TORONTO – You’re pumping your shotgun over and over, downing zombies one after the other. Suddenly, a hand reaches out from behind you, grabbing you. You jump and turn around trying to take down the zombie behind you, but the hoard that you were trying to ward off overtakes you.
This isn’t training for the zombie apocalypse or a casting call for The Walking Dead, but it’s what many people find themselves doing in front of their television sets. And it turns out we love it.
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Video games, in particular scary ones, are a billion dollar industry. From games like Resident Evil to Dead Space to Silent Hill to Call of Duty: Zombies, sales continue to soar.
And a new study out of Indiana University’s Media school suggests that these video games are just another medium where we enjoy getting scared.
Their study, which was published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media surveyed 269 college students in 2013 about their experiences with several video games including Resident Evil and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
“It was interesting to see how the fright reactions that people had, how the emotional experiences that they were having, differed from those reported with non-interactive media,” said Ph.D. student Teresa Lynch who conducted the research alongside assistant professor Nicole Martins. “There a lot more of these anxious feelings … and an enjoyment of that fear.”
Almost half of the students surveyed — 44.1 per cent — said they enjoyed feeling scared.
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“Maybe the enjoyment comes from the fact that you’re getting this rush, knowing that no harm is really going to come to you,” Martins said.
The researchers said that this helps to explain why people continue to play these types of games when they can in fact be so horrifying.
But it’s not just horror games that gave us pleasure; first-person shooting games accounted for a third of games that scared us.
The study also found that men reported playing and enjoying games that were more frightening compared to women. However, how often they experienced fear was equal to that of women.
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