Game design considerations of phobias

There was a twitter thread a few days ago that ultimately got deleted because too many people made uncharitable reads of it. The underlying idea was a bit interesting though. I wanted to riff on it, and twitter's not a good place for that. So here's some unorganizeed thoughts.

The underlying idea was just wondering whether games that have well-known phobia-associated things in them (e.g. spiders) explicitly consider whether their game needs to have such elements, or could use something else.

Despite a recent post, I have done some game design.. and such a thought never entered my thinking. But I'm not a designer. Would Romero consider it? There's a spider in Doom. It didn't need to be there. Did he consider it in the context of arachnophobia existing? I doubt it... Others in the threads who have knowledge one way or another have brought up cases where it was considered, though. e.g. apparently Guild Wars 2 cut out a spider mount explicitly because of players with arachnophobia existing.

I think part of why the original idea was so lambasted was because there was an easy uncharitable read that designers should consider such things, and even more so, should cater to those with phobias! There wasn't that suggestion, but it's still an interesting idea to explore around.

First off, some ground facts: Exposure Therapy works. If someone has a debilitating fear of something, as opposed to a "healthy" / "normal" fear that most of us have with say spiders, then good news, they can be treated to be at least no worse off with that fear than a normal person. i.e. no longer let it debilitate them. The treatment is exposure therapy. (It's worth noting that there are methods to the therapy: not following a proper method of gradual exposure but throwing them in the proverbial deep end of maximum intensity and telling them to deal with it or grow a thicker skin is incredibly cruel.)

Second fact, there isn't good evidence supporting trigger or content warnings being useful for their proclaimed benefits. Doing useless things is generally a bad thing, so think twice if you're going to bother with such a warning.

I'd have to re-review that meta-study but I don't think any of the studies they considered were in the context of video games. Video games are different from books, articles, and movies. If a movie says: trigger warning, next scene contains spiders, and you really want to avoid seeing them, then you can just skip the next scene (evidence suggests you won't, but still). If the movie didn't warn you, and you suddenly see some spiders, you can turn off the movie or skip to the next scene.

If a game has spiders and you run into them, what can you do about it? You can turn it off, but more likely than not, that's it. You can't "skip" past them like you can in a movie or book. The only way forward is through. Unless the designer planned for this somehow, by offering an alternate path, or even an explicit no-spiders toggle. (I have seen something that had an option to replace spiders with flowers, I forget what it was.) If you're lucky, a modder has made a "no spiders mod" you can use.

So we have a suggestion: if you're going to bother with a content warning, maybe you should consider going the extra mile with a content toggle to make it functionally useful. A warning by itself does nothing to resolve the issue that they have to face the content to progress.

Such a warning or disclaimer can sometimes serve as non-obvious information, which isn't useless. The place for this warning is in the product description. If you know before you even pick up a game, or book, or movie, that it "contains spiders", you can make an informed choice to not invest any time in it at all.

Spiders are a particularly bad example though. Over-labeling is itself a cultural problem, you get things like "may contain nuts" in a jar of peanuts because of overly broad fears on nut allergies. If suddenly every horror game needs to have "may contain spiders", we've regressed further as a society. And it's even worse for games that don't strictly need spiders, but are likely to contain them anyway. The original thread mentioned Skyrim, for instance. But I think a reasonable consumer can look at Skyrim, notice it's got combat, notice it's got monsters, and conclude that it probably contains spiders. No content warnings necessary.

A less-obvious game might be an innocent looking visual novel about Japanese school life. But I still think spiders are kind of likely in that. The reason is that spiders are a great fear base, and monster base, going back through all human history in myths across all cultures. The reason for that is: spiders are real. Thus any game that tries to simulate some elements of a real world could reasonably be expected to "contain spiders" as part of that simulation. In the visual novel scenario, an obvious use would be a "joke" of some character scaring another by putting a spider on their desk. Totally unnecessary, makes up a tiny fraction of the game, but plausibly there because it's something that happens in reality.

So if your goal is to 100% avoid spiders you can't even trust such an innocent looking game. Maybe you can trust an abstract puzzle game? Unless a spider-like level layout is going to trigger you... And you know, some ostensibly advertised puzzle games like to throw a curveball towards the end where they become something else, and maybe that part contains spiders... Really, you can only play a game if you know it doesn't have spiders at all, and you can only know that if you have a trusted third party tell you that, or you mandate that all games everywhere are required to state "may contain spiders" or "contains trace elements of spiders" or simply "contains spiders" in their product packaging. The latter situation will never happen, and should never happen, for many reasons not least of which is that spiders-as-surprise will always be a desirable tool in a designer's toolkit. You don't want to have everything you'll experience in a game listed out before you play the game, if it's even possible; that's what playing the game is for.

Ultimately I think that, because phobias are entirely curable through exposure therapy, unlike allergies, as a culture we shouldn't give in to over-labeling and over-accommodating things out of concern for potential phobias. If seeing a spider is going to cause a nervous breakdown, sorry, that's a "you" problem, not a society problem.

Still, if a designer wants to accommodate such concerns, all the more power to them. Spiders, or whatever else it is (gore, nudity, suicide, food, language...), don't have to rise to the level of a clinical phobia that's debilitating to be worthy of consideration. People have different preferences on these things, and while a game can easily compromise its vision if it tries to cater to all, catering a bit to preference variation (perhaps even the variation of preferences in the designers themselves!) can make a product not just one that more people can enjoy, but one that's actually better overall. At the end of the day it's something like a "no spiders mod" that's already built-in, and mods that enable a player to play the game how they want to, not how the designer intended, are beautiful things that should be encouraged.

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Posted on 2024-10-04 by Jach

Tags: games, philosophy, psychology, rant, thought

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