self and
they serve as obstacles and goals for the current player.
This was further explored in a prototype. However, due to narrative scoping, I’ve had to remove this from
the final project of the Thesis. I elaborate on this prototype and it's narrative and design challenges in the
Gameplay section of the paper.
5
3. Naissance - Game, 2014
Inspired by The Shining, I decided to conduct a Directed Research Study on the relationship between
Spatial Forms and emotions. As part of this course, I analyzed the game - Naissance. It’s a purely spatial
experience, with some addition of music, light, and shadows. It is an on-rails narrative, with a bare minimum
story and worldbuilding.
Fig. 4: Screenshots of the game Naissance.
This game, in my opinion, is the purest form of spatial exploration in a video game form. It has been
reduced to its absolute core and is simply a spatial exploration. The game has some themes of timed
interaction, to gate and force the player into doing certain actions, however, these hardly present
themselves as difficult obstacles and do not take away from the spatial experience.
One of the things I liked about this game is also its shortcoming (subjectively speaking). The lack of a
narrative, while highlighting and emphasizing the spatial experience, made the choices in the game feel
inconsequential. My failures and successes did not seem to have any gravity within the world, and
therefore I (subjectively) did not feel any positive or negative consequences for my actions or inactions.
I took from this game the beautiful spatial perception and wanted to add a heavy narrative to it.
6
4. Outlast - Game, 2013
Fig. 5: Screenshots of the Outlast.
Keeping with the theme of minimal and specific concepts in games, Outlast is a game where the player can
do just one thing - run. The game is a classic, and the narrative relies heavily on classic horror tropes such
as psychiatric hospitals, asylum, and science fiction. It is a survival horror game where all you do is run
around in complete darkness and manage your batteries while trying to avoid being hunted by what are
essentially zombies (or more specifically, people who have been experimented on and turned into mindless
zombies). I loved the simplicity of it and how it makes for such a good horror experience, with so few
mechanics to build on.
7
After deconstructing and analyzing these pieces of media, I was able to isolate a few common design
elements and parameters:
- The movies are of the psychological horror genre, however, they are linear, on-rails experiences.
The narrative implications may provide some passive interactivity, but not an interactive experience.
- The games all had traditional and simple mechanics that built on existing ones, while (some) setting
the gameplay in a narrative that is psychological horror. Their gameplay itself was very simple - running,
navigating, shooting or a combination and variation thereof.
- When I strip these games of their narrative backgrounds, they are no longer psychologically
horrifying.
I wanted to challenge this existing design trend in horror games. Can there be a gameplay mechanic that
sufficiently and specifically explores psychological horror?
Hence, I decided to borrow from the two movies - The Shining and the Triangle, to design a gameplay
mechanic that works as psychologically horrifying. Over the last two years, this culminated into two series
of prototypes for the mechanics.
8
Prototypes
1. Spatial Narratives
In the Directed Research course, and during the Pre-production phase of the Thesis, I explored what space
means, the emotion it evokes, and how manipulating it affects player experience in virtual environments. In
this pursuit, I was able to distinguish between two main concepts - static space and dynamic space. Along
with these concepts, I also studied how form, shape, volume, texture, scale, sequencing, etc play a critical
role in crafting a spatial experience.
Fig. 6: Screenshots from the final project from my Directed Research course - Spatial Narratives.
This directed research was about exploring space and its relation with emotion.
Studying space allowed me to design my first game mechanic - Architectural and Non-Linear Level
Progression.As with The Shining, I wanted the architecture around the player to feel alive, as if it were
constantly trying to trap the player, and new pathways and corridors were being opened up and closed,
beyond the control of the player. Therefore, on certain player actions, specific areas of the level open up
and loop back into the same corridor. This is designed in a way to make it seem like the player has
uncovered a new region and a hope for escape, however, it leads the player back through a loop, which,
through sequencing of space, indicates the idea that there is no real exit to the hotel.
From this prototype, I learned to deliberately design spaces that evoked a certain emotion. I used this
knowledge to design the hotel in a manner that it evoked emotions of fear, dread, anxiety and
vulnerability.
9
2. Agency Shift and Character Recording
Borrowing directly from The Triangle, I wanted the player to be able to see their past selves, interact with
them, treat them as obstacles to their objective and goals. This meant recording the player's actions, and
replaying them through an AI, while also having an independent AI system to behave differently to
encountering the player. I also try to extend this same system, to project the future version of the player
and the player's actions. The goal was to emulate the moments from the movie The Triangle, where the
protagonist holds up a gun against her past self - a reality she lived just a few moments ago.
The narrative implications of such a system were very exciting to figure out. Asking the question, what
would happen to the “story” if we met our past selves, and were able to interact with them as if they were
an NPC. The main mechanic here is the ability to switch player controls from the current protagonist to the
past or future versions of the protagonist, allowing them to be either obstacles to run from, or goals to
chase.
Fig. 7: Screenshots of the Character switching Prototype.
This gave me the second mechanic I wanted to design - past, present, and future ghosts.
This meant that the gameplay would be unique for every single playthrough. Since the “obstacles” for the
player will be crafted by themselves, as they’re playing “against” their past selves, I believed this would
sufficiently confound the player, and would sufficiently encapsulate what psychological horror would mean.
This provides for procedural gameplay, which I believe lends itself to the concept of psychological horror in
the sense that its procedural gameplay can provide personalized, unique, and new interactions that would
probably never occur again.
With prototypes and worldbuilding done, the next step was to concretely quantify and summarize these
ideas into project goals and objectives.
10
Objectives
The initial motivation was to craft a psychological horror mechanic that is supported by the game, narrative
and level design.
I had two prototypes of two mechanics that were explorations of psychological horror. To support these
mechanics, I wrote a story and designed a nonlinear level so the effects of spatial configuration - both
static and dynamic can be emphasized or utilized to best bring the mechanics to bear.
All these three (mechanic, level design, and narrative), in their unique combination of sequence/montage of
visuals/interactions together form the emotional metaphor.
An emotional metaphor is a mapping of a psychological structure of how we process a certain emotion, to
a combination of sequence/montage of visuals/interactions/mechanics or aspects of the experience. This
unique combination parallels the sequence of how our minds deal with these emotions.
To summarize the project’s objectives:
Audience Experience Goals
The audience will feel dread, disempowerment, and vulnerability as they try to escape the Hotel
and the manifestations of the player character’s repressed guilt.
Design Goals
To design a non-linear level design to convey a responsive and changing architecture.
To design a novel game mechanic that adequately induces psychological horror.
Possible Audience
The possible audience is people who enjoy horror games where the player is at the mercy of the
world and is often vulnerable facing extreme odds beyond their control, where all the possible outcomes
are bad.
In summary, the game design of the Thesis can be summarized as in the following diagram.
1. Psychological Horror: Designer Intent. This is the intent that I as the designer have in mind for the
experience.
2. Mechanics: The Psychological Horror Design intent influenced the mechanics, which I explored
through the series of prototypes embodying spatial narratives and character switching.
3. Non Linear Level Progression: The mechanics of the spatial narrative prototypes influences the non
linear level progression.
4. Narrative: These three aspects of design, the Psychological Horror, the Mechanics and the Non
Linear Level Progression were supported by a narrative that I wrote specifically to meet these
needs.
5. Emotional Metaphors: The sequences/montage of these elements - Mechanics, Non Linear Level
Progression and Narrative together form the emotional metaphor, which achieves the designer
intent of Psychological Horror Gameplay.
11
The following is a flow diagram of how these elements influence the others and come together to craft an
emotional metaphor.
Fig. 8: Game Design Flow - How the designer intent of Psychological Horror influences all components of
the game.
12
As I love logical puzzles set in a narrative context, I needed to set these mechanics in an appropriate
narrative background, with a strong character arc and story that best supported the gameplay mechanic
and the non-linear level design. This allows for the designers to add weight to the player's actions and the
following consequences.
Narrative, Progression and Levels
The story for this thesis came out of an older script I had written for the Introduction to Interactive Writing -
CTWR 518 course. During one of the assignments, I was studying Kurt Vonnegut’s (rejected) Thesis - Shapes
of Stories
1
. I wanted to adapt and write a story that followed one of these propositions put forth by him.
Kurt Vonnegut's Thesis Shapes of Stories showed us that stories have a structure that evoke a deep sense of
familiarity within the human mind - conscious or subconscious. The following structures resonate with us and
the stories that conform to these structures are popular or are widely written and consumed. This is
(probably) because there’s a part of the human mind, a deep rooted system of perception of events that
resonates with these structures.
Fig. 9: An illustration showing the different emotional arcs of stories from Kurt Vonnegut’s thesis.
Designed by Maya Eilam
1
Shapes of Stories - Kurt Vonnegut.
13
Additional research on these archetypes of stories have been done by Andrew J. Reagan,1 Lewis Mitchell,
Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds, where they concluded that stories are
dominated by six basic shapes.
2
Fig. 10: A series of graphs from the paper mentioned, which plot the happiness levels of the audience
across various stories.
I felt that this deep-rooted psychological system is the key to writing a psychological horror game. As I
mentioned earlier, psychological horror deals with a very primitive and deep-rooted or low-level
functioning of the human subconscious mind, often called the Reptilian Brain. In a good psychological horror,
the conscious mind’s ability to perceive and comprehend the events is inadequate and overwhelmed, or
limited, and the subconscious resonates with a primitive sense of fear and horror that makes us want to
escape or run. The mind does not suggest fighting in this situation, because the judgment and analysis from
our conscious mind tell us that fighting will not even be remotely effective because we can’t even fully
comprehend the threat.
I found this aspect fit aptly with the “From Bad to Worse” arc in Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Stories.
2
The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.07772.pdf
14
These structures or shapes of stories also parallel the Kübler-Ross model of grief. I came across this concept
in another game that adapted this into a mobile puzzle game - Duet.
Kübler-Ross Model of Grief
The Kübler-Ross Model of Grief
3
suggests that humans undergo a varying number of emotions and
emotional states when dealing with loss i.e. the emotion of grief.
Here are the stages of the human mind’s processing of grief
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Depression
4. Bargaining
5. Acceptance
Fig. 11: Kübler - Ross Model of Grief
It was later revised to mention that these stages do not need to occur in the specified sequence and can
occur in varying degrees, varying durations, and different order. Although initially theorized as a model
analyzing how humans dealt with the loss of a person in their life, it was later extended to the general
idea of dealing with the loss of any kind - person, situation, job, house, limbs, material possessions, lifestyle,
state of mind, etc. It was also later extended to the concept of dealing with any repressed motion. In this
case, repressed guilt.
3
Kübler-Ross Model of Grief - https://www.psy.lmu.de/allg2/download/audriemmo/ws1011/kubler-ross.pdf
15
Therefore, putting these ideas of the “Bad to Worse” story arc, and the Kübler-Ross model of grief
together, I wrote a story in the Interactive Writing Class about repressed guilt of willful ignorance. I
originally wanted to make this about humankind’s wilful ignorance of its abuse of the planet. However, as it
was out of scope to make such a generalized game, I decided to portray a similar situation through the
struggle of one character born into an abusive relationship, being ignorant to the abuse, and how that
abuse bred repressed guilt that later haunts them.
I merged the Kübler-Ross model with the “Bad to Worse” story arc to craft the following level progression
and emotional arc for the Thesis:
Fig. 12: Emotions and their corresponding level progressions.
While the story begins with the player trapped in the hotel, they subsequently find that they’re trapped in
there with their repressed guilt, and facing it is the only way out.
With the hope of a sense of agency, the player is given a chance to undo their mistake in the past, only to
realize that they were being subjected to reliving the same event, over and over, with no option to fix their
past. The only option after that is to accept their state in the hotel, and accept their eternal imprisonment -
temporally and spatially.
The level structure is broken down as follows
1. Level 1: Ignorance
a. The player character is unaware of the foreboding tribulation that they’re about to be
subject to.
2. Shock
a. The player character gets a glimpse of the horror present in the hotel.
3. Denial
16
a. The player character hides from the horror, denying its existence and carrying on with their
objectives, remaining oblivious to it. This works for a while until the player realizes that
their denial is making the entity stronger and only trapping them deeper in the hotel.
4. Confrontation - Thesis
a. Players must choose to actively and voluntarily confront their guilt by paying attention to
it. This is when the player character realizes that this horror is personal, and stems from
their past. This is the scope of the digital component of the thesis that is playable.
5. Regret
a. Amidst the agony, the player is given a choice to undo their past and fix everything.
6. Depression
a. They realize that this hope was misplaced and that no matter how hard they try, their past
and their guilt still exist and haunts them, regardless of how many times they undid it.
7. Acceptance
a. They accept the reality of their past.
8. Resolution
a. They willingly accept their present and their future, of being eternally trapped in the
hotel, forced to deal with their past and their future, over and over.
Since it was out of scope to work on all the levels, I have had to decide to work on simply one level,
instead of all or multiple of these. The level I chose to work on is the tail end of Denial and the Beginning
of the Confrontation stage.
The next step after having made the prototypes and writing the script was to do some basic world-building
and art direction for the project.
17
Art Direction
The world building of the project was undertaken to fully immerse the player in the virtual world.
Fig. 13: Art Direction Research of the Hotel interior.
Fig. 14: Art Direction Research of the Hotel’s exterior features.
18
Fig. 15: Art Direction Research of the Topology of surrounding landscape.
As a precursor to the entire project, I believed it important to do some and research about the world we
are going to build. This helped me establish the design goals and parameters of the world. As I build more
elaborate and complex systems, the research allowed me to art direct the world and make informed
decisions later on. The result of this research was a brief description of the hotel and the world around it.
With prototypes in hand, a narrative is written out, world-building, and art direction are done, I then set
out to work on the gameplay.
19
Gameplay
After multiple prototypes and playtests, I realized that a few decisions needed to be made.
As I mentioned before, the Thesis only covers the section of the arc where the player deals with denial and
confrontation - more specifically, where the player graduates from denial to the confrontation stage.
Therefore, after spending some months prototyping and playtesting, I realized that the game cannot have
one standard mechanic, and would benefit greatly from having smaller, micromechanics specific to each
level that embodies/encapsulate that particular level/stage of the arc. This would be in service of the
emotional metaphor being presented at that particular level.
It was in favor of this micromechanics that I decided to not remove the character recording and switching
mechanic. These micro mechanics gave me more control as a designer to brainstorm, prototype, and
implement specific sequences in the game that allows for emphasizing the emotional metaphor.
An example of an emotional metaphor is the sequence of hiding from an unknown entity that causes fear,
and confronting the entity, paralleling the psychological structure of denial where we ignore or avoid
certain situations or thoughts that we are afraid to deal with.
Therefore, I needed to craft a mechanic that “felt” in its structure like denial and confrontation.
These were the goals for the psychological horror mechanic.
Since we’re dealing with Denial and Confrontation, the micro mechanic for these evolved as follows.
For this thesis, I defined Denial as the act of actively ignoring something that is otherwise in the course of
encountering. As in, the player actively chooses to ignore or to hide from facing something that is in the
path of their encounter in the game. This definition lends itself to the idea of stealth where the player must
hide from entities to accomplish tasks. A personification of this idea then became the entity, which is a
manifestation of the player character’s denial. Therefore, the stealth gameplay worked well for this stage,
as the player actively avoids the entity, and runs away from it, denying what it represents - their guilt.
Then came the idea of confronting it, and I needed something that the player can do “actively” rather than
passively, that embodies what confrontation means. This took the form of light being the metaphor for
attention.
Therefore, the player attaints different objects that cast light, and this light signifies the player’s attention.
These resources are limited and need to be searched and obtained by the player.
The gameplay then became an extension of the traditional survival horror genre mechanic. The
psychological horror came from the idea of hiding from the entity and confronting it with objects of light,
which signify the player’s attention and what they choose to pay attention to.
20
The entire gameplay is broken down into smaller units of gameplay verbs and moments, built on traditional
survival horror mechanics such as:
1. Pick Up/Collect Objects - consumables/usables.
2. Interact with Objects - consumables/usables (food, drink, batteries, etc), table lamp, switches,
doors, etc.
3. Stealth and Chase - Hide from other characters, chase them and/or run from them.
As an extension to these traditional mechanics, I added the emotional metaphors in the game, which in this
case became: :
- Running from entity - denial
- Sneaking up on an entity and shining light on it - confrontation.
While these mechanics in themselves are not psychologically terrifying, taken in sequence and context with
the narrative and the previous and following beats, it becomes clear that this action has more meaning to it
than just gameplay progression. For example, to emphasize the aspect of confrontation, the player is
forced to deal with the entity that keeps chasing them. On successfully dealing with them by shining a light
on them, the entity then drops a flashlight, which then allows the player to use the flashlight to better
confront the entity in future instances. This kind of “gating” is one of the ways that the player is forced to
confront, and subsequently rewarded, to parallel the human mind’s ability to deal with recurring issues
through agency and deliberate confrontation.
I hence decided to push some of the psychological aspects into an on-rails narrative. This design decision
was made due to time constraints and I hence opted for the on-rails version instead of the emergent
gameplay. This allowed for more control of gameplay and progression of gameplay moments.
Mention Gating here.
The thesis has a non-linear level progression, as inThe level progression changes depending on the player’s
actions - however, this is not responsive and is more of an on-rails gated experience. As in, the level is
locked off and made to seem like it is complete, however, as the player does a specific action, walls
disappear and reveal a hallway where it previously was a dead end.
This provides for a non-linear progression since the player cannot be sure whether a wall is truly a
dead-end or not. However, it is not dynamic.
I expand in the next section about the various challenges with dynamic non-linearity in levels.
However, the design goal was achieved since the goal was non-linearity, not necessarily dynamic.
I pushed the psychological horror aspect of the game into the narrative, rather than solely the mechanic.
This was particularly a hard decision to make, as I challenged myself with this exact design question - a
psychological horror mechanic, which stands alone as a mechanic that is sufficiently psychologically
horrifying. However, as I learned more about the process, I have had to adapt to a slightly different game
flow.
21
The experienced goal is achieved not solely through the gameplay mechanic but the sequence of the
conceptual, visual, mental, and/or narrative montages that parallel the emotional stage of denial and
confrontation. It is a halfway point between fully emergent and fully scripted.
One of the goals of designing a novel game mechanic that adequately conveys the feeling of
psychological horror, within a new environment, was out of scope, hard and time consuming.
While the game doesn’t have a novel mechanic, the experience goal is achieved. And in this process, I’ve
come to realize why bigger games tend to do this as well.
Here are some screenshots of the final game, where the player is performing a number of different tasks.
Fig. 16: Screenshots of final game.
22
Challenges
The single most important challenge in this project is confusion or the lack of ability to confuse players in
video games. Psychological horror relies heavily on overwhelming the audience, with unknown information,
and/or relying on keeping the audience in the dark. While it works great for movies, these
experiences/moments are huge contributors to player disengagement. Especially, or even more so when the
game mechanic fails to convey these moments. Players tend to feel like they don’t understand, or don’t get
it, or that they’re doing something wrong, and then disengage. Mechanics are how a player communicates
and interacts with the game, and if we make the player feel overwhelmed, confused, and/or too scared
due to just that, they very quickly stop playing because their investment doesn’t feel rewarded or
acknowledged. Most games solve this through mystery and curiosity.
Following are more specific issues.
1. Game Design Challenge
Crafting a Universal/Standard Mechanic was particularly hard for a narrative-driven game. This was my
initial hunch. I think now, had I pushed harder on this, and sacrificed some narrative/story elements, I might
have had a bit more progress in the case of crafting a novel psychological horror mechanic.
However, having a universal mechanic would have not been novel. It would’ve been harder to convey the
emotional metaphor, through a universal mechanic that works for all emotions. Had I still ran with it, It
would’ve made my game comparable, like Outlast or Naissance, where the story is given in bits and pieces,
in between sections of just gameplay. I didn’t want my game to feel this disconnected or separated.
Hence, I went with an intermediate where the emotional metaphor is a result of multiple factors from
gameplay mechanics, narrative and level design that come together to form it and hence provide the
psychological horror part of the game.
What this means is that interactivity is a very broad, yet limited field. There are several things games do
very well, that have been tried and tested, and many things that videogames are a bad medium for.
For example, games do the following very well: navigating, shooting, racing, fighting(combat), building,
puzzle-solving (of a certain specific kind). All of these provide quick, immediate feedback for actions. This
was perhaps one field/place that I think I should’ve investigated, before trying to craft a psychological
horror mechanic.
Games are particularly a bad medium for the following: slow burn, non-linear puzzles, abstract and/or
novel gameplay combined with abstract/psychological horror, etc.
That’s sort of what I spent a good number of months trying to figure out.
I realize that I could’ve made my life a whole lot easier if I chose some kind of
existing/traditional/off-shoot of traditional game mechanics early on in the development process. This
would’ve made me think about what each stage of the character arc meant, through the filter of a
particular mechanic.
23
This would’ve been so much easier to make. But this is exactly what I wanted to avoid. I didn’t want the
game to be where the Psychological horror is only a theme/background, built on top of
existing/traditional gameplay such as puzzles, or shooting, or navigation, etc. I wanted this to be where the
mechanic itself is psychologically horrifying.
Another challenge was to balance too many new/novel mechanics and systems. Seeing previous selves and
shifting maps strain and overwhelm the player. Additionally, having a very dark environment made
everything a lot more confusing and irrelevant.
If we break down each mechanic concerning its gameplay implications, the challenges become very clear.
The following questions were some of the reasons why this mechanic did not make it to the final game.
1. Character switching/Agency Shift.
i. What does it mean for the narrative for the player to switch their control from one player
character to another?
ii. What happens to the past self? What happens to the future self? Even if they become
AI-controlled entities who perform scripted events and actions, what does it mean narratively to
see a future version act in the world?
iii. Can/does the player just follow them? If so - what does this mean in terms of story?
iv. Cannot solve time logic because it is literally impossible.
It is difficult to contextualize procedural/emergent gameplay moments within a narrative - as there are far
too many emergent variations to contextualize. It is even harder with continuous non-turn-based systems
where everything happens continuously rather than in discrete moments/increments.
2. Changing architecture/Non Linear Level Design
a. The player is already unfamiliar with the new environment. Changing the map will confuse the
player further by disorienting them. I realized this was not the experience goal I wanted in this
prototype. Although it is something I want at a different point in the game, doing this early on in
the game makes the player disengage and not understand what’s happening.
2. Narrative Issues
As this is a narrative-driven game - every choice/action/event needs to be contextualized within the
narrative. The movies work because of their linearity - the audience can watch it, rewatch it, and not be
prompted to act - therefore their confusion, while impacting and influencing their perception of the story,
does not hinder their future action of continuing to engage in and consume the media.
The movie can continuously, in varying or increasing intensities and complexities, confuse, overwhelm, and
challenge the audience, and yet keep them engaged in the consumption of the media - since it doesn’t
require the audience to act on anything. This however obviously has a threshold and is a delicate and fine
line to balance. It is important to know when to cross it to give the optimal horror experience to the
audience.
In games, this threshold is very, very low. Since the consumer/audience/player is prompted to act and
interact with the world around them. Therefore, confusing them with a confusing/difficult to perceive
24
mechanic (which in this example I assume to be ideally psychologically horror), and prompting them to act,
makes the players not know what to do and subsequently disengage.
This is counterproductive as it results in disengagement quickly. No matter how captivating and engaging
other elements of the game - art, sound, etc are if the interactivity does not make sense to the player, the
player will disengage quickly and be left unsatisfied.
This may be why the two games - Naissance and Outlast are so simple in their mechanics - navigation and
running. These games successfully push the abstractness and the horror into the narrative background and
sustain the interactivity through simple mechanics.
Possible Solutions
Several games come to mind when I think about how other games successfully achieved their psychological
horror goals.
The single most important learning I can take away from this experience is to learn to stand on the
shoulders of giants.
These games rely on simple existing game mechanics and introduce horror at a later point in their
gameplay. They do not introduce a novel mechanic, or two novel mechanics, within the realm of
psychological horror.
One such game that comes to mind is Doki-Doki Literature Club, a graphic novel dating simulation game.
This game has a huge advantage - it’s a narrative game. But, it works by showing the player that it is a
simple graphic novel game and then introduces darker themes and concepts through the narrative, which
then achieves the experience goal.
What I can learn from this is to keep the interactivity simple, and build it on existing game mechanics and
traditions. Then, once sufficiently established, introduce the concepts of horror and the player. This however
takes a long, long time - something that was out of scope for the thesis.
Other games that successfully implement procedural elements in gameplay, while also incorporating
emergent gameplay are Shadow of War, Shadow of Mordor, and Alien: Isolation.
These games have elements in their gameplay that are significantly influenced by the player’s actions. In
the Shadow series, the games build on the player’s actions and craft narratives on top of it. They do
conform to a set of constraints, yet still offer novel gameplay, building on top of existing combat mechanics.
This is of course supported by in-game Artificial Intelligence. In Alien: Isolation, the AI of the antagonist
learns over the course of the gameplay and successfully overpowers the player. This is yet again supported
by a learning algorithm within the game.
25
Overall Reflection/Conclusion
I fell into the same issues a lot of horror games did. I still want to overcome and solve them. However, as a
designer, it was important for me to learn to prioritize and know what to do and what to set for the future.
In this process, I’ve learned a few things.
I spent a significant amount of project time, trying to build an architecturally perfect procedural hotel. I
believed that to sufficiently immerse the player and convince them of a living hotel, I needed the spatial
configurations to be as logical and realistic as they are in the real world. This however never made it into
the game, as there were far too many things to design within a hotel. I hence had to partially manually
design the level. However, I did learn a very important lesson.
Procedural content production is probably best for puzzle-based games or games with recurring or
standard gameplay. It is not suited for developing heavily narrative-based gameplay. This is because one
of the strong suits of procedural generation is the ability to create a large amount of content and its
variations. For story-oriented games, this is unnecessary because the story requires specific moments that
don’t repeat or recur. Unless of course, the story is repetitive, which is a different use case and might work.
However, for linear storytelling, this is not suited.
To successfully implement this within a game is a full-time project in itself. In hindsight, dealing with game
design, tech implementation, art direction, and level design and everything else was ambitious.
However, this is one of those rare chances professionally where I can get to do what I want on a project.
Hence, I wanted to sufficiently explore and answer a major question - what do I want my career to be
based in.
Through the course of this project, I realized that I love to work in a procedural field. While game design
and other aspects of art excite me, I derive the most satisfaction from understanding the procedural nature
of the world around us and implementing them in interactive environments.
This is what I want to do for a career. Procedural design, Worldbuilding, Breaking down and understanding
systems in the world, Converting them to procedural systems that we can interact with, Learning the
underlying rules of the world.
26
References
1. Movies
1.1. The Shining (1980),Written by Stephen King, Directed by Stanley Kubrick,
1.2. The Triangle (2009), Written and Directed by Christopher Smith
2. Games
2.1. Naissance (2014), Developed and Published by Limasse Five
2.2. Outlast (2013), Developed and Published by Red Barrels
3. Works Cited
3.1. Shapes of Stories, Kurt Vonnegut, February 2004,
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php
and https://ed.ted.com/best_of_web/ZG7Q2obA
3.2. The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes, Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis
Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds, June 2016
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304469919_The_emotional_arcs_of_stories_a
re_dominated_by_six_basic_shapes
3.3. On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross -Ross,MD (Discussant) Stanford Wessler, MD,
and Louis V. Avioli, MD (Editors), July 1972 -
https://www.psy.lmu.de/allg2/download/audriemmo/ws1011/kubler-ross.pdf
27

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Asset Metadata

Creator Rajendiran, Roahith (author)

Core Title Harvest: first person psychological horror game

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Degree Conferral Date 2021-05

Publication Date 05/09/2021

Defense Date 04/15/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 3D,first person,game,horror,immersive,interactive,Kübler-Ross Model,media,OAI-PMH Harvest,psychological,videogame

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kratky, Andreas (committee chair), Bilson, Danny (committee member), Fullerton, Tracy (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member)

Creator Email roahithraj@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112720111

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Rights Rajendiran, Roahith

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