Dynamic Lighting for Tension in Games - Review

These next few blog posts are going to be on articles I have yet to right up about. This first one is about lighting in games to create tension.

Link:

http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/elnasr_niedenthal_knez_almeida_zupko

While many lighting principles can be borrowed from film and theatre lighting design theories, the interactive nature of games distinguishes them substantially from film and theatre. Game environments are dynamic and unpredictable due to the interactive freedom afforded to users within the world, thus narrative context, users’ positions and perspectives within the gameworld-crucial parameters to the calculation of lighting-cannot be assumed.

- Lighting becomes much more complex when designing it for game levels

One key way in which survival horror games create their emotional effect is by maintaining a state of player vulnerability, often by suspending the player in a state of incomplete knowledge. The perceptual conditions for this state of vulnerability are enhanced through visual obscurity. Obscurity supports a sense of vulnerability (uncertainty) and is thrilling because it is makes the object of terror indistinct. It should be noted that the opposite of obscurity is not light, but clarity; thus, obscurity can be produced by anything that thwarts clear perception: darkness, atmospheric phenomena (such as fog) or occlusion (blocking by architectural objects).

- 'Vulnerability' is something I keep coming across - key feature for tension in games. Obscurity in game is also important. I may look into fog within my environment, to enhance the atmosphere.

Personal Notes

It is clear that when reading these articles, I am only finding little bits that are of any real use to me. This is because they go extremely deep into their specific research that it is far too unnecessary for me to go that far when I am looking into something different. However these articles are giving me some bits of useful information and reading.