Phenomenology

      One of the games that I have found makes you extremely aware of your body, is Alien: Isolation. I think that this effect is fairly typical of the horror genre, but especially so within this game.

      As the ‘action’ as it were gets more intense and you get more and more adrenalin going through your body, your breathing gets harder and faster. This is a huge problem in this stealth horror-survival game as there is a setting in which you can turn on your microphone, allowing the AI humans and Aliens to hear you if you make too much noise. While this mechanic isn’t intrinsic into the game, if you are playing with a gaming headset on and the setting turned on, then the experience of being onboard a collapsing space station, being quite literally stalked through the run-down areas by an Alien that is stronger, faster and has an acute sense of hearing becomes all the more terrifying.

      I think when games passively make you aware of yourself, they immerse you into the gameworld so much more than if you were to interact with the game via touchscreen or through a camera system like the kinect, especially when that game is set in the first person, making you believe that the character’s emotive state is your own as you get drawn into the terror of being chased by something that you can hear crawling around the map above you, while also being able to hear you if you move too quickly, or if you are foolish enough to knock something in the environment over.