Excerpt from USC’s Erin Reynolds on Nevermind, Managing Stress, and Eternal Darkness:
Every survival horror game faces the tough task of finding ways to bring out our innermost fears. Some decide to do so through over-the-top gratuitous violence. Others try to use more cerebral methods, tapping into what frightens us psychologically. Nevermind is a game about tapping into our psychological fears, but introduces a unique twist.
Nevermind is about learning to confront fearful scenarios and dealing with them so that they’re no longer frightening. It’s a game about coping with stress and learning to brave the stressful portions of everyday life. Through a first-person perspective, players venture into the minds of trauma victims, and face the terrible things that hide within. The game will utilize biofeedback technology to measure the player’s stress level and it will dynamically adjust its difficulty, accordingly.
It sounds like an unexplored frontier in gaming, so to find out a little more about Nevermind, I talked to the game’s Team Lead, Erin Reynolds. Reynolds is currently attending the University of Southern California to complete her Masters of Fine Arts degree. Though she may be a student, Reynolds has a significant amount of experience in game design, having previously worked for Disney Interactive Studios on several titles.
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