ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to employ evolutionary frameworks in deriving falsifiable hypotheses and “commonalities between human and animal communication". It describes how one of those evolutionary perspectives, resource holding potential theory, could serve as a basis for understanding differences among players in processing of fear content. Within the game environment, player formidability is comprised of a number of attributes held by players or their avatars. In video game play, however, that impulse may fuel behavioral responses, players enact through the control mechanisms. Horror games, then, provide spaces where players might take on roles that moderate the intensity of their emotional responses and practice survival strategies when encountering predator-like threats. Because they afford responses to dynamic changes in the virtual environment, digital games have the potential to simulate physical world experiences; potentially bringing players closer to a full-fledged fear response. Some media psychologists have suggested that digital media simply stimulate memories of similar physical world encounters.
