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Tedd Video Game Opinions - 012 - HD
🕑 Added 2021-05-29 06:30:12 +0000 UTCWeb.
Commentary
I got to hear a whole lot of analogies and comparisons after the last comic. Many of these didn't feel like actual equivalencies, which got me to thinking about the criteria for something being a fair comparison.
As I see it, there are three primary things to consider if attempting to make a fair comparison to the issue of arachnophobia and video games.
1 - Relative commonality of arachnophobia.
"Video game developers can't account for every phobia" is, on its own, a reasonable statement, but this isn't a rare phobia that cannot be anticipated or managed. It's a foreseeable and probable issue.
2 - The prevalence of spiders in spite of the lack of necessity for spiders.
For some stories and settings, you're going to need a spider. For example, if your game is literally about the adventures of an anthropomorphic house fly (obviously named Buzz), spiders not being involved would be as weird as the protagonist not wearing a trendy t-shirt.
Many games, however, have spiders that don't need spiders.
The previous comic said spiders were boring, which was an oversimplification. It was meant to reference the way spiders are treated as arbitrarily added staple enemies in games.
In terms of "we have to come up with an enemy," they're a bit like the free space on a bingo card. Unless really appropriate to the game they're in, or made unique in some way, they feel like a lazy choice.
Not to be mean to Skyrim, my most played game of all time, but the spiders REALLY feel out of place in it, and they've kept people who love The Elder Scrolls from playing.
Coming back around to what the second primary thing is, spiders are common in video games, and they often could be replaced (or made less spider-like, more on that later) with very little impact on the game.
3 - Spiders are most commonly presented as hostile enemies that are intended to be scary and dangerous.
Exposure therapy to help with phobias, as I understand it, can do a lot of good!
It's something that should be handled by professionals, however, because the panic that can result from doing exposure therapy poorly can have very bad consequences for everyone involved.
As for games being used as exposure therapy, I imagine they technically could be part of the process (don't quote me on that), but exposure therapy is supposed to gradually make someone feel more comfortable and less threatened by something.
Video games in which the thing you're terrified of are giant and trying to murder you are not that. They're basically the opposite of that.
It's true the game can't actually hurt you, but that's not really the issue. "Yes, you're scared, and you lost your game progress while seeing something out of your worst nightmares happening, but look! Not one literal spider bite!"
That's not exposure therapy. That's "let's see if we can't make this phobia worse".
It might be different in a game in which every spider was a friendly Non-Player Character, but again, don't quote me on that, for it is untrained speculation.
Bottom-line, spiders being enemies in games invalidates any sort of "exposure therapy" argument. It's not going to cure anyone of their phobia.
The primary points simplified:
1 - Arachnophobia is a relatively common phobia.
2 - Spiders are overused and often unnecessary in games.
3 - Spiders are most often hostile enemies in games.
Again, I'd like to reiterate that I'm not arguing for no spiders ever in games. There are just questions worth asking when making a game, such as...
"Does this need to be a spider?"
"If it does need to be a spider, can anything be done about the arachnophobia factor?"
That second question is one more designers are considering these days. at least a couple games now have options that replace spiders, or make them look less spider-like.
It's also worth noting that people with arachnophobia are scared of literal spiders. The less realistic a "spider" looks, the less of a potential deal breaker they are, and I'm not just talking about making them cartoonish and/or stylized.
It may seem counterintuitive, but because they'll look less like a spider, giving a spider monstrous features might make them less scary to someone with arachnophobia.
A human torso with a spider-like bottom and six legs could be less of an issue that just a giant spider. Though, at that point, maybe make them half gecko? A gecko-taur! Yeah!
Anyway, if all else fails? Crabs.
Comments
Spiders4brekfast
What about those of us who love spiders and love seeing new spider designs? Yeah they can be pretty boring enemies at times but I love seeing how different spiders look to different concept artists. Also it arguably makes a world feel more lived in when it’s not just humanoid enemies populating it. I’d argue humanoids are the more boring enemy type here
Some Ed
I think spiders are generally weak enemies in most games *for* the people with arachnophobia. Basically, they're there to be conquered, not to be feared. I've known people who had arachnophobia who stopped playing games because the next level was spiders. And then, after seeing their friends playing the game past that, and no spiders, and more no spiders, and still more no spiders, managed to go back, beat the spider level, and once they were past it, they were better for the experience. I'm not saying that the way most games do spiders is good. I don't have some huge data collection to show whether it is better or worse like this. I'm just saying, I know a few people for whom it has worked.
Chronos Cat
Personally I'd be fine with removing real animals (and made up ones that act like real animals) as enemies in games (as a decision on the part of the creators of course, not as a law or anything). In games where you kill the enemies, I always feel guilty killing animals (for a value of "guilty" that acknowledges it's not real).
Professor Harmless
It was really just the one time that spiders were slightly better than the man-kraken.
Daniel
If that wasn't your point, then you may have phrased it badly in the previous comic, as you said exactly that. (Yes, you included the caveat "unless there is a really good thematic reason", but I'd argue simple verisimilitude fulfills that.) And as W C Purdy pointed out below, mods are an *excellent* way to resolve this problem. If you've got a phobia so severe you cannot play games involving it, you might be lucky enough that the game has a strong enough modding community that someone has removed them as a mod.
Stephen Gilberg
I finally remembered a friendly game spider: Squitter from the Donkey Kong Country series. He's large enough for a monkey to ride, yet kind of cute with his eight little sneakers.
dude13537
To be fair, spiders are usually also a boring enemy to fight. I’d much rather battle something interesting, like a swarm of flesh-eating fairies, than something that is only challenging because it blocks off areas with its web or crawls up the wall so you can’t reach it.
Hilda Leyes
Gamers aren't oppressed but based on these comments they definitely should be.
Changer
I don't particularly find the phobia angle very compelling, as someone with a rather strong phobia of another common insect; wasps and bees. When I was younger, it was rather debilitating, when a wasp shows up, it was usually a crisis that stopped everything else that was going on until it was dealt with. It was the worst when I was a young kid, sometimes I would feel a tingle on the back of my neck and I would freeze until someone could confirm that there was no bee or wasp on my head. When I moved out on my own though, I had to learn pretty quickly that just because the insect causes me issues, doesn't mean that I can just choose not to deal with it. In fact, choosing not to deal with the problem makes the problem worse. If I don't deal with a wasp nest on my own, more nests will pop up and more wasps will be around, and it's not financially feasible to call an exterminator every time I spot a paper wasp nest on the overhang. I recall once stopping for gas to find that some paper wasps had built a nest inside the little space behind the door to the gas cap and they were instantly upset by my opening it. I was alone, and I had no wasp spray, no fly swatter, and I had to fight them by hand swatting them down to the ground, and stomping them, and getting stung. I couldn't just abandon my car there because I have a phobia. This phobia is one that you can't really just choose to avoid like you can deep water, heights, or clowns. And I can say for sure, I see more spiders than I do wasps, by far. So, I have to imagine it'd be the same issue for someone with a spider phobia. They will be forced to deal with it as part of growing up, because you literally can't escape dealing with it. You *will* encounter spiders in real life, frequently. And there won't always be someone you can call to deal with the spider for you, so you're going to have to be the one to deal with it. Fortunately for people with a spider phobia, they tend not to be nearly as aggressive as wasps are, and don't fly. For this reason, I don't think avoiding the use of spiders in games due to the phobia existing is really feasible. Encouraging people to try to shield someone from this kind of phobia seems kind on the surface, but it makes it so much harder on them when they finally have to deal with the problem unsupported later in life.
AstroChaos
Man, sounds like I missed quite the discussion after the last part! This is one I can't really get behind. In terms of the phobia, I certainly get the frustration of it affecting if you can play something. I just feel that it's a very slippery slope to try and address it from a global game design. It's only ever going to be a small subset of the population and it does open the door for having to address 30 other phobias as well, which would cripple the design process and probably the game as well. While I do agree that using spiders can be bit lazy at times, that's hardly uncommon... how many bad guys in movies have crisp British accents? Growing up the shadowy forces Behind Everything Bad were always the Russians. Now days it's Corporations and Capitalism. *Shrug* So far as something like this goes... going to pull the PC Master Race card here and just say "there's a mod for that." No, seriously... For Skyrim there are mods to remove spiders and mods to make them look different and even mods to substitute them with other animals.
Wizard Stan
My point being that phobias aren't binary, and it's entirely possible that more people have a fear of dogs than of spiders, but due in large part to, as you said, the fact that dogs are much more common as pets, they've managed to adjust enough that it's not as big a deal in virtual settings. Again, all anecdotes and assumptions though.
Wizard Stan
Anecdotal evidence as it is being terrible, I'd still like to say my brother-in-law has arachnophobia and if he sees a spider, small or big, he panics and needs to be not-anywhere-near-that-thing. My roommate has arachnophobia and if he sees a spider he tenses up but can handle. Another friend of mine has cynophobia and if he sees a dog he can deal, but if the dog saunters up to him he is just "nope nope nope nope" but he doesn't freak out or anything, he's managed to adapt himself to keeping his conscious mind active even while his subconscious is screaming "that fluffy creature that's wagging it's tail is the most violent and evil thing on the planet!"
Applestone
"It's something that should be handled by professionals" is easy to say, but hard to pay for. Sometimes people want to try treating their problems by themselves and they shouldn't feel bad about it because they were "supposed to let a pro do it instead". I guess it all depends on who is talking, i.e. if you want to help someone else, beware that you might not be competent enough and make it worse instead, so doing more than being there for them and listening requires to be careful, but if you want to help yourself, then you're in control, so do what you like. As far as spiders in games are concerned: I generally believe that artists should be free to do as they please. Spiders aren't the only common enemies in RPGs. There's also bats, snakes, caterpillars, rabid dogs, rats, lizards and such. I feel that if spiders are a free bingo card space, then so are all those other animals. I do agree that you can't account for every phobia, so for me it would be enough if artists were made aware of this issue, so that they could make a conscious choice about it.
Klaus
From my experience without a phobia: Spiders are still a bad idea. Most of the time they are the kind of enemy that isn't challenging to fight – just frustrating, mostly of they are the "crawling swarm" kind of enemy. It is a typical case of variation for the sake of variation, when more of the same enemy would have been preferable. Skyrim is a bit borderline there; At least the spiders are large enough not to be frustrating. (@Patreon: Seriously, why does the software enter key on mobile send the comment instead of inserting a line break? And why can't I scroll in a textarea? Someone went out of their way to make commenting hard on mobile.)
W C Purdy
Speaking as somebody who dealt with Cynophobia for most of his life, I do not, nor would I ever support the removal of wolves, zombie dogs, enemy guard dogs, etc as enemies from games. I was always able to deal with them, and I wouldn't want to dictate to artists what they can and can't do.
W C Purdy
Okay, since I was the guy that started the squabble in the previous comment section, I kind of feel obligated to follow up here. 1) There's lots of common phobias that aren't accounted for. Dogs, clowns, snakes, the dark, the ocean, heights, blood... all of these are depicted quite often in games and nobody is making a stink about them - largely because it's a very very small minority of people who have these phobias who have them to a severity that they can't even deal with them depicted in a picture or on a screen. That minority is so small, though, that it doesn't seem right to cater to it at the expense of both the artist trying to depict these things, as well as the rest of the audience. Especially since, if we were to cater to every single common phobia, we'd basically be left with nothing but Super Mario Bros - and even then without the water levels or ghost houses. I actually hadn't realized that my Cynophobia was quite so common (if what Daniel is saying is correct, that actually makes me feel like a bit less of a freak since, while I don't panic at the presence of a dog anymore, I still don't really LIKE most dogs) and nobody has ever questioned the wolves in skyrim or the zombie dogs in Resident Evil. I never panicked at a dog in a movie or in a book or anything like that. I could separate reality from fantasy, as most people with anxiety disorders like this can. It's actually a little bit insulting to suggest otherwise. 2) This one I can't argue with. And if the argument is just "there should be more creativity in games" in general, then I fully agree. I actually feel the need to potentially step up and defend Skyrim though. The Elder Scrolls is one of the pillars of the fantasy genre in gaming and it's clear that they take a lot of inspiration from The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings - a series which featured a lot of giant spiders. My guess is that the presence of the Frostbite Spiders in Skyrim is an homage to that. And this leads me cleanly into... 3) I'd like to talk a little bit about WHY giant spiders featured in The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkein actually went on record saying he included the giant spiders in the Hobbit because he wrote the Hobbit for his son. His son (Michael, I believe) had a really bad case of Arachnophobia, and Tolkein actually included the giant spiders specifically to scare his son - and specifically so they could be overcome by Bilbo and the Dwarves so that they'd seem less like an insurmountably scary monster and more like something that could be overcome with bravery and courage. It's also commonly theorized that J.R.R. Tolkein suffered from arachnophobia himself and he was working through it in his own way by including the spiders in his work. I think you're underestimating the good that "conquering" the scary monster that is the source of your fear can do. It helps that the spiders are usually some of the most basic and easily beaten cannon fodder enemies in most of these games. Heck, discounting a few mooks from either the Stormcloaks or the Empire (depending on who you sided with), Spiders are literally the FIRST enemy you face in Skyrim. They're so easily beatable you can take them down without issue at literally level 1. The idea that this couldn't possibly somehow be EMPOWERING to an arachnophobe seems kind of silly to me. My POINT is that I don't feel comfortable trying to dictate to artists what they can and can't include in their work - for ANY reason - because we can't know the inner workings of why the artist (or artists) included it in the first place. Even if they seem boring or offensive or uninclusive or whatever, it's not UP to us to dictate what artists can and can't do. In the end, my trouble wasn't necessarily with the idea that spiders were a boring enemy or the opinion that game developers should try to be more creative. My problem was twofold - firstly with the declarative statement "Games Shouldn't Have Spiders..." and secondly with the justification for that declarative statement being that "all people with arachnophobia are so cripplingly terrified by spiders that they can't separate fantasy from reality enough to handle dealing with a spider on-screen." The first is a violation of artistic freedom, and the second is just false. Also, I support the ultimate conclusion that the answer is mods. "More games should have mod support" is a statement I have an easier time getting behind, and a modding community can easily make an "Arachnophobia mod" to remove spiders, or a "Cynophobia mod" to remove wolves and such. That way, we're not stepping on any artists' toes, and people whose phobias ARE so bad that they can't handle even depictions of their phobias can still play the games.
Dan Shive
It's also worth noting that different fears are triggered differently, and the impression I get with aracnophobia is that it's on something of a hair trigger when it comes to visuals. I'm not sure other examples are triggered so easily by video games. I'm curious to look in to that more, however. Already asking around about the dog phobia and whether it's an issue when they play games.
Dan Shive
My point was never "don't have these things in your games". It was "be aware of these issues and take them in to consideration". Spiders get highlighted more due to their relative prevalence and overuse in games. Really, everything should have a good reason for being included, and those good reasons will ultimately take priority. Like, you're not going to just not make an open world game because fear of open spaces exist, but you might reconsider how you handle a loading area because claustrophobia is a thing. You can be considerate while still deciding things on a case-by-case basis and sometimes deciding you really do need the thing some people won't respond well to.
Erin Halfelven at BigCloset
What's semi-hilarious is that on my Patreon feed, the entry just above this one is about alien spiders.
Daniel
The question then becomes how common is common enough that it warrants changing the game? Other common phobias (some of which are more prevalent than arachnophobia) are ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), musophobia (fear of rats), or insectophobia. If you have to account for them all -- and if you're going to account for one, why not all? -- you might as well remove animals from the list of enemies altogether. Phobias are by definition irrational, and while it may be uncomfortable to encounter in a game, it is a step removed from real life. As for expose therapy, as hostile as they may be as enemies, it isn't actually threatening to you, so it may still work to desensitize you towards them, by letting you get used to the way they move, etcetera. It isn't actual expose therapy, but it's unlikely to be harmful. I could even see being able to release some frustration towards them by beating them up in a safe environment as being therapeutic.
Dan Shive
If I had to guess, a key difference with dogs is that they are pets that are so common that people are more expected to cope with them in general, and that the inclusion of canines as companions is more often a strong selling point than a sales hindrance. Dogs are also closely linked with humans in ways that spiders are not. Their inclusion more often makes sense with the story. A dog companion, guard dogs, and wolves are all things that will pretty naturally be included in something and feel like they belong, whereas a spider enemy is "we're tossing in a big version of something that couldn't physically exist". Between a phobia that common and people who like dogs not wanting to hurt them, though, they really might not be the best video game enemies. It seems like either people will feel bad about fighting them, or could be overly stressed out by fighting them. Is anyone happy about having to fight good doggos?
Dan Shive
I am actually curious about cynophobia and games now, though, because I've heard about arachnophobia and games a LOT (and I've heard from more people now since posting these), but not once cynophobia prior to you using it as a counterpoint. The most I've heard about dogs as enemies is "but I don't want to hurt dogs".
Dan Shive
I don't recall giving a number. I've been saying it's relatively common. As far as phobias go, that's up there. In any case, if accurate (I am suspicious of all such % claims), that's 3-6,000 people if a game sells 100,000 copies, and AAA games hope to sell in the seven digits. It might be low percentage, but it's still significant, and could effectively be an issue for any random potential customer in a given demographic.
Daniel
Arachnophobia affects around 3-6% of the population. It's far from as common as you're presenting it as. Cynophobia, the fear of dogs, affects 7-9%, but you're not seeing many complain about wolves in games. I doubt most people who complain about spiders in games actually suffer from arachnophobia -- I think it's more likely they just don't like spiders.
