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Being Scared in Games is Needed
zombieinthebackofyourcar writes "The Escapist has done an entire issue on why we love and need horror games. Jon Schnaars, an expert in psychology and mental health issues, writes about how we need to be scared to generate pleasure from the game. From the article: 'Perhaps the most important change made in the game mechanics of RE4 was fixing the camera behind Leon, providing a tight third-person shot through which the player could experience the action. Through this move, Leon has become every protagonist from every horror film ever made. He is the lone survivor; steadily trudging into the dark when all our instincts tell us it's a bad idea. And as the player, it is actually us proceeding into the dark, receiving (when we're not getting beheaded) our genre pleasure.'"
I don't know about Horror being needed. I sometimes like the idea of playing the monster, when the opportunity presents itself. Heck, I've certainly been one in the online games I play, where I go around slaughtering things to gain experience levels and take the victim's treasures. See it from their point of view. "Horrors, here comes that damn human again! Is there no end for it's thirst for blood? It'll probably go after our shaman some day, then were will we be as a people?"
Really, what we already know is that variety is what games need. If every game was based upon something jumping out of the shadows and ripping your lungs out, we'd have someone telling us what is needed is the safe-and-secure game genre where no harm comes to our valiant little avatar as he/she zips around collecting rings or what have you without repressing some proletariat.
My own take is I have long had a preference for games where the player explores the unknown. There may be danger, there may be reward, but cooling your heels doesn't do much for the sense of intrigue. Exploring dungeons and wiping out baddies, or going on raids day after day, to achieve enough levels to used some object or spell is, as a topic some time back pointed out, is work (you know, that four letter word.)
Ages ago I was totally wrapped up in the old fortran game Empire (eventually released as a PC game), until I'd played it enough to know what to expect. Nothing quite like the first time you're marching your little a into the black unknown only to find the enemy well entrenched, then to gear up your production for an assault. Eventually it was too slow and tedius. Same went for Seven Cities of Gold when you rolled your own New World (which wouldn't be at all like what you see on a normal globe) Exploring the unknown and facing risk is what gets the heart rate going, Grue or no Grue.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
i'm no 'expert' on any brain-stuff, but I'd have to disagree on this. Sports games are incredibly successful, and none of this fear stuff applies here whatsoever. Madden, Tiger Woods, MLB, NBA, FIFA, Tony Hawk PS, and so on...
In one of Jack Vance's novels someone has determined that society has made things too safe in comparison to most of our evolutionary history, and people suffer some kind of debilitating angst as a result. So there's an organization whose members go around scaring the sh*t out of random people, in order to restore our species' cognitive balance.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'd disagree completely. Both Doom 3 and, to a lesser extent, F.E.A.R. scared me. Granted, in Doom 3, I was in a jet black room and had my sound up to extreme levels, but when demons jumped out all up ons at times, I would scream.
Really, it all depends on how much you allow yourself to be immersed in the game. Pick a scary movie - any scary movie - and I won't bat an eyelash (provided there are no spiders, of course). It just doesn't phase me. Doom 3 scared the absolute shit out of me at times - which made me love it all the more.
And it wasn't any kind of gore, or zombies, or anything like that. Well, lots of things like that, but that wasn't the main cause -- it was the foreboding atmosphere.
Abandoned schools are scary. It taps into childhood fears. Seeing the 'regular' world turned upside down and redecorated with body parts and rust is deeply unsettling. The lack of regular communication with other characters in the game, the ambient sound effects - my god, the sound effects work in that game was good. I remember standing in what I think used to be a gymnasium but in the 'other' world, and just standing there, listening to this distant clank-clank-clank of some unseen machinery. I left my character standing there for awhile, just taking in the sound, and I truly began to feel disturbed.
It was shortly after that I descended the ladder to the first full-on satanic ritual looking setpiece in the game. This gigantic cucumber with four legs ran out and split in half as it opened its mouth, revealing about a million teeth, and i swear to fucking god I actually dropped my controller and shrieked like a little girl.
Good times.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I haven't played a lot of videogames in a long time, but the summary made me think of something that could be pretty cool in a horror game, if any game designers are out there.
You, as the player, control a character who is seen in a third-person view like what's described in the summary. This character is actually moving ahead of "you," though. The POV of the game is actually that of another character that walks behind the character that you control. That other character is basically defenseless, however -- think screaming chick from a horror movie. It's the job of the character you control to protect the POV character. So you fight the zombies and what-not with the character from a third-person POV, but every so often the zombies are trying to reach over the shoulder of the character you control, to claw at the POV. Cue all sorts of nasty death scenes where you get to watch your protector be overrun and killed, even as your own POV camera flips sideways to the floor...
Breakfast served all day!
I admit, when I play horror games - I should say, when I played horror games, since I've gotten so bored with them - they do startle me. They scare me when I'm not bored to tears by their pathetic hackneyed plots stolen from B horror movies. So basically what I get out of it is a bunch of boredom punctuated by occasional moments when my heart is wondering what the fuck I'm doing to it.
YOU may need horror games. The author of the article may need horror games. I'll pass. What I need is more racing games that don't suck :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think that the summary was accurate to the article itself. The article talked about the need to have a level of satisfaction when our expectations are met from having an immersive environment. That's not restricted to the horror genre of games as the summary implies. Every genre of games requires a level of satisfaction when our expectations are met or the game will get panned by players and critics. I use that abomination of Ultima: Ascension as the prime example of a game that completely failed to meet expectations and therefore generated no satisfaction. That article also mentions GTA. I wouldn't exactly call that a horror game.
There are some classic games that are so much fun, not so much from a playability standpoint but from an entire experience. I am a great fan of the Max Payne, Thief, and Splinter Cell series. Lots of great suspense and dark gameplay, but they pulled you into their environments, which is one of the key factors in the success of games of that nature.
Honestly, I think that the editors need to be a bit more accurate in the description of the articles. I was about to go on a huge rant about the bullsh*t that we need to be scared in order to derive pleasure from games until I actually RTFA.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Stephen King once commented about why horror books and movies do so well. His point was that we need to feel fear in order to process the emotion without our real fears paralyzing us. He pointed out real fears: that we'll get cancer, our loved ones will die in car accidents, that our children will be kidnapped or molested. These are all very real fears that could actually come true. Yet, we read books and watch movies in which bad things (both plausible and unplausible) happen. Why intentionally scare yourself? Because the experience (as the article somewhat mentions) lets you live out or experience the emotion and yet go on with your everyday life.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Everblue 2 for ps2. everblue 1 never came out in US, but i picked the sequel up on a whim, because it sounded like a wierd enough game that it might just be awesome. Everblue 2 is a scuba-diving RPG, actually, and you wouldn't think that would sound scary.... a game where you dive to the bottom of the ocean and take photos of fish or salvage things, in order to gain money, to buy better scuba equipment....... BUT....
there are a few very scary moments in it.
there's a scene where you are diving into the wreckage of a sunken cruise ship, and you get inside of it and its pitch black, no sunlight can filter down that deep, and when you're actually in the ship, all light is blocked out. the water is murky. your flashlight allows you to see only a scant few feet in front of you. you know there are sharks in the area, and in the gameplay segments, there is actually only one music: a theme that plays when sharks (which can eat you) are around. so, as you explore the ship, you come across a doorway, and you open it, and its an old indoor swimming pool... and you hear the shark theme, which, as a gamer playing it, lets you know that there are threats nearby, and that you should be very very cautious and try not to panic, and that something big and scary could lunge for my throat at any moment.....
my experience with this area was one of the few times a game has honestly scared me. its one of those moments where I was so immersed that I forget i was playing a game. its a tight, enclosed level, and i hear the sharks, and I know that i need to be on the lookout for threats.... and then, all of a sudden, i run smack into a ghostly white face, illuminated by my flashlight and made more scary by the murky water.......
after jumping up and dropping my controller, because i totally wasn't expecting to find any ghastly apparitions, i realize that what I'm looking at is not a ghost, but a statue, remnants of the luxurious decorations of the cruiseliner. nothing as out of the ordinary as I'd thought, but the atmosphere, and the fact that I knew i was in dangerous waters, and then the running smack into the thing just made me jump and still gives me the heebeejeebees. truly effective game design... and unfortunately, in a game that almost nobody has ever played.
I'm not sure "creepy" and "deep" horror are qualitatively different; causing this on an interactive environment may be a matter of expertise in the art more than an impossibility. But I do agree that the "passivity" of other mediums has some advantages.
I found the System Shock series pretty scary, and I'm having great fun playing "Call of Cthulu" right now (more than I expected, actually). Both mix traditional plot techniques in the gameplay pretty seamlessly, and I'd have a hard time finding 'deeper' horror in a movie or book these days.
We have thousands of years of storytelling tradition, so our tools to elicit horror, or any other dramatic effect, are based on tight control of the plot and pressing the right psychological buttons. It's actually pretty independant of the talent at the medium itself, but it does require limiting the audience's freedom, which in spite of the hype of sandbox games may be a requirement for enjoyable games in many of genres.
The most successful examples of "creepy" horrors I've seen in games have seamless, consistent transitions of free gameplay and tightly controlled plot events. If they move the game in the active-passive axis without breaking suspension of disbelief it works very well. This is not that different from the challenges in filmmaking, it's just that game designers have less experience doing that.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...