Intense feelings about PoE's arachnids?

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Khodar wrote:

I have some bad news for you guys, you DO have arachnofobia, just a mild case of it. Non-phobics don't have any emotions seeing spiders on computer screens, and most don't care about real live ones either (for me they're just another bug that i throw out of the window or let my cat eat).

I suggest you admit it to yourself and start working on whatever the therapies for phobics are.

I know that, that's why I called it a "phobia" in my original post.

Personally I don't have much issue with live ones, it's when they're (apparently) 6 feet tall and hugely hairy and detailed and coming to eat my character that they really bother me. In other words, as it's designed to be, the game is much scarier than real life. Which is fine, great etc. but also means that it's going to set off people with even mild phobias like myself.

Like I said above, I'm fine to just power through it - but I can also tell the people saying "face your fears! free therapy!" that powering through phobia-induced discomfort doesn't make it go away, it just makes me uncomfortable for that period of time. So it'd be nice if the devs gave us a way to switch to roaches or whatever other monster and avoid the discomfort, though I certainly wouldn't demand it of them.

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say that GGG is unlikely to remove or add an alternative to spiders. It's just too much required effort to appease a tiny market segment.

This subject invariably comes up whenever new games include spiders. Which is strange to me because there are plenty of other common phobias which games play off of, like fear of the dead, fear of the dark, and even PTSD in the case of FPS games. But it's always the spiders that bear the brunt of phobic ire.

Huh. Wonder why that is.

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karoc wrote:

Like I said above, I'm fine to just power through it - but I can also tell the people saying "face your fears! free therapy!" that powering through phobia-induced discomfort doesn't make it go away, it just makes me uncomfortable for that period of time. So it'd be nice if the devs gave us a way to switch to roaches or whatever other monster and avoid the discomfort, though I certainly wouldn't demand it of them.

Actually, exposure through video games has shown success with treating phobias. Thing is, those are specifically designed video games, and I imagine they go gradually.

I have a similar situation - I'm acrophobic, and having my character fall in an MMORPG produces significant vertigo. Over time, through intentional exposure (most recently, I made a Champions Online character and gave him the "Super Jump" power - that was interesting), it's gotten a bit better, but without focused therapy it's still slow going and I suspect that mostly what it's helping is my phobia's tendency to manifest in video games.

Still, that approach might work for you or other arachnophobic fellows... just start with games which are less inherently creepy and work your way up.

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Daugvolf wrote:

This subject invariably comes up whenever new games include spiders. Which is strange to me because there are plenty of other common phobias which games play off of, like fear of the dead, fear of the dark, and even PTSD in the case of FPS games. But it's always the spiders that bear the brunt of phobic ire.

Arachnophobia is a common phobia and easy to invoke in a video game.

For instance, I'm pretty sure you have to be pretty damned acrophobic to dread falling in World of Warcraft, and there'll just be fewer people who reach that threshold.

I am confused by the concept of a phobia only of large virtual spiders but being unbothered by actual live spiders.


Spider hypothetical (pass by if thinking about spiders makes you squeemish):

I would think the walking undead would bother you more.

if spiders scare you, all the more reason to kill them fast :)

The fear response is a very deep seated response mechanism in the brain. Experiences are wired up in relation to one another and the fear response, and sometimes the initial wiring makes a mistake and thus phobias are born.

Most of the time people reinforce these by avoidance behavior, which is our innate and instinctual behavior when it comes to fear response... however every time you experience fear and then act on it, you reinforce the fear connection... which in the case of a phobia is bad.

The best response to a phobia is incremental desensitization where you retrain your brain connection to something else by showing it over and over without anything bad happening to you.

Desensitization methods in some cases have a success rate of behavior extinction around 90%.

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Wittgenstein wrote:

if spiders scare you, all the more reason to kill them fast :)

True, hehehe,
Well the main problem is that a phobia is different than a scare.
Sometimes you will be freeze yourself, or even accelerated heart than could cause of heart attack, and things like that (more in real life of course).

Personally, when seeing spiders in real life too too close when unexpected, for example, with their corpse without legs as big as a coin, or I even remember one climbing from inside the PC keyboard and going outside near my fingers, I have found myself completely frozen sometimes and without any capability of talk and move and a heart accelerated as hell, and other other times just moving my arms up and down repeteadly and crying for some seconds because of panic until being able to composure myself.

There are some things that could made impossible killing them or facing them.

And of course the moderate and gradual exposure to them could help, specially if you start with pictures or videogames. But other times the risk doesn't compensate. If they cause you to not having fun while playing and not having a great experience and all you find is an annoying feeling of disgusting, I agree the better thing to deal with it is move on from that and play other things.

Fortunately as I said I'm able to play these games, but ocasionally I can't and I try to avoid some situations. If I could choose to go killing for magic find purposes, I could select an area without spiders, in any game. If I like 2 different games the same, I am probably more inclined for the one without them or with less scary ones, for obvious reasons —fortunately PoE is way way better than any games I know, so no problems here for me, the election is very easy even with the spiders.

Being said that, I fully understand developers when they design spiders in their games; they are supposed to fear people, in the same way as a terror movie.

The one thing that is making me more and more unconfortable is like every year the games are more and more realistic, and I fear the day in which games could simulate absolutely real-appearing spiders, with 3D effects and amazing amazing realistic graphics. I hope I die before the release of those kind of games lol :P

I share this fear with you.

Some spiders in games, I can deal with. The Diablo 2 spiders? No problem. They look nasty, sure, but they don't look like a typical spider.

A spider in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow? I'm not touching that game.

I was really having a lot of fun with POE during the open beta week. I got to Act 2 on my Duelist and saw some spiffy animations with those ape enemies coming down from the tree-tops. Thought it was awesome, but then it hit me...

"New enemy type. New act. No list of enemies in this act yet... are spiders going to come hanging down next?!"

So I asked and surely people responded spiders were in Act 2 and came up walls. Now I'm not sure how that feels in comparison, but I am not even touching Act 2 at this point. The fear I experience is like if Scarecrow from Batman hit me with a fear toxin. I freeze up, sweaty palms, shivering, shortness of breath, and loss of appetite.

I plead with GGG this: it sounds silly, maybe it makes your art/graphics design team smile with glee at the job well done, but please make these places entirely optional and spiders placed in the main line be removed and replaced with another enemy type.

It disheartens me tremendously too since I really like how this game is. I don't want to completely eradicate spiders from the game, but if they were only in areas that had side-quests and such, I'd highly appreciate that and I'm sure there are many out there too.

I know what you mean. Although I don't have arachnophobia, it's definitely very different from most other games - specifically, the parts where a bunch of spiders climb up on the platform you're on. Movie style!

I actually like it because it has a slight effect on me unlike other games, but yeah :P