Hello everyone,
I am planning on designing a Psychology experiment. The idea is to investigate if audience effects increases courage. There will be three conditions: play alone, play with strangers, and play with friends.
I need recommendations on subtly creepy freeware games...
I highly recommend SCP-087, AKA "that creepy staircase game." It's free for windows and mac, and it features the type of extremely slow-build tension that is definitely heightened by playing it alone everyone knows this why would you even bother to research this *ahem.* It's a good horror game, subtle, creepy, and pure, with just one big jumpscare at the end, after it's spent a lot of time slowly winding up the fear jack-in-the-box. It should be suitable for your purposes.
Note that the game ends after the player descends a random amount of staircase, but that the player can increase the amount of time the game lasts by proceeding more slowly down the stairs, or refusing to procede at all, or after playing the game a few times, by stopping when they detect the end is near.
Thus, I would not measure 'courage' purely in terms of the amount of time spent playing. Instead, you would need to record their behavior through a keylogger and interpret standing still as cowardice.
A better metric might be to simply tell them they can play as long as they want to, and measure how many minutes until they choose to quit. (Some players have told me they refused to even play, they just looked at the screen and heard the sound and went "nope!")
But that decision could be influenced by other social factors than "courage." People do choose to play scary games on purpose, after all. If they're invested, they might keep playing it until they beat it, precisely BECAUSE they're scared, and loving every minute of it. If they're jaded and not easy to scare, they might quit out of boredom. If I were at a party, I probably wouldn't be as invested in Amnesia the Dark Descent as I would be playing the game alone. It might take more social courage to play a game (any game) in front of a random group of strangers than to play it alone, and the genre or emotional content of the game could be irrelevant. And so on.
All of these issues stem from the same place: A scary game is not a threatening life-or-death experience, and thus does not require "courage" to play. A scary game is actually a safe environment in which to experiment with fear, without putting yourself into any actual danger, and fans of horror in any medium are keenly aware of this.
Good luck. I know I don't need to tell a student of psychology that it's difficult to measure these things and easy to misinterpret the results. But SCP-087 is probably as pure and simple yet effective of a horror game as you're going to find.
Also, free.
