Background Info on the Games

An extremely theatrical, psychological, and unnerving horror game made by the company Red Barrels. The game was first released on PC in 2013 and on all other consoles by mid-2014. It is the first installment of the trio game series, soon to be quartet come the end of this year I believe. Ever since my discovery of YouTube as a preteen and the walkthrough gamers that ruled YouTube during that time, I fell in love with the horror gaming genre! Specifically this game with its critical scares, walkthroughs, and gripping story. The game itself is incredibly controversial just with displayed pictures from the game on it’s Steam page. Although I have a somewhat favouritism of the game, and horror games over the past decade and a half in general, I still wanted to go ahead and see what the rest of society thinks of the series. Whether it’s excitement for the fourth installment coming soon or simply the joy is still brings gamers closing on a decade since it’s release.

The second game I’m comparing Outlast to is titled Five Nights at Freddy’s, a game made by Scott Cawthon and his development team. Ironically enough, the game was released around early August of 2014 very close to Outlast’s final console release date. This game is arguably just as if not scarier than Outlast in some aspects. The gaming method behind the two is different, as Outlast is more run and hide exploration, FNAF is more sit still and don’t mess up or you die. However, the FNAF creators have extended a hand into the run and hide gameplay with their most recent gaming FNAF: Security Breach, released in 2021. In conclusion, both games have an exceptional fan base, and community. And I, alongside hopefully many others, get very excited when I hear of updates or more content from the two games.

To gather information from society, I used the Twitter API to pull tweets relative to the game and conducted sentiment analysis on the controversial thoughts the public may have to this game. Retweets were not used, as I wanted direct quotations from every tweet and their user.

Sentiment Analysis on Both Games

As you can see with these four graphs, I ran a Bing sentiment analysis on both game tweets and looking at the FULL Analysis of both: We see the extensive list of sentiment words for both games. Outlast had a much more heightened list and was more split between the words contribution to sentiment. Meanwhile FNAF had a less extensive but way more words attached to negative sentiment. I also added a simplified graph of sentiment analysis above 1 for both. Looking at the results of that, we see no more than three words max for both games. Within Outlast’s simplified graph, we now see the change in shift of reigning negative sentiment. We also see the word, trophy but that may be picked up for the trophy award system for completing unique and different/difficult tasks within the game. As for FNAF the two words contained aren’t as sentimental, “breach” and “ready”. I believe “breach” is contained for the title of their most recent game, “Security Breach”, but ‘ready’ is fair game and I’m sure twitter users speaking on their anticipation for the release of a new game already or simply streamers ‘ready’ to play the game.

Emotional Sentiment Between Games

With our next visualization comparison, I conducted an emotional sentiment analysis between the two, NRC. Starting off with Outlast, it provided a clearer and legitimate set of output words. The majority sentiment of the words were in the description of “anticipation”, I also found it funny that the word ‘twitch’ was nearly a maximum negative sentiment. I assume they could release twitch to the physical tick that some people live with, but I want to believe that R is well aware of the power the streaming platform Twitch has, and is simply jealous. Moving onto FNAF, the output list of words was way bigger than Outlast. We see a way bigger variety of the sentiments that the words fall into. Outlast had the majority of anticipation, but FNAF not only has anticipation in the ranks, but more negative, a splash of anger, and surprisingly a trust sentiment(s). I could definitely understand the vaster range FNAF has over Outlast, especially in the positive sense. Outlast is extremely bloody and gore with potential for incredibly graphic and disturbed scenes at any and all times within their games and gameplay. Although, FNAF still has made it’s mark on the horror industry, it’s fear implemented in gamers was strictly from the jump scares, lore and genuine love for the game that was held. I, being apart of the love for Outlast and its community, I truly do love the game, but that doesn’t change the zero hesitation Red Barrels display to add those pop up displays of questionable violence on the big screen.