{"id":14800113,"date":"2016-04-07T07:17:50","date_gmt":"2016-04-07T07:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=14800113"},"modified":"2016-04-07T07:17:50","modified_gmt":"2016-04-07T07:17:50","slug":"virtual-haunted-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=14800113","title":{"rendered":"Virtual Haunted Houses"},"content":{"rendered":"

My daughter, a second grader, loves ghosts and zombies and Halloween. \u00a0We read Grimm fairytales together and she is now old enough to enjoy films like\u00a0Ghostbusters<\/em>. \u00a0It is to my considerable delight that she is not easily phased by the macabre.<\/p>\n

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This place is legit.<\/p><\/div>\n

But last summer I made the mistake of taking her to a haunted house in Eiga-mura, a theme park in Kyoto\u00a0that looks like a samurai movie film set. \u00a0Almost every haunted house I’ve ever been to has been something of a disappointment, but this one was incredibly well done. \u00a0It’s a bit like stepping into a\u00a0Fatal Frame<\/em> level, complete with dilapidated tori gate and women with long hair in white funeral garb. \u00a0It was way scarier than I expected, and way beyond what a reasonable parent should expose a second-grader to. \u00a0My daughter lost it after the first jump scare and I had to carry her the rest of the way. \u00a0A significant investment in ice cream was made immediately thereafter.<\/p>\n

The most effective thing about the Eiga-mura haunted house is that it is free of hokey animatronics and plastic skeletons. \u00a0It’s dark, it has a well-made set, and it employs actual humans to run up behind you and scream bloody murder. \u00a0This is like the ultimate pop-out scare because it’s literally a person popping out of a hidden door, dressed in all sorts of scary makeup, yelling at the top of their lungs. \u00a0I don’t care how stone cold you think you are, that shit is startling.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of this parenting fail the other day while playing some horror games in VR. \u00a0Since\u00a0Dead Secret<\/a><\/em> is a VR game, I’ve spent some time playing other VR horror titles to see what the state of the industry is like. \u00a0Most of these games are just experiments, little vignettes designed to explore one aspect of VR horror. \u00a0I like the way\u00a0Dreadhalls<\/em> plays with perception by moving things when you aren’t looking at them. \u00a0I like how\u00a0Alone<\/em> forces you to focus on one spot and then makes sure you know things are happening behind you. \u00a0And\u00a0Alien: Isolation<\/em> was the VR experience that convinced me that the medium had finally arrived<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Pretty much just like this.<\/p><\/div>\n

But a lot of the horror games I’ve seen in VR boil down to virtual versions of that haunted house in Kyoto. \u00a0A convincing environment\u00a0that you wander through, followed by a screaming monster that comes out of nowhere and gets all up in your face. \u00a0Some of these “virtual haunted houses” are really well done in terms of art and sound production. \u00a0A few of them even try to do interesting things to ratchet the tension up before the inevitable jump scare. \u00a0And if you had any questions about the effectiveness of this sort of scare, there are a thousand YouTube videos of people screaming their guts out. \u00a0If you want to make a virtual haunted house, now’s the time.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’m a jaded cynic, but I find all of these virtual haunted house games to be terrifically boring. \u00a0I thought about it for a while, and I think the main reason is that there’s just nothing to them beyond the immediate experience. \u00a0Like a real haunted house there is no story, no characters, nothing to really work the brain. \u00a0Just dark hallways and women with bleeding eyes lunging from the occasional nook or cranny. \u00a0To me, this is the simplest, safest form of horror you could possibly make. \u00a0These titles remind me of the types of games Richard Rouse III has called\u00a0“empty calories,” the interactive\u00a0equivalents of junk food. \u00a0While satisfying in the short term, they have no real value or longevity. \u00a0They don’t tackle the problems that make horror a difficult genre to do well.<\/p>\n

With so many developers now working on horror projects in VR, I wish that more of them would tackle those hard problems. \u00a0Haunted houses are great, but they are short, shallow affairs. \u00a0Given the powerful feeling of presence that VR affords, it seems like a missed opportunity to use it for pop-out scare factories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My daughter, a second grader, loves ghosts and zombies and Halloween. \u00a0We read Grimm fairytales together and she is now old enough to enjoy films like\u00a0Ghostbusters. \u00a0It is to my considerable delight that she is not easily phased by the macabre. But last summer I made the mistake of taking her to a haunted house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14800113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","category-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14800113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14800113"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14800113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14800116,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14800113\/revisions\/14800116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14800113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14800113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14800113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}