Engineering scares with Glen Schofield

Who doesn’t love a good scary game? Plenty of people, I’m sure, but I’m not talking to them. Nothing is better than matching wits with evil and barely escaping with your life. The art of horror is pretty well explored in the movies and TV, but gaming is a different animal altogether.

“Well, in movies and television, the camera’s locked,” said Glen Schofield, CEO of Striking Distance Studios, in a fireside chat with GamesBeat’s Rachel Kaser at GamesBeat Summit 2022. “So the director always knows where the camera is looking. They can scare the viewer because they know where it’s [the camera] going to be. And they know where the scare is going to come from. In a videogame, the character, or in most cases, the camera is in the player’s hands. And so you don’t know where they’re gonna turn the camera at that time.”