What makes a place seem'haunted'? Psychology, setting, and the power of suggestion all help make certain places feel more spooky. From the ghost of Al Capone to the crying Lady in Green, many otherworldly entities are said to populate Alcatraz Island. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With its long history of incarceration, brutal conditions, and several grisly murders, the stories of hauntings on Alcatraz Island are a dime a dozen.

A new indie video game publisher made its debut in Los Angeles last week: Blumhouse Games, a division of the horror movie production company co-founded by director Jason Blum in 2000. Unsurprisingly, its specialty will be horror. During the livestreamed Summer Game Fest showcase, Blum and creative lead Louise Blain announced a slate of six experimental horror games, the first of which, Fear the Spotlight, will launch later this year. Blum described the games label as "going back to our roots, with a focus on indie horror, pushing boundaries and elevating new, original stories". Like the company's movies, from Paranormal Activity to M3GAN, its games are all low-budget productions with interesting ideas.

Emotion detection is a crucial component of Games User Research (GUR), as it allows game developers to gain insights into players' emotional experiences and tailor their games accordingly. However, detecting emotions in Virtual Reality (VR) games is challenging due to the Head-Mounted Display (HMD) that covers the top part of the player's face, namely, their eyes and eyebrows, which provide crucial information for recognizing the impression. To tackle this we used a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to train a model to predict emotions in full-face images where the eyes and eyebrows are covered. We used the FER2013 dataset, which we modified to cover eyes and eyebrows in images. The model in these images can accurately recognize seven different emotions which are anger, happiness, disgust, fear, impartiality, sadness and surprise. We assessed the model's performance by testing it on two VR games and using it to detect players' emotions. We collected self-reported emotion data from the players after the gameplay sessions. We analyzed the data collected from our experiment to understand which emotions players experience during the gameplay. We found that our approach has the potential to enhance gameplay analysis by enabling the detection of players' emotions in VR games, which can help game developers create more engaging and immersive game experiences.