Dark video games

[Dodece]

You are not alone in your distaste of that I assure you. I as well despise games that are absurdly dark in their visual presentation. Some genuinely enjoy it, but personally I despise what amounts to being handicapped. So that a developer can attempt to obtain a cheap graphical impression, or obtain a cheap thrill.

The reason developers do this is the same reason magicians can use slide of hand. They are using psychology to their advantage intentionally or not. They know when presented with a environment of darkness the human mind is prone to a number of things. First of which is that focus is increased, followed by agitation, which in turn generates a strong emotional response. This is part of the thrill. What is more the lack of information results in the mind filling in gaps with what it perceives as logical.

To make it simple darkness makes the experience more intense, and as an added bonus it makes a game look graphically better even if it is not. So you will often here someone say boy that game was scary even if the scares are both cheap and blatantly unfair. You will also hear people say boy that game looks good. Even if it had a color pallet of three colors, and half the world was a black mat.

All told it isn't exactly unfair to play to human psychology, but if your a extremely righteous person it is understandable if you find being handicapped to be mere frustration. Personally I avoid black games like the plague. Thankfully I think some developers have clued into the fact that a lot of gamers are not amused by these shenanigans either by personality of physical limitation.

For instance I found that Bioshock was very good about this. They had a darkness setting right up front. So you could set it to just the right spot for you personally, and the far ranging pallet let players get good distinction. So while there is a problem I think developers are getting a lot better about not abusing blackness so much that it is game breaking.