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(I could not find proper previous topic for discussing Amnesia in the members area and I want write this as honestly as possible)

I finished Amnesia recently and have had some time to let it settle. My overall feeling is that I liked it and that I would recommend it to people - especially looking forward to having a friend over and see him play it, it will be very amusing to see his reactions. The atmosphere is very good, the physical interaction works very well and of course the powerlessness feels far closer to what I would expect to feel like were all of this to be real. For most of the game I did not even realize this type of play is uncommon, which is its greatest strength but also in a strange way shows weaknesses. While I remember having played the demo to Penumbra at some point and to be 'intrigued' by the interaction and running-away mechanic and in Amnesia I was 'sold' the first moment I fell on the ground and had to struggle to get up again, this also created a small problem for me because while it does these things well it suddenly became evident to me how much further there is to go with them. Which is a good thing! It shows excellence has been met at such a level new things are possible.

So perhaps to approach this in several topics, it is a wall of text as it is.

Freight
So many says they cannot play the game for more than 5 minutes - but I remember a point at which I realized I was no longer scared, only unnerved. The problem is I think that 'freight' comes from being in possibly fatal danger and is enhanced (as you point out in the in-game torture comments!) by knowing ahead that you will be exposed. The later went quite well with escaping from small rooms in which I was hidden and due to lack of oil having to walk through unlit hallways. I still panicked (as opposed to just being shocked) at times, which I consider an achievement for a game.

But the problem mainly was that I 'emasculated' the hunter (for most of the game I thought he was the darkness) in three ways. Firstly, I realized that if he started breaking doors down all I had to do is hide around a further corner. In the dungeons this happened in the kitchen, he broke down the door and I hid behind a counter until he left. It made me feel powerful because I could do about anything I liked without being in possibly fatal danger - at most I would have to run to a room and hide around a corner. Secondly, the hunter did catch me at some point and the game loaded me to be not too far away. While still rigorously unpleasant to be close to the hunter and running away from him, I no longer fell scared knowing that if I hid all happened was a black screen with text. Thirdly, the big bolted doors being a safe exit reminded me it was a game because unlike me the monster could not skip 'levels'.

Something worth noting was that when I walked through a room and found what I thought to be 'the' dead hunter I thought for a moment: 'what can it be - of course! I have become so confident that the monster itself has succumbed to the darkness!', which of course was proven wrong. Perhaps this would have been a good route to go - to introduce a 'worse' thing once the original threat had become less potent. Especially in the later levels the monsters were not scary at all and I walked through dark corridors without a worry and even just looked at them, but it felt like the game never recognised this and I felt like I had escaped from the game rather than from the monster. At some point water became safe, too - which was odd and made me feel powerful.

Towards the end I also had 'freight fatigue' - there is only so much blood and nastiness I can take before my brain just stops processing it. The torture chambers towards the end suffered from this. However, the scariest thing in the entire game was in one of those: just after the iron maiden opening suddenly I imagined stepping in to it. I did not and just thinking about it still makes me shudder. Because that feels like such an acute, painful thing to do that the mere thought is horrid.

But I want to emphasise that when the game worked, it worked really well. For most of the first three hours I was scared quite a lot. I just started empowering myself too soon.

Player-avatar
Going insane, having blurred vision, being startled - all worked really, really well. It made me feel like I was in a real body. Especially when Daniel goes mad and there are spiders crawling on the walls and, worse, beetles on my screen it felt very good. In a way you portrayed the mind of a mad man quite well. My favourite moments were when Daniel was barely conscious and I had to drag him over a bridge. Manipulating objects to the point of opening doors on a creak is incredibly real and in a hurry removing objects from a door so I can open it as nerve-wrecking as can be. It felt incredibly real somehow. My compliments on this: I think the various shaders and camera FOV must have been very well chosen. I underestimated the power of manipulation in this area. Especially in mild fright things kept blurring and because initially I never got a glance of the hunter, this was a subtle reminder of the madness and unknown horror of it all. The most 'real' thing was being hurt - the viewpoint takes such a jolt that it feels almost physically painful and I would have avoided painful things for no other reason than to avoid that sensation.

No doubt I am even forgetting things I really liked because it felt so natural.

This is one of the points, however, where I suddenly realized that showing strength highlights weaknesses. Beyond his mind, I had no body awareness. Opening doors and throwing rocks all happened with invisible hands. At first I did not question this because it felt normal. But at some point I felt this contributed to me not being scared - I am sitting on my desktop chair not in danger. Daniel in-game sometimes did not feel in danger because when sane he is again a floating camera. When I played Zeno Clash (a first person rough fist-fighting game) I realized that seeing hands is very important in being aware of danger, especially when interacting and falling over.

What I blatantly missed was that when crouching in a corner I saw my knees, or when hugging a wall I saw one hand resting on it. I missed seeing a hand shaking when opening a door. I missed seeing myself dragging stones and seeing how heavy they were. Because being in danger with Daniel's physical presence would have been far more hurtful to me - hands becoming cut and crusty with blood nearing the end of the game would have been a horrifying, continual reminded of how frail and weak I was. These are things which are never done but are so much more personal. If the monster can cut my belly and I bleed to death that is a terrible prospect. If I just fall over after a few super-imposed cutting wounds that does not feel like I am being brutally murdered. Also it is easy to imagine that during madness I would have to steady myself against the wall, lamp shaking violently in my other hand - that would have been majestic.

These things are incredibly hard to realize, which I notice myself working on it presently. But that I started missing them showed that I had opened up a part of me which wanted there to be a physical Daniel in danger. Conversely, most 1st person games offer me no full body and I do not care because it is not required. But here I remember being hidden behind a wall and suddenly wondering where my body was. I would not have reached into the acid vat in the kitchen should I have seen my own hand. I would have gladly sacrificed the entirety of the prison block levels if it had meant more body awareness.

Also I quite simply must note that in real life I can climb up walls as long as my finger-tips reach the edge if I think it saves me from monsters. Not being able to scale things is something which I get agitated over because it is blatantly impossible a character would have this limitation.

Puzzles
I thought the puzzles were good in an adventure-game kind of way. Though a lot of them were solved by throwing a rock at something. The 'stuck bridge' puzzle was solved by some people by jumping on it rather than throwing a rock on it, but that was amusing to me and felt good. Grabbing a rock and throwing it feels very real.

The machine-room counter-weight puzzle was good, I felt like I solved that 100% on my own (though I believe I did not have to raise the normal bridge to check on its counterweight stance?). The closing door in the machine room staying open when blocked was a very nice element because it saved me time and (I think) was not needed - which makes me feel like I did something clever beyond what you require me to do! The 'broken staircase puzzle' did not give me the chance to make a bridge, it just locked into place, which annoyed me a little, I had no chance to do anything. Some things were odd - sometimes I thought some things were physically inconsistent, like when the staircase had to bend the pipe - because my (cough) thrown rocks did not affect it at all.

The hint system, I must to my annoyance say, considered me an absolute boob: 'Your cell is locked. Find another way out' got a very annoyed snort from me. I remember you finding it hard to find a balance in this, but I must admit the hints and on-screen messages at times treated me like such an idiot I felt insulted.

Narrative
The story is serviceable but I must admit only Agrippa resonated with me. My problem was a little like the body awareness - at some point I wondered what Daniel and Alexander did in the evenings - they must read a lot of books, but which books? Did they keep live pets other than for torture? Finding out more about them in a 'at my leisure' way highlighted that I 'could not see my knees': does Alexander ever joke about anything? Do they ever get drunk together? Does Daniel ever miss England? Do they play chess, pool or are they fencing? Allergies? Is breakfast taken together? Do they read newspapers? Interact with the village? Etc.

I knew precisely enough about the characters to care about the story but not enough to care about the characters. I picked up books but they were all identical - every flash back revealed only more horrible things. The mention of Napoleon and Alexander's Egyptian relics were exactly what I needed, though, it started to feel like it was all real (and more horrible).

However, towards the end the scale of structures became so immense that the characters felt even smaller. Even the terracotta army was not stored in such large hallways. How, pray tell, could they build that in their time (or even ours)? I suppose Myst has the excuse that as the ages are written so they can design just about anything, but Alexander must have had a slave army to build even one of those pillars, let alone the room. The last chamber is physically impossible, I am sure, to build underneath a castle with the materials used. It was not even serviceable. Walking through it I felt like I walked through an end-boss chamber from a shooter which has to over-compensate because things need to 'get bigger'. You had Agrippa hanging from beams, a functioning brazen bull! These things were very unnerving! Large chambers feed into that sentiment of 'this is all so big' which removes all personal connection for me. It did not feel like Daniel was in 'way too deep', rather I lost perspective and sort-of started forgetting him.

I am afraid I can only conclude the narrative did not work well for me because it lacked details. This reflects, like the body awareness, on my lack of fright: if I do not know whether Daniel has to give up smoking because he hates German cigarettes, somehow I care a lot less about whether he is mauled to death.

But I must say my favourite scene was when you have a played flashback and hear the horses and Daniel talks of taking the farmer and children. It felt fresh and terrible because 'as a ghost' I could not do anything in that scene.

--

I hope this reaction is of some use, because I certainly thought the game to be good at the new things it did - but doing the things well highlighted where there are still more details to be 'filled in' for something to be excruciatingly real.

Congratulations (Thomas) on the game! It is great to see how well it fared and I am certainly becoming a lot more enticed about future games!

Thanks a bunch for the detailed feedback!

Yeah, this was something we struggled with quite a bit. Our goal was simply that unexperienced players should have it pretty easy to escape enemies, while more experienced, who we though would try sneaking past and the like, would be in for a much harder time. But in the end, as you say, it still becomes very easy to avoid the buggers. However, this works at the start since you are not sure exactly how the enemies work. And as you say, this goes away later on because you become so familiar with the enemies. If we had had more resources I would have had one or two more enemies, to show new things to the player and never let them be familiar.

I think this is a valuable, lesson: When elements of the game are fresh, you can get away with a lot of stuff, because the player has not learned enough and will imagine properties that might not be there (for example that the player thinks he is in danger when he is not). So keeping in mind no to be repetitive is a good guideline.

This is very interesting because we have gotten feedback from players who disliked the parts you mention, feeling they pulled them out of the game world. I wonder if this is just a problem of imagination, or if there is something else missing. For example, I am thinking that some kind of "training" at start, where the player learns to accept how the game works might have gotten better results. Instead we just throw the player into the game, with sounds of panting, blurry vision and so on.
This is VERY hard to get right and I think the only good way is to have some kind of dynamic system. What is easy and self-evident for some, is very hard and non-evident to others. It is quite an interesting problem.

Regarding Details:
Interesting descriptions! For Daniel, we wanted the player to become Daniel and thus not say too much of his character. However, I agree that more mundane details would have been nice to have to contrast the more horrible parts.
It is a matter of us not having place for more stuff. The game is pretty much packed with notes and stuff. Still, I guess a few more personal notes could have been slipped in here and there. Need to think about this.

You're very welcome :)


That is a very good guideline. I suppose it is especially difficult because since my death depends on whether I learn how to 'play' the enemy I spend a lot of my thoughts on figuring out how he works in a non-narrative way. It is incredibly hard not to start thinking 'out of character' because your life depends on it.

I think this felt odd because Daniel never stops being scared of them whereas I did - so he and I diverged throughout the game. It is a missing step in his emotional development, perhaps... but this is interesting! With Amnesia you have created a new 'verb' for games, in a way, because I now realize that the way in which Daniel is scared and what he is scared of could vary throughout a game and tell a story of its own - whereas pre-Amnesia I did not know well how intimate reactions would work. As an example, Daniel could 'learn' to be scared of some things and begin to 'accept' other monsters. Seeing the dead monster could remove his fright of the monster (and indeed, he throws a rock near one later on), but then when he realizes that the monsters are not 'the darkness' he could become neurotic about whatever it may be then. I suppose this is taking part of the player's journey and putting it in the player.

I suppose the film trope database would call making an avatar take into account the acceptance of these things as 'lampshading' :)


Having played Zeno Clash some more I find the part during which I reach the highest amount of virtual body awareness is when the character is knocked down and with blurred vision tries to get up, so there may be a pattern for me - like in Amnesia I start to frantically press the keyboard and shake the mouse going 'get up, get up', apparently saying this at myself because I feel I can influence getting up.

The effect may work both ways - not having a fixed, clear 'floating camera' view of the world means some players loose the ability to 'read' the world because the character interferes, whereas the floating camera (as happens in the walking segments of Zeno Clash as well) removes my awareness because it feels like I control a tank, not a physical body. I prefer a 'muddy' free area.

To compare Amnesia some more, though, I thought it was far more involving than shortly having replayed Half Life 2: Episode Two, in which you press a button to open a door. Having played Amnesia, opening a door by pressing 'e' feels like I am virtually physically disabled and I got turned off at the game because of how physically locked-in I felt quite quickly. All the characters are upright, 'clean', acting like little tanks with human skin. I suppose you have ruined a lot of games for me by showing a better way! :) It is a dog-eat-dog, of course, because HL2 ruined a lot of games for me by having emotive characters.

Though I remember large stretches of Amnesia as a game, a part where I was nearly insane and ran over the bridge at the end-game, with blurry vision, I remember as vividly as a dream. This may be an important factor too - evidently I prefer to remember parts of it as dreams rather than 'a game', but many players may simply prefer to have transparent awareness.

But the sensation Amnesia, panting and and blurry vision and all, is something I will happily look at again when doing the initial steps of the camera/post-processing for my next game. When I was in the sewers and had the blurry vision in full light I realized that games frequently mimic camera flaws but rarely 'brain flaws'. Somehow not being able to 'clearly' read the screen made me more involved, rather than making the screen a hindrance. So I think that even though my game is about love it will fit quite well to blur, skew, &c.

It is one of these crazy things where you skew the camera and lower the player height and suddenly I realize that the camera is not some sacred entity which you can only tie to a bone. So again, well done, the more I think about it, the more opportunities I see. Well done indeed :D


I realize it is impossible to gather enough data to make this work well - time delay between finding and solving a puzzle probably has no statistical significance unless combined with a lot of factors. In that way I do not mind it because I know of very few games which did this right (and it is preferable to my alt+tabbing to Chrome). Perhaps hiding the hints in Daniels self-exposition would be nice, or having a more dedicated hint system which I choose the level of at the start. Or just having single-word hints. Or having a supply of mind-altering drugs which inflicts a health and sanity penalty but give you blurred visual clues (which by not being descriptive have no chance of telling me what I already know).


I had to think about this for a while, but I thought of something which might be useful. Say you take one extra lockable texture. The player walks up to a book (any book in the level) and picks it up. You make sure it takes 5ms before the book is in full view: during the same time in a separate thread you lock the texture, look up the XML book file, and dynamically render a title to the book (through vector-based glyph rendering like FreeType) and age it through various compositional techniques, unlock the texture and in the rendering modulate between the place-holder texture and the dynamic texture, making the 'actual' title appear sharp and crisp. The upshot of this would be that one man spending an afternoon on an XML file would have created a thousand books which can appear throughout the game. More than any player will ever look at, even, which means the supposed depth of detail in your world is 'as much as anyone can take'.

You could expand this and create a 'look inside' feature to reveal a few pages by creating some files which in a HTML-way describe how pages look. Again, with some clever compositional techniques you can just write the raw text with no concern about the formatting or 'ageing' of the texture, even bypass the entire texture-artist step. I suspect this is how Myst III rendered their books, but you could also just write a page or two for some books, like you see in many adventure games, or even just go to project Gutenberg and just download some old books! It would take you a few days but it is not logistically impossible in the way unique textures would be. It would be an interesting copyright situation, too. :)

Notes, such as on a case of import cigars (;)) could load in the same way. Showing the note on-screen would even make a distinction between your spoken story-critical notes and the 'ambient storytelling' that is in the books and various details; i.e.; important books become blue and are audio, normal books do not but it still shows me your world is alive.

I thought about Daniel this morning and realized that I mostly know a sequence of events, i.e., if I remember he goes to Brennenburg I remember what happens next. But I have little emotional memory, which I think creates a separate index; I can think 'how tragic what happened' and I go to Egypt and Brennenburg and to the torture cells without specific order. I suppose more emotional detail can create separate indices which allow you to keep the story in your mind in a different form than a thread.

It is exciting to discuss this, I find :) and makes me want to play the game again.

EDIT:

The parasol was a good mention - browsing paintings just now I suddenly remembered the parasol conversation. Details like that do very much resonate with me.

I haven't finished Amnesia yet. I'm. Not. Reading. This. Thread. Before. I'm. Done.

Good heavens, Michaël, find it in yourself that you do not!

It is a cause of bad luck to go back stage before seeing the show :)

I've finished Amnesia yesterday. So now I can read this thread. :)


I experienced the same thing. I stopped being afraid because Amnesia was so well designed as a game (as in almost completely abolishing the frustration I commonly feel with games).

But I felt that this mental emasculation was a fault on my part. I wasn't playing my role properly and was taking advantage of the "weaknesses" in the game's design. I was behaving like a gamer! And felt pretty bad about that.

I wonder if it would be possible to tweak the design to encourage people to play their part better.

I must admit that for me, role-playing was much easier to do when there was no real danger. When I was just being scared by the noise and invisible things and I was hiding sort of for the fun of it. Later in the game, when there was actual danger, i.e. when a monster could come up to me and kill my character, I felt more inclined to "cheat". I guess at that point, the game became a power struggle, and I was using everything at my disposal to win. Sadly this included behavior is not supported by the fiction (such as allowing my character to die on purpose because I knew the game would get easier after).

Again, I don't feel the right solution to this problem lies in brute force, in making it impossible for the player to "cheat". I think the correct solution must be in finding a way to improve the desire (and pleasure) in the player to play-act, to perform their role in the story (and not to "play to win"). For that, perhaps character death needs to be abolished entirely, so that the experience never turns into a power struggle.

I wonder if a large part of Amnesia's scariness does not comes from its lack of proper death. For example, I have seen comments saying that once they understood that they should not worry about dying, since it was part of the experience, they could relax and get more immersed / frightened. This is really interesting as a relaxed player seems also to be one that is more afraid.

We are actually gonna do some test regarding this and see how changing player death, change the level of immersion in the players. My prediction is that players, as you seem to do, reverts to a gameplay-like behavior and things go lost.

Conversely, you could make the experience of death unpleasant without killing the player. For instance, if the monster grabs him force the player to twist and shake (both in-character and in real life) to shake him off, sometimes failing to the point where the player goes so insane he finds himself waking up but only when the player does nothing it is fatal. It would be important that his is unpleasant rather than difficult... and it allows you to have the monster sometimes catch the player even when hiding so every time you hide you are completely uncertain.

The moments when Daniel falls on the ground incapacitated were very good, I think playing on such panic could be quite interesting.

Speaking of which, who were those enemies/monsters anyway?  Did I miss the explanation of them in the story somehow? What are they doing there? Why do they attack Daniel?

Concerning death, I think it should be the end. The end of the game. No chance to try again. But as storytellers, we should make this ending satisfying. Which in practice probably means that we won't have our character die. How many movies or novels do you know where the protagonist dies? Very few! But in games it's so common that it is part of the design conventions.

I summary, I found Amnesia's design at its strongest when it was doing new things, and at its weakest where it was working with conventions. I had little patience for the puzzles, I didn't like actual confrontations with enemies (though I loved hiding from them), and I'm a bit uncomfortable with the setting and the narrative, which struck me as a bit cliched and also a bit too "manly" (Hire a woman writer for your next project! ;) )

I'm certain that part of this feeling is simply caused by my personal bias against games. And perhaps what I disliked is precisely the thing that is helping Amnesia be so successful commercially. So I find it hard to criticize. It feels like you've found a good compromise. Which doesn't stop me from being very curious about your next project, since you've declared that you'll be exploring the innovative path further.

Amnesia was one of the most impressive immersive experiences I've had with games. Mostly thanks to the combination of graphics, sound design and simple "low level" rules (like "you get frightened in the dark" and "step into the light to calm down"). The physical simulation of opening doors and drawers work well for me functionally (which is exceptional in and of itself because most games get this wrong) but I don't feel it contributed greatly to my feeling of immersion.

Amnesia is also by far the most relentlessly scary game I've played. Especially because of the sound. I really loved how the soundtrack just didn't stop throwing more heavy beats, sighs, screams, heart beats, etc at me. This kind of extremity is rare in games. I admire that a lot! It's like suddenly Death Metal errupted when everybody was still playing Glam Rock.

I do wonder, though, how well all of this would translate to other sets of emotions. As we have experienced ourselves with The Path, horror is easy. You can get away with the weirdest things in a horror context. I may not personally think these things are weird, but other people do (they are convinced we must be on drugs when we design our games). And in any other context than horror, they reject them. I guess we'll find out, since both Jeroen and Auriea and I are working on non-horror games and we'll certainly be influenced/inspired by Amnesia.

This is a bit vague, but there is an event early on in the game that explains their origin sort of ;)

Yeah, this is a big question for me too. Seeing how some people react in videos to Amnesia, makes me want to evoke that kind of response on more "serious" matters. Which is something that will be a goal for the next game.

I do very much think that developing code and a method which does Amnesia-like things and being able to apply this to non-horror genres will be a huge step forward but it will indeed also need some key to having people accept it. I would consider things like extreme obsessive love, drunkenness, depression and euphoria to be likely candidates but it would be more interesting to do it at subtle moments (like the smell of a rose making the screen 'frost' with petal-shapes or a cold beverage removing the blur of hyperthermia). But I think this needs a game in which transforming things is good rather than making things less easy to do.

On a sideline, I do think Amnesia and The Path actually share a rare thing, which is a true sense of horror. In most media, but particularly film and games, horror is (ironically) a shambling undead thing, guts-and-gore pornography with little emotional resonance. For all it's faults, when we released Korsakovia, some people responded with what seemed to be genuine disgust, not just fright. They found it unpleasant, but coercive, and then all the more upsetting for the lack of catharsis. That's interesting to me, because contemporary audiences are trained in a horror reflex that is more about masturbatory release than the deeper, almost spiritual trauma that traditional horror is/was designed to evoke. The Grimms fairy tales simply do not belong in the same category as the Saw movies. But I don't turn away from horror as an easy mark, more that it holds a portal to a deep truth: so when I think horror, I think Artaud, and the shattering of the easy surface, the Lovecraftian reminder of the forms in the deep. I love Artaud, he is my marker:

"We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all".

Substitute theatre for games, and you have an even truer sentiment. If Artaud lived today he would build notgames!

True enough.
But I would also like to sing about the beauty of life, sometimes. :)

With Amnesia, I feel that much of what people perceive as fear is just basic reactions without any deep thought behind them. I like to think that the scares in Amnesia are a class above "jump out of closet"-scares, I still do not think they have any really "deepness". For example, in Lovecraft's Shadow of the Time, the fear comes from considering the insignificance of man in a cosmic perspective. I was hoping to get something like this out of Amnesia and have the player being disturbed because they contemplate that they might themselves have been capable of doing what Daniel did. Judging from reactions this did not really happen and the next step for me is try and get to this kind of depth.

I really like the distinction made between horror and terror by theorists like Noel Carroll. He talks about one being the fear of a body in the dark, the other of actually falling over the corpse and being confronted with it. Ironically, in these terms, games are really quite brilliant at horror, but quite bad at terror - and actually, I think Amnesia is unusually good at that. But then there is this other level, which is more (this sounds a bit like i'm a complete tosser, but), dunno.... spiritual vertigo. That there is no floor, and no walls, and just a void of empathy, of morality, of humanity.

Erk. That did sound bad. Anyway. The interesting thing if players were not contemplating themselves carrying out Daniel's actions is that if they are regular players, they do far worse on a regular basis. Have you played Prototype? Jesus, I got slaughter-ennui off that. Loved the game, just loved it in terms of a genuinely dark, dark story ("p.s. player, you're not a human being, you're a bioweapon, a virus who only thinks it's human because it's infected with the memory of the corpse it's stolen..." HELLO!?!?), and the parkour is fabulous, and the city is amazing, but it got to a point where I wasn't offended by ripping the skin/head/organs/feet off innocent civilians so much as just quite bored of it. And what would have been interesting would have been if the avatar had got bored as well, but that's another thing. So we have all of these incredibly horrific acts that are mainstream activities, not even one-offs but grinding, the minute-by-minute neccessities required to just get from one end of Central Park to another. So how do we get more extreme than that, or is that even an answer?

I guess what I'm saying is that it's really hard to project a genuine, deeper sense of empathy with the abuse of power, as abusing power in a safe environment is the bedrock of so many games. Powerlessness, on the other hand, Amnesia did spectacularly well. I like powerlessness as it fucks with the primal instinct of play. That you have power and you are rewarded for this power, and survival horror games work off a delay system where you defer the manifestation of the power and its reward, but the deal is we all know it's there. Start screwing around with that, and you are in less well-lit territory.

I'm rambling (not enough sleep) but this is great stuff...

While the players did not contemplate if they could do the action. It is quite common for players to start hating Daniel. This is very interesting as it makes me think that if I had made Daniel more "seductive" to inhabit, then players might have made a choice early on that become Daniel more closely. Then as they found out about his choices, they would have put a lot more into being Daniel and perhaps would deal with it in another way.

There has also been people who have in various ways argue in favor of Daniel. For example some have said that drinking the Amnesia potion was equal to suicide and thus he could not be accountable. Others blamed it on Alexander and said that Daniel was tricked. I cannot recall anybody thinking of it in a personal level (like I hoped), but these responses where interesting nevertheless.

I am annoyed I did not do a proper survey early on, but here are some info case there is interest:
http://frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-4126.html

Regarding prototype. I do not think that kind of violence has sensitized people for Amnesia. Because of the lack of gore (and anything graphical early on really), people seemed to be much more affected. As an example I watched a playthrough of someone who had previously played Dead Space, etc and upon arriving in the torture chambers he actually got silent and had for a while a hard time cracking jokes. And I think it is possible to go way further with those kinda feelings. Especially if it brought into a more familar and "close-to-home" setting (gothic castles are pretty much fantastic settings)

Why do we want to make people feel bad?

I do not want them to feel bad, but rather reflect upon on themself and learn something. It is also a way of in a safe way trying out the spectra of human emotions. I do not want to feel sorrow and be afraid about real life things, but they are part of being human, and it is essential that we can live through these things. And through art we can experience this without destroying our lives. I think many good things can come from feel bad.

True. But I think there's also a lot of things that people don't realize about joy and hope that art can give them access too.

I don't want to "discriminate" against any emotions. Living is a rich experience. I don't want to be protected from feeling sad or depressed. I want to experience it all. Likewise I don't want to be content with simple fun or happiness. I want joy and delight. I want the sublime.

I think art enables us to see things we wouldn't otherwise see. It's not just a device for learning how to cope with chaos. Or to protect us from bad feelings. It's a device that allows us to get in touch with that chaos. Without art, we would live life with a much more limited idea of existence. Art creates a connection to the cosmos, the divine.