Children, Video Games, and The Development of Fear
A conversation between an academic who studies the science of fear and a father who openly watched 1989's The Blob in front of his children out of protest.
Recently, my children were eating dinner and watching their tablets, while Dad ate in front of the TV and took in the last few delicious minutes of 1989’s excellent, underrated The Blob remake. Within moments, both children bolted from their tablets and asked to join me. When I explained this was Dad Time and I would not be changing the scary movie, they mulled things over and decided to watch it anyway.
Seconds later, a child fell from a ladder and was eaten by the titular blob, only to later emerge screaming, their skin melting off. My oldest screamed in terror, my youngest in delight. Their reactions, one of a seven-year-old and one of a three-year-old, are a good example of the cognitive gap between my children. My youngest doesn’t know what she’s scared of, while my oldest grasps why a flesh-consuming blob is upsetting.
“What we are afraid of changes over the course of development,” said Teresa Lynch, associate professor of communication technology at Ohio State University, where she focuses on studying emotions, including fear, in video games. “That's where children are really fascinating to me, actually. Children will sometimes be scared by things that seem completely ridiculous to us as adults, but then sometimes things that are really scary to us as adults, don't bother them at all.”
Lynch’s work doesn’t focus on children, though she is gearing up for an upcoming academic study about Five Nights at Freddy’s, the cultural phenomenon among young kids that has a live action movie hitting later this month. At home, Lynch has a four-year-old son who hates when people get “giant,” and walks out of the room when Lynch has to visit a Great Fairy in Tears of the Kingdom to upgrade Link’s armor.
(In her son’s defense, Great Fairies have always been a little creepy.)
“What I try to do is I try to glean the best practices and in terms of how to help him manage those experiences,” said Lynch, “because we know from early research this idea of not letting kids have access to technologies and not letting them have access to entertainment media can actually be very stifling to them, both in the sense that they don't get to explore things they might be interested in, but also, kids use media as a reflecting point to socialize with one another.”
Games have been part of Lynch’s life since a young age. She credits her grandmother with introducing her to the medium, and her father with cementing it as an institution. The attraction stuck through college, at which point she hoped to have a career scoring soundtracks. (She still dabbles!) But in graduate school, she felt a pull towards better understanding our emotional reaction to video games, including fear.
“It was always really fascinating to me that you have this element of control,” said Lynch. “In a horror movie, you're looking at the screen and you're saying ‘Don't go in that room, there's a killer in that room, there's a ghost in that room.’ But in the game, you're actually in control of that experience.”
Lynch has a phobia, which she understandably declined to divulge, that she’s coped with using games and movies. That personal reaction has proven a powerful motivator to spend time and energy trying to understand how emotions interact with the body.
Lynch’s masters thesis was “Nothing to fear? College students’ fear responses to video games,” and her Ph.D. dissertation was “Assessing the Relevance of Formidability on Fear in Playful Simulations of Predation.” It’s not hard to see the pattern, and it makes more sense when you realize Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is one of her favorites.
My children don’t really discern genres. “Horror” doesn’t mean anything. The world is binary, divided into things they are scared of and things they are not scared of. I’m not going out of my way to pitch my oldest on watching Nightmare on Elm St., but if she asked, I’d consider it My goal as a parent isn’t “yes” or “no,” but providing context.
“As parents, our obligation is to try to stop them from watching things that are going to do direct harm, but it's not the case that much media is going to have that direct harm,” said Lynch. “It's a lot about the context in which they're watching it and that kind of thing. I have a set of practices that I engage in with how I allow [my son] to watch certain things. And there have been certain media that I think people are surprised that I've let him watch, and some of that is informed by research and some of it is just informed by my experience with him as a unique individual.”
My oldest has no problem walking through a Spirit Halloween, or playing an experience on Roblox with characters from Five Nights at Freddy’s. But the moment we watch a horror movie, where the control is taken away from her, she freezes. There’s something about the lack of agency that suddenly creates a profound sense of fear.
What’s interesting is that in Lynch’s research, control works in different ways.
“One of the things that I discovered in my dissertation was that people's relative skill level at video games, it should have predicted that you would experience less fear, if you're a high skill player,” said Lynch. “You would be very capable of getting away from the monster. I had people play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and so you’re going to be really skilled at being able to get away from the monster being able to navigate away from it, and actually found exactly the opposite: that the high skill players were reporting the highest levels of fear.”
“As parents, our obligation is to try to stop them from watching things that are going to do direct harm, but it's not the case that much media is going to have that direct harm.”
I like horror movies more than games, despite my streaming history. I enjoy being disconnected. Specifically, when I’m playing a horror game, I’m alone. When I’m watching a horror movie, I’m with my wife. I associate holding her hand when something gnarly is happening, and I lose that grounding inside of a horror game.
As an adult, I can dissect my appreciation of horror, and how it lets me work through feelings about the world. For my children, it’s almost like touching an electric fence. They enjoy the emotional high of being scared, then coming down, but can’t process it.
“Media gives us these opportunities that are safe to, basically, try to respond to these things,” said Lynch. “And of course, what we are afraid of changes over the course of development.”
But again, the definition of “horror” and what is “scary” is important. Lynch pointed towards a study by academics Kirsten Harrison and Joanne Cantor, called “Tales from the Screen: Enduring Fright Reactions to Scary Media.”
“They went into the experience of this study expecting that kids were going to be really afraid of blood,” said Lynch. “And at the youngest levels, they found that kids weren't afraid of blood. It was because they didn't have this association of blood with pain and suffering that we as adults are all too familiar with. Some of the things that we think of as characteristic fear stimuli aren't necessarily scary to kids. But a face that might be slightly distorted, or have an eye in the wrong place, even though it's not overtly scary, may terrify a child, because it just looks wrong.”
I didn’t ask, but I’d wager a guess this is why kids are often afraid of older people, too.
The ignorance might be a blessing. As Lynch pointed out, part of getting older is finding more things to be scared of. Children cannot process existential threats like death or climate change, but you still might be afraid of an open closet when you're 40.
I’ve had a lot of parents ask me “Hey, when is [insert game/movie/etc] appropriate for my kid?” and the answer, unfortunately, is not clean and simple. Instead, it’s when they’re ready. It’s a very fuzzy line, but one of the reasons our house is more permissive is because I’d rather have experiences, both positive and negative, in a controlled environment. I can give my kid a hug when they’re scared, I can hold their hand when they’re anxious, and I can turn something off when it feels like it’s gone too far.
“They're going to go out in the world, and they're going to discover things that you don't want them to see, and that maybe they don't want to see,” said Lynch. “They're going to be exposed to things, and if you don't help them to have a frame of reference for how to cope with negative feelings when they they see that, or have the confidence to say, ‘this is too much for me, and I want to turn it off,’ then you're not doing your job of helping them to be prepared for that content.”
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Also:
Lynch told me one of her favorite movies is The Fourth Kind, a recommendation I can get behind. Found footage and aliens? You’re making the perfect movie, imo.
My oldest is still debating whether we’re watching Five Nights at Freddy’s, a conversation and debate I’ll be writing about a little more later this month.
I’m fortunate that my children have not really had nightmares, which informs why I’m so permissive on horror but I’m guessing not every parent is so lucky.
Something that I came across when revisiting Mr. Rogers as an adult is how he explored child psychology, how they're still developing a sense of what's real and what's make believe. He had the actress for the Wicked Witch from Wizard of Oz show up on an episode of the Neighborhood and showed her in normal clothes and in costume to show she's not so scary. Hayao Miyazaki also told a story about how small children would cower under their desks watching Totoro (of all things!) but be oddly fascinated and reassured by their parents. It's hard to be mindful of what children (and adults) can be afraid of
That's a funny thing here about agency, I can attest... Back when I was 3 or 4, my mom and I were playing Microsoft Explorapedia and she left me alone in the room to get something. Explorapedia was a typical 90's edutainment activity center kind of thing, but it specifically had this character Tad who was a frog in a space suit. Every screen of the game, Tad was ALWAYS looking at you somewhere. (Check it out on YouTube! He's always there!) I got kind of unnerved because I was alone in the room, and in that same exact moment I was looking at Tad - then it played an idle animation where he blinked back. I completely flipped out, developed an intense fear of him, had nightmares about Tad popping out of the screen, and even five years later when I thought I'd try to get over it by reinstalling the game... He was in the installation wizard when I didn't expect it! I screamed and my parents suggested throwing the CD out.
It's kind of hilarious now that Tad scared me of all things, but (ironically as an IT worker) I still have a pretty intense phobia of computers acting on their own. Unexpected issues - black screens from loading issues, abrupt or loud jarring errors, programs seeming to wrench control from me, etc. - unnerve the shit out of me. And likewise, games that play with this sense of the game itself screwing with your expectations of its inherent interaction - Eternal Darkness, Doki Doki Literature Club, the later bits of Undertale - are morbidly fascinating to me because they often do a very good job of invoking that kind of stuff in an environment where I can alt-f4 quickly.
Thankfully this is a pretty innocuous phobia that I don't mind sharing, but when something as innocuous as edutainment messed with me that much, it worries me a bit. How do I even protect my kid from that kind of thing happening?