Over this last month, three separate video games have announced additions to their game that will be meant to help people with phobias thalassophobia and arachnophobia according to Axios. The games working on helping people with these phobias are: Horizon Forbidden West, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Hogwarts Legacy.
To explain these phobias a bit more, thalassophobia is the fear of deep water and arachnophobia is the fear of spiders. Horizon Forbidden West is working on an option to add pulsing and glowing effects to people who are underwater and eliminates the ability for people to run out of air while underwater. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Hogwarts Legacy have both added an “arachnophobia safe mode,” which will change the appearance of specific monsters to make them less “spider-like.”
While these are not the first games to give their games a mode to fight against phobias, these are among the biggest titles to do so. According to Automation-media, there have been a few games in the past who have added arachnophobia modes, with one of the first being a game called Grounded back in 2020, which added a slider from zero to six, with zero portraying spiders as normal and six removing any resemblance to the spiders.
A couple of other games in the past couple years have added arachnophobia modes in their games including Kill it With Fire and Webbed. Webbed in particular is an interesting example because the player plays as a cute pixelated spider, instead of trying to kill them as with other video games.
These changes seem to be done to increase the accessibility of the games to people with phobias, and while most of these examples are meant to help people with arachnophobia, Horizon Forbidden West is an example of a game that is trying to help people with more varied phobias such as the fears of deep water. With the wide variety of phobias out in the world, it will be interesting to see how many other games will continue the idea of adding phobia options to make their games more accessible to a wider variety of audiences.