Until Dawn

Paralysing Fear: Player Agency Parameters in Horror Games

"Paralysing Fear" examines how horror games manipulate player agency, arguing that the experience of fear in these games depends on carefully calibrated constraints and affordances rather than on content alone.

• Horror in games is produced less by content than by calibrated constraints and affordances that restrict or open up what the player can do, and the report proposes an Agency Parameter Model to analyse this.
• The model organises agency into three hierarchically arranged categories: Player Character Parameters (physical and psychological), System Parameters (technical and material), and Player Parameters, all encapsulated by Staging.
• The framework was built from hands-on play, fieldnotes, and recordings of six horror titles, including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Dead Space, and Until Dawn, and is grounded in qualitative humanistic analysis.