FOBi: VR Fun, With Phobias
FOBi is an episodic VR gaming experience that gives players the opportunity to immerse themselves and have “fun” with various phobias. Spiders, needles, darkness, dead bodies and even a sinister looking clown wielding an ominous red balloon. It sounds terrifying, but then you play it and realize — FOBi is more about fun and interaction than it is about fear.
“That’s why it’s called FOBi with an F,” says the VR game’s creator Joe Halper, “the whole point is for the player to have fun interacting in immersive virtual environments, while also experiencing some common phobias they may or may not have.”
In a way, FOBi has found its own niche within the VR space. Sure, some players will find it scary, but the goal isn’t to terrify. In fact, while playing the one episode, I instead felt like its goal was to charm me with spookiness. To me it felt decidedly like a neighborhood haunted house on Halloween night. The lighting was creepy and there were giant spiders all around (seriously, spiders are everywhere in this game), but all of the mini-jump scares and atmospheric lighting effects are done with such a wink and a smile that you can’t help but laugh while exploring the various rooms.
“With FOBi I initially focused on 1 or 2 phobias per episode,” Halper explains, “but after development of the first episode began I couldn’t help but add more. It enhanced the design and created a more engaging experience. From the beginning the goal was always to keep it fun and humorous. As I added each additional phobia I couldn’t help but laugh- knowing people would get a kick out of playing it or watching others play it. I just hope nobody has a heart attack or smashes their equipment while trying to run away from clowns, avoid dead bodies or shake giant venomous biting spiders off of their hands.”
Halper is a 20-year veteran of the entertainment and serious games industry with strong ties to studios both large and small, local and abroad. In 2012 he formed his own game studio and consulting company, Grit Games. According to him, the original purpose of FOBi was to function as a learning mechanism for VR.
“FOBi was something I created in order to independently explore and develop new practices for immersion in the VR space,” says Halper. “I wanted to dive deeper into the VR capabilities of various game engines such as Unreal Engine 4, which is what I am using to develop FOBi.”
Halper has 2 VR game titles currently in development, including FOBi, which he was inspired to make after an unexpected bout of acrophobia (fear of heights) during a demo session at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. During the conference, Halper was one of the first to try a series of experiences on the recently announced HTC VIVE. About halfway through his session, he was transitioned into a new demo without being repositioned in the VR-space beforehand. Because of this, the VR headset registered his starting location as being on the edge of a platform in the game-world, thus causing the experience to open with him staring down over an impossibly large drop. According to Halper, “Once I saw that drop, something amazing happened — something that I never really experienced before. My legs began to shake, I started to breathe heavy and even lose my balance. Because I was so immersed, my limbic system, or what some people call their ‘Lizard Brain,’ kicked into full fear, fight or flight mode. Even though I was standing on a solid floor in a convention booth my brain believed I was about to fall through the clouds.”
Halper was so impressed by the level of immersion he achieved during that particular experience that he decided to explore it further with FOBi. His initial intention was not to create a horror game, but rather to experiment with VR and, according to him, “just tickle people into having the same kind of immersion that I accidentally experienced in that GDC demo. Phobias seemed like one of the most direct ways to achieve that.”
FOBi is still in development, but the build I tried was incredibly effective at walking that line between fear and comedy. Playing the first episode, I was tasked with finding and collecting roughly a dozen large spiders roaming around an apartment building at night. Lightning was crashing outside and there appeared to be a body covered in a sheet lying in the middle of the room. Wandering around the space in VR felt similar to walking around my own (real-life) house at night. I felt safe enough, but there was something about the shadows and the dark spots that made me feel uneasy.
Things ramped up when I discovered that one of the spiders was not only venomous but also surprisingly hostile. Getting too close to it would cause the arachnid to leap onto my hand and bite me, which immediately made me let out a short yell, followed by intense laughter at the surprise and shock of it all. The venom from the spider caused my hand to rapidly develop hundreds of tiny little holes (Note: fear of holes, especially in the skin is called trypophobia) that, again, served to make me feel very uneasy, but also had me laughing at how on edge it made me feel. This culminated in a scene in which I had to grab a comically oversized needle and administer an antidote to myself by jabbing my necrotized hand and pushing the plunger of medicine down into it. Again, this action made me feel very unsettled, but the whole situation was so ludicrous I couldn’t help but smile as it progressed.
Finally, after staving off death by spider-bite, I collected the last spider and placed it in a glass jar, at which point sparklers shot off and I turned around to discover a mini-jump scare surprise that caused both Halper and myself to laugh at my reaction. Check out the video below for more reactions to this game:
While FOBi is certainly a passion project for Joe Halper and Grit Games, I think it is also a surprisingly unique and even important game. Over the years, horror games have prided themselves on pushing the boundaries of fear and, as a result, they’ve become more popular than ever. Many see Virtual Reality headsets as a way to take these already incredibly intense experiences and kick them up to 11. But, where does this type of “extreme” mentality leave users who just want a fun, spooky experience rather than a traumatizing endurance test? Personally, I would feel terrible putting someone who had never experienced horror VR into something like “Paranormal Activity VR”. But, on the flip side, I would greatly enjoy putting new users into FOBi (as long as they didn’t have severe pre-existing phobias) and watching them have fun with the fears presented.
To put this game into a greater context, I imagine that most fans of horror don’t start out with The Exorcist, but rather, they start with Goosebumps and then work their way up over time. FOBi is goosebumps. It is a good-humored, phobia playground that provides an incredibly fun experience which respects the power of Virtual Reality and its potential impact on those who are new to it.
People who haven’t tried VR, especially room scale VR with touch controllers, don’t have a complete understanding of how intense a Virtual Reality experience can be. It is dangerous to effectively trap someone in a horror experience within a VR headset, because no matter how comfortable they are with other fear-related media, they will not be able to prepare themselves for how deeply they are affected by the immersion of quality VR. That is why it’s important for users to have options. Just as Goosebumps is targeted at kids and The Exorcist is targeted at adults, VR should have a similar breadth of options, some targeted at VR-newbies and others targeted at those who’ve done a lot of VR and have a true understanding that what they’re seeing is not real.
FOBi fills that space beautifully, and I cannot wait to try the finished product.
**FOBi is slated for release on Vive and Oculus Touch in Q4 of 2016. Grit Games is also working to release a version for Samsung GearVR for some time in early 2017.