GamePhobias: Help tag game content for mental safety

GamePhobias is a new website that just went up about a week ago. It aims to tag video game content that could be upsetting for people with common triggers and phobias.

The site is new, and the owners currently have only posted content reviews for games they personally own. Users are invited to submit reviews for games that do not yet have pages. A review is pretty time-consuming, as it requires no detail to be overlooked or glossed over. The site owners don't post user-submitted reviews until they or someone else can confirm the review's accuracy, since even a good, trustworthy reviewer can miss some things.

If you're interested in helping out, I really, really recommend it. This is a fantastic idea for a resource, and I'd love to see more games added.

This is really cool. I'll try to see if I know of any games to put up there.

It seems like a good idea. Specifically, the phobias. The triggers less so, but if you're already doing phobias why not, I guess.

There is one that bothers me. What's the deal with "Aquatic Violence"? Like...is that a thing? It seems really specific.

Inflicted drowning. It is a thing, and if you do it routinely to a victim at a young age, it is startlingly easy to convince them you are not abusing them.

But drowning was separate. And it was specifically noted to be separate. "Aquatic Violence" is described as general water safety, which... I guess is a thing? But most of the time it relates to drowning anyway.

It's almost simultaneously too specific (as in, the personal hang-up of one of the people who made the site), and not specific enough (as in, it could have been separated into its various components; fear of fish, scalding, hypothermia, etc.).

I take it more as a catch-all for people who have phobias related to aquatic animals. For example, I have a jellyfish phobia due to being stung multiple times.

Fair enough. Which kind of speaks to my point about it not being specific enough. It'd probably be more effective to separate it into "Aquatic Animals" and "Fear of Water".

Is there a tag for screamers? Those can be dangerous in causing a sudden rise in heart rate.

Jump Scares, yes.

Although Mario Kart 8 is on there for some reason.

edited 9th Sep '14 10:43:01 PM by BadWolf21

Because item hits come out of nowhere? And it's dark in Megaman X? *shrug*

While in theory this site has great promise, in reality it's a bit too detailed and nit picky for its own good. Very, very few people would be scared or disturbed by anything found in Mario Kart, and the fact that fire is listed as one of the potential phobias means that sucker is gonna appear in almost every article imaginable.

And most importantly of all, fear itself is a rather subjective thing. Some kids didn't mind making the really deep swim with Mario in Jolly Roger Bay in Super Mario 64, but the depth of the water, plus the Eel at the bottom of the lake truly scared me like few other games did at the time. Yet, I could play a horror game like Resident Evil and not get creeped out as often as some adults were.

This is a great idea. My arachnophobia has prevented me from fully enjoying video games. I still haven't been able to get in to the Thief series and Limbo because of it. Haven't written wiki articles before, but I've signed up to try to help anyway.

After reading some of the content advisory tags though (Disruptive Home Life? Existential Despair? Really?), I'm a little worried this site will become a Tumblr "TR-TR-TR-TRIIIIGGGEEEEEERRRRR!!!!11" encyclopedia.

Maybe they should stick to the clinical phobias? Having an actual psychologist contribute here would be fantastic.

Yeah I dunno about Super Mario 64. I thought the scariest thing in it might be the chomping piano, or maybe the way Mario drowns in water or the scream-laugh he does bouncing off of lava, but someone in the "shameful secrets" thread got too scared to play it for five years from the first "HUW" noise Mario made upon bumping into an enemy. Really? Note to Charles Martinet: Never yelp again

"Boom"...that's what he said.

Hello, one of Game Phobias' admins here, addressing some of the questions/concerns raised here.

Aquatic Violence was one of our oldest tags, created before we'd really finalized the image of what we wanted to do with the site; we have been debating breaking it into different tags in the future.

As far as Jump Scares go, there are two broad categories (that we may choose to delineate sometime in the future): Scripted Jump Scares and Unscripted Jump Scares. Scripted Jump Scares are common in horror games, especially American Horror games. Unscripted Jump Scares are things that resemble Jump Scares but aren't strictly part of the game's plot or story. To use the example already given, Mario Kart 8; you have shells and the like (especially the accursed blue shells) that can sometimes come out of nowhere, and your danger indicator (the bubble at the bottom) doesn't always warn you.

We don't feel it's our place to say what should or should not scare, upset, or hurt someone, which is why our tag list is so long and diverse. That's for each gamer to decide. Because fear/psychological trauma/discomfort is so subjective, we chose to be an objective (and hopefully complete) source of information so that gamers can make informed decisions for themselves. We never want to judge someone for having an issue with something, nor do we judge the games for containing any content we tag. We aren't seeking to change the industry or to get developers to make games that don't contain anything that we tag for (because those games would be, for the most part, very boring).

If you have any further questions, I'd be willing to answer them.

Our very own Nightmare Fuel pages show how much these things can vary for people, after all. All it takes is one user being scared by something to get it an entry, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I was originally going to say that specificity of descriptions would make this helpful - like if someone has a fire phobia, they could learn whether the fireballs in a given game are Mario-style "just another kind of attack" or actual "this models fire and makes the characters hit by it suffer and burn" - but then I guess going into too much detail would be disturbing in itself. How could this be negotiated?

We try to provide descriptions as best we can; but you're right, it's a balancing act. Eventually, once we're a bit better established (and our server architecture is a bit better), we have ideas on how to include images, so people can determine for themselves, as the "A picture says a thousand words" thing, while perhaps being numerically off, is true in spirit.

I would. Like I said, it's a strangely specific tag for a very general idea. I'm afraid of spiders, to the point that I have difficulty playing some games with them (though not all; I'll get to this later). If someone has a similar issue with sharks, or squid, or basically anything else, it's less convenient for the content they're concerned about to be bundled under "Aquatic Violence" where they may not think to look, than under a more specific "Aquatic Wildlife" tag, or similar.

Moving on, I'm not sure that what you refer to as "Unscripted Jump Scares" should be tagged. It's not properly a jump scare, just a sudden event, and those are going to appear in every game because your field of view is restricted to the screen. Things are happening behind you that you can't see, so if they start to affect you, you're not going to get any warning about it. It's the People Sit On Chairs of your categories, basically.

I was going to bring this up too. At first, I was going to suggest a rating system, but because fear is so subjective, you can't really judge the severity with which someone will react to something. So numbers are out.

But there needs to be more specificity in the descriptors. Going back to spiders (see, I told you I'd come back to this), both Don't Starve and Skyrim bear that tag. But there's a big difference in the way they're portrayed. Skyrim has photo-realistic graphics, and Don't Starve has cartoon-y, gothic-inspired graphics. There's no indication of this in the descriptions, so if I hadn't played Don't Starve, I have skipped out on it, not realizing that the depiction of them would be less upsetting to me than the spiders in Skyrim.

For another example, this time with the same spider: Skulltulas. The Skulltulas in the N64 games barely resemble spiders, looking more like skulls with legs. Compare to the Skulltulas in Twilight Princess, that are more realistic, and send me into panic attacks if they appear without warning. There's nothing in the description of the Skulltulas in Majora's Mask that would help me differentiate between these two portrayals.

I really like the idea of the site. It feels like a safe space where I can research what games might set off my arachnophobia, instead of the wikis for the individual games which are more likely to have pictures. It just needs to be more detailed. Don't be shy about detail. I would much rather read a better description of what I might encounter, even if it's upsetting, than to run into it unexpectedly in the game.

EDIT: Don't include pictures. Have better descriptions. You said "a picture's worth a thousand words" to explain why including images would be helpful. But look at it from the other side. A picture is a thousand times worse than just reading about something.

edited 14th Sep '14 10:12:27 AM by BadWolf21

On pictures, perhaps if they are to be included, they could be linked with a trigger warning rather than embedded in the page? Some people might be curious enough to look to see if it really would be that bad for them, and leaving them as just links satisfies those people while also respecting those who would not want to see them. Maybe even a prompt could come up asking to confirm if you want to view the image in case of accidental clicking.

I think the general idea is that, yeah, a lot of games have "unscripted jump scares" but you have no way of knowing that if it's really going to freak you out. So you list that, and it's up to the individual person to decide if they're gonna be okay with that (Because plenty of games don't have them: Puzzle games, sidescrollers, stuff like that.)

Same goes for fire, or any other fear that may seem ridiculous. It may seem silly to you, but for another person they may end up in the fetal position if it happens.

Aquatic Violence is subject to a lot of internal debate; For the moment nothing is happening, but we're listening to people's thoughts.

And Unscripted Jump Scares are less common than you think; fairly common, but the list of Jump Scare Free games don't have either and is fairly well populated. (If you want the People Sit in Chairs, look to Weapons, which we keep because serves a number of purposes for us).

One of our FAQ questions addresses the creation of a rating scale, but it seems like you understand our reasoning without having to see it. Our system has never been intended to rely on the CAT tags alone. We expect people will read the descriptions of the content on the relevant game pages. I agree with you, we could probably stand to be more specific, but at the moment we're a small team with very limited resources trying to get up the largest breadth of content rather than depth of content, which we feel we can do later. We encourage people to help us by submitting content (or content revisions) to submissions@gamephobias.com. We're still young, still a work in progress, and still very small and limited. But that'll change, I have every confidence in that!

I accidentally left off a MAJOR part of what we would do if we had images: they would be behind a cut or hosted offsite so that they cannot be accessed accidentally.

edited 14th Sep '14 11:05:35 AM by GamePhobias

My problem with "unscripted jump scare" is that it seems poorly defined. The only example I have is the shells in Mario Kart, and nearly every genre of game will have things happen unexpectedly. The definition, as near as I can tell, is little more than "things happen to you without warning", which is a consequence of living in a world where things happen. I'm not opposed to it on principle, but I do think it would be more useful if it had clearer criteria.

I don't really have any issue with "fire" being present either. But fire is such a general concept that the descriptions need to be specific about what it does. Fire could mean a torch on the wall, and some people are only going to have problems with it being interactive. Sometimes fire is little more than a concussive force (Mario's fireballs), and some people are only going to be bothered by burning.

Much like our own trope pages, it's the examples, more than the concept itself, that is going to be most helpful.

...But at the risk of sounding pedantic, if a blue shell counts as an unscripted jump scare, by that logic, wouldn't any game where you can be hit by a projectile you never got forewarning be an example? Ergo the entire First Person Shooter genre would, by default, be an example. Unscripted Jump Scare should be one of the most populated categories.

After all, what's the difference between "I got hit by a blue shell I didn't see coming" (Despite the blue shell actually hovering over for a moment before hitting, which IMHO is more forgiving than say, a red shell in the scare aspect but I digress) and "I got hit by an imp's fireball in DOOM I didn't see coming" or "I got sniped by a Jackal in HALO?"

Noticing some common phobias that seem to be missing - many triggers for forms of zoophobia seem to be missing - dogs, cats, birds etc...

edited 14th Sep '14 11:20:00 AM by CobraPrime

I can see your points. For the moment, things are still being debated and none of this has been implemented.

One thing to note about Fire: our definition is that the fire has to be uncontrolled; this generally will end up being forest fires, dragon breath, fireball attacks, etc. We haven't had any requests for anything like controlled fires, so we haven't had any cause to broaden the definition.

I've got to sign off for the moment, but I'll be back later, sorry for any inconvenience.