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.'"

Comments

Horror, Genre pleasure, the Unknown

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:Horror, Genre pleasure, the Unknown

[happyemoticon]

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.

When I started playing Doom 3, I thought, "They've finally done it. id has returned to their former glory." However, as I progressed through the game, though the visuals remained impressive and the baddies remained gross, I could predict with absolute certainty when an imp was going to jump out from behind me. I'd look at a doorway, see a few places where a hidden door could open up, back up through the doorway, and give the imp a mouthfull of buckshot. This started to become agonizing beyond belief and I cheated my way through the last four levels or so.

The other sin that Doom 3 committed was the same one that has been used in survival horror games since Resident Evil: You are in a place where there should be more ammo than you could possibly imagine (America, a military research facility), and there are exactly 9 bullets. Clive Barker's The Undying used this cheap tactic, and I blazed through most of the game with only a haste spell and the Scythe just to spite the developers. Whenever a first person shooter makes you want to not bother and just use a melee weapon, it's just because their monsters are so pathetic they would be trivial if you had sufficient ammunition to kill them all. But that's another topic entirely.

LOL

[Black Parrot]

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.

Subtle Horror

[thatguywhoiam]

I know there's going to be many many comments to this effect, but there is one game that scared the bejeezus out of me: Silent Hill.

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.

Stephen King said it best

[zymurgy_cat]

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.