Gaming after Dark - Visual Patterns and Their Significance for Atmosphere and Emotional Experience in Video Games

Design Patterns help a range of designers, architects, and others. However, there is surprisingly little such guidance for game artists. In this paper, we present our look at late 19th century art works and the emergent set of visual features commonly used to create an atmosphere of horror in visual art. Further, we show how we transformed these features into a set of seven patterns to be used in interactive artistry, based on an analysis of six well known survival horror games. Finally, we provide the full description of one of these patterns, the Visual Contrast.