Common opinions on light and dark themes

There are many opinions in regard to common opinions of light and dark themes in the modern video game industry. This is shown within various video game genres being more popular than others as well as these different types of games drawing upon different potential audiences. This is shown through many light themed games are often bright and colourful and therefore appeal to a more younger audience. This is shown in a colourful, education game such as those seen on Sites such as Coolmathgames.com are usually aimed towards a younger audience. In comparison, darker themed games are tended to be commonly associated with older audiences. This is generally because audiences are more mature and understand messages and connotations with certain viewpoints, allowing them to potentially enjoy this theming more than a younger audience would. This also includes The first instalment in the Five Night’s at Freddie’s Series, with many young people being fooled into thinking it was aimed at younger children because of it’s bright colour scheme, despite this being a horror game. This has also shown by the official tally by the developers, that only 20-30% of those who contributed to ideas and coding actually did play the game at release, showing that this dark theming only attracts a certain audience.

Facts about light and dark themes

Video games often use Light and Dark themes in order to portray a certain genre in a certain way in order to resonate with the audience. Some games do this in a linear fashion, for example, the Slenderman games portray a horror themed game in a very dark setting, this is intentional to make the game feel tense and the player to be constantly on edge during the whole experience. This is intentional to increase the player’s situational awareness in order to reinforce these connotations. In addition to this, the game’s purposeful use of a single, personal light controlled by the player enforces a sort of tunnel vision, therefore further increasing situational awareness as the player only has a limited view. By knocking out the players peripheral vision, the designers are forcing the player to keep this view, as the player’s only other way to control the light is to turn it off. This is further increases the player’s situational awareness as the dark theming and lack of lighting naturally instils fear within the player, knowing that the threat of the game (The Slenderman) could be nearby at any moment, and therefore be unlikely to turn this off.

On the contrary, the game ‘ Severed ‘ is a game using a comparatively different colours. This uses the theme of intimidating monsters in combat, but however wishes to lighten this tone using light colours, because of this, in order to get across a monster’s intimidating appearance, time is focused on the monster’s visual design. This is often done by giving monster’s an unexpected, inhuman appearance, often using speed make a player think quickly about what they have seen to guess a monster’s weaknesses, often highlighting these with colours that contrast greatly with the rest of the design. In addition, a different colour pallet is used for the background area, allowing for more contrast to exist between the monster and the background. This in turn could allow the user to focus on the more ‘unnaturally’ coloured parts of the monster, those being colours that would usually not fit with the monsters colour scheme or would be natural for a typical monster.