Interactive engagement helps to make video games more scary than other forms of media, new research suggests.

Resident Evil

Resident Evil

Titles such as 'Resident Evil' and 'Amnesia: The Dark Descent' have gained huge popularity over recent years, and Teresa Lynch, an assistant professor of communication technology at The Ohio State University, has offered an insight into why such games are so addictive.

She explained: "For video games, because we're actually acting in these virtual worlds, it feels much more realistic in some ways, and even if the content itself might be more pixelated or it might not be as realistic looking, we don't necessarily have, we're not necessarily processing that content in a way that makes it feel like it's not real. It feels very real to us in that immediate sense."

And while gamers are aware that the titles aren't based on real-life events, their bodies may not notice the distinctions so easily.

Speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, the academic shared: "There's a perspective in human psychology that talks about this long evolution of the human brain [that] essentially does not allow us to distinguish between mediated content that we see on the screen, that we might rationally know is not real.

"But when we're feeling present in that environment and we're engaging with the content on screen and it's displaying behaviour, our brain is going to respond to it as if it's real."