Tim Kavanagh/Millennium Images, UK
I’M WANDERING the corridors of a derelict hospital. The place was abandoned following the mysterious disappearances of a woman in a coma, then several other patients. Strange noises have been reported coming from inside. Nobody knows what’s going on. It’s pretty spooky in here – dimly lit, with peeling paint and rusty doors. I screw up the courage to open one of them and – BAM! – a bloodied zombie girl leaps out at me. My heart starts racing.
That zombie gets everyone, says Connor Lloyd at Buckinghamshire New University, UK. He should know. He designed the game and has all his players wired up so he can monitor their heart rate, breathing and sweating to find out what scares players. “I’m interested in how games affect people’s minds,” he says. But when Ciarán O’Keeffe, head of psychology at the university, came across the game, he realised it could do much more. O’Keeffe is now adapting it to study ghosts.
Rationalists may scoff, but it’s only human to feel haunted. Many more people believe in ghosts and claim to have encountered one than you might suppose (see “Anyone for ghosts?”). “I think it’s quite arrogant of us to ignore these experiences and to say they’re all deluded,” says O’Keeffe, who is one of only a handful of researchers studying ghost sightings and supposedly haunted locations. Of course, he doesn’t believe ghosts are real. What he wants to know is why we get spooked. Over the years, researchers have singled out various physical, psychological and environmental factors. But debate continues about which ones are actually involved, how they create ghostly experiences and why some of us are more affected than others. An immersive game could be the best way to…
