Poll: Do Phobias Affect Your Gaming?

[Lotet]

Well I hate roaches (its not fear through its disgust) but in Fallout 3 the radroaches were pretty meh and also weak I always killed them unarmed so I never wasted bullets and weapon durability on them.

I guess my character had hes hands dirty with insect guts.

If you attacked them in V.A.T.S. with no weapons (even no unarmed skill) then you'll kill them with one stomp. no need to get your hands dirty.

I get grossed out by the thought of the Bloatfly's from Fallout, their ranged attack is actually an infestation bug that feeds on hosts till they mature and become more Bloatflys. I always get my companions to deal with them, thankfully their aggression radius is smaller than most enemies.

Wait, is that canon? Because if that's the case than most of my companions and I should be dead/infested.

I do hate the noise when they die though...

yeah, they had this PrepareForTheFuture.com thing which doesn't seem to be up any more. it described the enemies before the game was released.

here's the nonsense: the video is kind of boring/slow because of how the recorder interacted with the thingy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6uYCOAC7No&list=PL4CFA3B09FCF446C3&index=9
they "deliver a colony of maggot eggs into your belly"

 

[00slash00]

Anyway I'm curious OP...
Which game do you find more scary?

Skyrim with the realistic spiders mods? And lets say a mod to increase their spawn rates.
Or Amnesia: The dark descent?

I never played Amnesia, it didn't appeal to me that much so I just watched a playthrough of it, but I understand what you're asking. It's a very different kind of fear. A game like Amnesia, it's the kind of fear that makes the game tense in a fun way. With spiders it completely kills any enjoyment and makes me feel sick. In the most extreme case, I had incorrectly installed a " no spider" mod. I wasn't expecting any spiders to be in the game anymore so when I got ambushed by a group of spiders, I had a small panic attack. I had trouble breathing and started shaking.

 

[00slash00]

SNIP

Oh, yeah. Big-ass bugs, especially spiders, will ruin certain areas in games for me. Those damn mutated ants in Fallout 3 were the worst things I've ever encountered, I think. About fell out of my chair when one rounded a corner while I was in first person mode. Had to close my eyes and blind-exit the game.

And yes, I said "blind-exit." That's when you know a phobia has reached epic levels of pathetic.

I've definitely done that before. In the beginning of the Dalish elf story in Dragon Age Origins, where you enter a cave and are immediately ambushed by spiders, I quickly pulled up the game menu and then stared at the floor, while I hit the power button on my computer. I couldn't handle looking at the screen for the 3 seconds it would have taken to click exit game

 

[DementedSheep]

No not really. I'm afraid of deep water I can't see through but it doesn't have the same effect on me in a game. I don't like things being inserted into eyes (or fingernails falling off but I haven't seen that in a game.) but its not stopped me from playing something. It just makes me feel sick which is probably the intended effect anyway.

I would imagine being phobic of spiders would suck because they are used in a lot of games.

 

[stormeris]

I'm extremely afraid of dogs, but that don't prevent me from shooting them, stabbing them, setting them on fire in video games.

Though i do get startled if i hear one bark when i don't expect it. But overall, it doesn't really affect my gaming.
I'm also afraid of water, because i can't swim. But that doesn't prevent me from swimming, diving in-games, heck i mostly play Argonians in Elder Scrolls, so i often use rivers as a quick way of transportation (because fuck fast travel)
There's also the fear of public speeches, which doesn't come up in gaming at all for me. Not sure why.

 

[Denamic]

I 'used to' have a deep water phobia. I kinda got over it by picking up free-diving. It's still there, but it only makes me mildly terrified rather than totally unwilling to get near a large body of water. But it's never actually manifested significantly in me in games, save for certain events in certain games. RE4 water boss, fuck you in every orifice you have.

 

[TheCrapMaster]

I have a minor phobia to spiders but i do have trouble with parasites and similar stuff, some other lifeform that goes into your body and theres nothing you can do about it as it devours/infects you. Heck i havent finished a single marine campaign in AvP 1 and 2 thanks to facehuggers. Having those things cover my entire screen with that tentacle, thinking of that disgusting thing being forced into ones throat only to lay an egg*shivers*.

This is a fact my friends used against me ALOT in AvP2 lan partys with alien lifecycle enabled. -.-

And im a big sissy when it comes to jumpscares, so in games like F.E.A.R and dead space 1 and 2 i needed to take a 5min break after playing for about 20min just to calm my nerves.

 

[Silent Protagonist]

I don't really have any strong phobias. I have a very mild fear of heights, but that has never really translated into a game, or any other form of media for that matter. I guess for me I have to experience it in person, and even then I have to be pretty close to whatever the edge of the high place is.

I find spiders pretty creepy but for some weird reason the bigger the spider, the less scary it is(outside of real life of course). That actually holds true for a lot of creepy crawlies in games or movies. The ridiculously big ones just aren't creepy. Doesn't really make logical sense but I guess phobias rarely do.

Honestly I have never really been scared by a game. Tried the horror games. I even did the whole alone, lights off, with headphones thing and have never really been scared. Even the jump scares, which are more startling than actually scary, usually don't get me.

 

[Foolery]

Not many games have moth enemies, so I think I'm ok. Spiders used to bother me, but not so much anymore. Especially the ones from Drakan.

 

[MiskWisk]

Only very little. I am scared of spiders and they do affect me but not that much. Instead, I just get a little uneasy around them. Really, playing to my fears in a game just makes me twitchy and that allows things like giant spiders to make me jump a little more when they suddenly appear in front of me.

 

[babinro]

Yup.

I can deal with just about any kind of violence/torture/rape out there except broken bones. The sound of it and especially the visual of it. I'll never watch a Jet Li movie because of this. The one(s) I've seen always led to a scene where he dispatches thugs by efficiently breaking their limbs. I couldn't deal with 'the rack' scene in Saw or even the stairs scene in Unbreakable.

Very few video games exploit this in a realistic enough fashion that it bothers me. However, I do have a tough time wanting to do special takedowns in the Arkham games since some of those get pretty brutal.

I'm not sure if you'd call that a proper phobia but it's certainly a major fear of mine.

 

[Something Amyss]

Things that scare me in real life tend not to scare me in games, movies, etc. Why? They're not real.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

Bah... There are few phobias I have,and unfortunately are niche and thus there are no games using them.
I'd actually love to find a game that would make me to feel afraid of loosing a life or something,as this would thrill me,and you know,that would kill the boredom for some time.
I actually wish games had more fearful situations/opponents so when I'm playing I'm like "Ohh!!! The evil thing wants to eat my brains! / kill me!! omg!!!" and not like "oh another dumb weak enemy that gets in my way,boom his dead".

 

[BleedingPride]

Actually no, in fact i think my phobia of wind storms actually added to the experience when dealing with the Dark Presence in Alan Wake. And whenever the wind picked up when enemies were near? I still get chills just thinking about it.

 

[Korolev]

I can deal with Spiders in a game, provided that they don't look too realistic. The thing that always, ALWAYS got with with spiders is the eyes. I can't stand their eyes - they freak me out. Their eyes look so horrific. It's pretty much the only reason I hate them. I don't mind the legs, I don't mind the overall body-shape. It's the eyes that terrify me. So Spider-like enemies that don't have realistic eyes or realistic heads are fine. The Spider-ants in Borderlands never bothered me. The Spiders in Torchlight aren't too much of a problem, since their sufficiently low-res enough to not look realistic, their eyes being represented by mere dots of light.

The Spiders in Skyrim however, messed me up. I couldn't play that game until I downloaded a mod that turned them into mud-crabs. Sure they didn't animate properly, but it was the only way I could play that game. Dragon age I managed to get through by literally zooming the camera out all the way and only looking at the enemies out of the corner of my eye. I never used Morrigan's ability to change into a Spider, though. Ugh.

The "Spiders" in Metro Last Light I could deal with since their face/eyes didn't closely resemble the eyes of real spiders.

The only thing that I was ever mildly apprehensive about in a game are charging, screaming enemies. I don't like them, but I can deal with them. I do have to say however, facing down the Beserkers in the Original Gears was very, very, very stressful for me.

 

[an annoyed writer]

If it's got excessive gore, yeah I tend to stay away from it with few exceptions. I have some major phobias of dismemberment, so seeing dismembered characters and body parts tends to make my stomach churn. That's why it's hard to get me into things like Dead Space, for example.

 

[nekoali]

I don't have really strong phobias.. I do have mild to moderate vertigo, so standing on high places in games makes me feel dizzy and nauseous so I try not to look down. But it doesn't stop me from going to said places if I need to. While I don't have a phobia of roaches, I find them profoundly disgusting. Any game that has any variation of roaches as enemies I try to kill as quickly and far away as possible and not look at them. Not any other bug though. Spiders? Scorpions? nope, no problem. Cazadores just piss me off. A common radroach or even a player-pet sized roach... EWWWW! GET IT AWAY!

 

[OneCatch]

Can't say I do, although the spiderbug enemies from Metro: last Light make me feel a wee bit uneasy. Seriously, they're horrible fuckers.

Same here. It doesn't make me want to stop playing the game, but the spiderbugs themselves (and the occasional animation of a small spider crossing your vision) do ratchet up the tension. I am not the happiest gamer in those segments.
They're almost perfectly designed to be revolting to anyone that has any reservations about spiders, scorpion, ants, mantises - bugs in general really.

 

[Adventurer2626]

They haven't prevented me from playing any games but sometimes height does get to me, like in Tomb Raider, Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia. Also. Sharks. **** sharks.

 

[Xeros]

So I am afraid of spiders. Like really really really afraid of spiders. To the point where I have a lot of trouble even playing video games that have spiders in them

I also remember seeing people complain about Far Cry 3, due to having phobias of deep water and/or sharks and having difficulty completing the game as a result.

Both of these. My god, the spiders in Skyrim, the fish in Half-Life, hell, even the eel in Mario 64. But it's weird, they scare the absolute hell out of me, but it makes the games so much more exhilarating. I just recently finished up the scuba diving side missions in GTA V, and even though it was a nerve-racking experience, I couldn't stop playing. I suppose I just really enjoy being terrified.