A fair warning: the following video is about survival horror games, and it will feature
some creepy themes.
{What I Love!}
Hello!
I’m Scruffy, and today, I’m really glad to have you here.
Because we’re talking about horror games once again, and if there’s one thing that
helps alleviate the dread of a horror experience, it’s sharing it with others.
Braving it together.
Whether you’re playing with friends online, or showing a solo horror game to a friend
in the same room, or streaming to a chat of anyone, you don’t feel so alone the way
the game would have you feel.
What’s more, others can offer suggestions, help, or reactions, that can actively combat
two pillars that most horror games seek to instill: absence of information, the inability
to plan for what comes next, and absence of action, the inability to change your current
situation in the game.
Now it’s great to bond over these games by diluting your fears that way… but if
you’re a horror game developer, who wants to make something spooky, but multiplayer
co-op, how would you account for this?
How do you keep players on their toes, when you’re sure they’ll be together, communicating
and mitigating the horror?
Two games, Phasmophobia and In Silence, took on that challenge by specifically messing
with multiplayer communication in a unique way.
It’s called “proximity voice chat,” and it occurs in plenty of simulation games,
not just horror ones.
In an online multiplayer game, voice chat is a really quick and effective way to inform
one another about what one player might be doing that others can’t see.
And while you may have plenty of voice chat options outside a game, building an in-game
voice chat is rather useful, and simple!
Just have a player set their microphone as an input, and then make the output a sound
effect for all other players.
The advantage of making it in-game is that you can make the sound a “3D sound,” tying
it to the location of that player’s character.
So if another player moves away from that sound source, the sound attenuates for them.
All of a sudden, this “proximity” voice chat feels a bit more like it occurs within
the game world, instead of hovering outside it.
And in a horror game like Phasmophobia, it encourages your team of ghost-hunters to stick
together, because not only are you more vulnerable on your own, you can’t hear your teammates
and plan things out together.
In this game, a group of up to four online players needs to conduct various tests for
signs of a ghost haunting some large building or site.
All players have to agree on what type of ghost is haunting this place, and mark it
down in their individual journals, to complete a mission.
And one player can only hold so many of these tests, so you need to delegate who’s testing
what, and split resources like lights, and sanity pills, and…
Ah, I forgot, walkie-talkies.
This is a way to beat the proximity part of the voice chat, you can talk to your teammates
from anywhere on a walkie-talkie.
But, Phasmophobia does something neat with your microphone input when you use a walkie-talkie:
they filter the sound through a high-pass EQ before the output, simulating the tiny
speakers from which others would hear you.
Similarly, you can often hear other players even if they’re in an adjacent room to you,
but their input gets filtered through a low-pass EQ before outputting to you, so they sound
muffled like they would in real life.
But it seems like you still have the advantage here, right?
If you can radio your teammates and vice versa, you can still go anywhere and have their help
beside you, right?
Well, that is true, up until your in-game sanity starts dropping, and your group has
split up to cover more ground, and suddenly the ghost you’re after starts hunting the
living, and you attract their attention by accidentally speaking during the hunt—
And the ghost gets you.
Here is the pivotal twist that Phasmophobia puts on proximity voice chat.
If a ghost successfully hunts you down, you enter the afterlife, where you can see and
hear the other teammates, but they cannot see or hear you.
You’re cut out of the voice chat, and because this game is online and the other players
are remote, you’re cut out of the lifeline of communicating with them.
They have one less member to coordinate actions and give verbal feedback.
And yet, you can still mark things down in your journal…
so it’s possible to finish the mission, if you basically…
haunt your teammates silently and come to a consensus with them about what type of ghost
you’re tracking.
You may not be able to speak with them, but you can still pick up and drop objects in
the environment, which actually became a form of communication for me the first time I became
a ghost in this game.
My teammates would tell me to “give us a sign” for certain yes-or-no questions, and
I would pick up and throw a basketball to respond.
With that system, we could still complete the mission.
So, I suppose while this setup certainly hinders the information you can exchange with your
fellow voice-chatters, it’s not a total absence of information.
Then there’s In Silence, which approaches its twist on proximity voice chat a little
differently.
In this game, two to five players are trying to hunt or escape from a horrific monsterm,
the Rake, played by a sixth player.
The monster can barely see anything, but it can hear extremely well across long distances,
and it can outrun and dispatch the other players.
And in addition to in-game sound effects attracting its attention, you guessed it, proximity voice
chat between the five-person team can also be heard by the monster.
Any messages to teammates will give away your location to the monster player.
So from the team’s perspective, voice chat almost becomes a last resort, or perhaps part
of a larger diversion plan, but not the relieving action it was in Phasmophobia.
From the monster’s perspective, voice chat becomes the most effective means of finding
players, as your vision while playing is darkened and blurred: you can only really see players
well if they’re nearby with a flashlight on.
This approach to voice chat is more about absence of action: limiting your options for
communication by giving them major consequences.
That’s why this game relies so heavily on its in-game voice chat, otherwise the game
would be heavily balanced against the monster player.
Now, a couple interesting details here.
Like Phasmophobia, team members who are killed in this game will become an entity that can
see but not interact with voice chat: in this case, a mouse.
You can’t do nearly as much in this state, but you can still find items for other players
and distract the monster with your sounds.
And a more interesting design choice to me is that the monster is also a member of the
proximity voice chat.
They can hear players who are nearby, and they can speak with players who are nearby!
I’m not quite sure what it does for the fear factor of this game.
Here you have this horrific and fearsome creature of urban legend, talking to you or to no one
in particular with the microphone-fidelity voice of whoever joined this game session
with you.
Initially that seems like a recipe to take you out of the experience.
Then again, perhaps the monster player could use voice chat to play mind games on another
player, make them feel more isolated, or even just act unusually silent.
I’d say, to re-immerse us in this experience, the monster player could perhaps be encouraged
to toy with other players this way.
Perhaps in another version of this game, they could even be awarded small recorded voice
clips of a player they already defeated, and use those to trick and lure other players
with the sound of their teammate, until they’re discarded at the end of a play session.
I suppose that’s getting into the possibilities of proximity voice chat: it becomes such an
indispensable form of communication in otherwise dark, foreboding environments like this, that
it’s the perfect target for horror games to manipulate and suddenly alter it.
That simultaneously imbues us further in the world, and makes us feel more helpless in
the dark.
And if you and your cooperators survive it, well, that’s testament to our ability to
counteract absence of action, and figure out alternative ways to work as a team, even under
great deals of stress.
And that’s my chat about proximity voice chat in horror games.
I’d like to thank my friend Wolfgang for helping me with this script.
And as always, I'd like to thank my patrons on Patreon, who help keep my video-making
process sustainable.
If you'd like to support my work directly, and get perks like your credit here, seeing
videos early, a vote on what music I arrange, and more behind-the-scenes content, you can
visit my Patreon link in this video's description.
And with that, I'm Scruffy, and thank you very much for watching.