Slashdot Mirror
When Will Games Disturb Us?
Game Girl Advance brings up the subject of emotion in games, again, by going to the dark places. Jane talks about movies that are just plain uncomfortable to watch (shades of Donnie Darko), and wonders why when games will have the same effect. From the article: "Yet you could argue that Manhunt used a cheap trick - it set up the situation in order to exploit it for someone's idea of 'fun.' You could say that the developers did not mean to convey any message beyond entertainment. City of God was entertaining, in the broadest sense of the word, but it was also a portrait of hopelessness and a cycle that trapped its inhabitants; it was also in some ways a social history of gang violence in the slums from the seventies to the eighties. Manhunt does not have enough external references to be about anything other than what it is."
A: August 2, 2004
Sorry doom 3 was creepy as hell (bad pun) when i frirst started.. then again i did start at night with the lights off and hifi audio going - the random people screeming through the walls really got me
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
F.E.A.R. is the only game I have ever played where I was literally scared to play any further...especially since i was playing during nighttime.
"Takeshi's Challenge", the 1986 NES game by Takeshi 'Beat' Kitano (who later went on to create the tv show we know as MXC). The game begins with a screen saying "This game is made by a man who hates videogames" and is designed to make the player as miserable as possible. The game includes such gems as a sequence where the player is forced to continuously sing karaoke for one hour without pressing any buttons; a gap which appears to be jumpable but is exactly one pixel too short to jump across, forcing the player to try and fail several hundred times until after several hundred deaths the game suddenly announces that the gap was actually impossible and lets you to the next screen; and a final boss that must be hit 50,000 times to defeat it.
Games can't ever be truly disturbing because disturbing is a subjective, personal quality; what one person finds disturbing another will find really neat, and vice versa. But Takeshi's Challenge, by abandoning the idea of shocking the player and actually moving into the region of purposefully causing them pain, was outside the possible comfort zone of anyone.
I'm a player of EVE-ONLINE. It didn't take long for the PvP aspects to have real effect. (Consequently, they have much less effect now; perhaps an end all be all definition of pirate depending on why?) Early, my heart beat would raise, adrenaline rush and all of a sudden I would get a real feeling of fight or flight mentality whenever a 'flasher' would warp in. That "oh shit" feeling, that even if kept silent is obvious to any onlookers. The effect is so strong, from myriad accounts not just my own, that I have often pondered if CCP will eventually have some sort of medical warning to those with heart conditions while starting to play the game. Not only does the game genuinely enduce physical and emotional characteristics of imminent hostile danger, but if you get to see your opponent pop you get a genuine sense of gain or power, if you die, you have a genuine sense of loss.
From these effects, they enduce real emotion as well. For example, hate mail or something within EVE known as 'smack talk', there has even been situations where the sentiment has been extended into real life threats and harrassment. Usually, becuase someone was attacked and killed by another pilot, but as involved as the game is, there are many ways to 'screw' over another player; such as undercutting their business stealing their customers or sabotaging political ties with alliances/corporations for your interest, or internal disloyalty and corp theft/betrayal.
This is all on account of game structure and mechanics. And, if this much can be enduced simply by interactive 'situational' analysis, then any other game could be developed to target a particular effect just by building up all the variables to justify the reaction whenever something happens. One of the chief causes for the seriousness of EVE, is that you do encur real loss and actual gain. If you die, you lose what you had and have to work towards acquiring it again, if you win, you may loot your victims wreckage for items valuable to you (that, and you get the killmail to further insult them by posting it on public forums.)
I remember the first time I played through the Seventh Guest... and then not long later Phantasmagoria.
I dare you to find anyone that played those late at night that wasn't at least a little scared. The environment on those two games... especially with the sound was just creepy.
Even some of the Myst ones had some creepy moments in them. Not near those other two though.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Is it disturbing that in Terranimga for the SNES, everything you do that you thought was supposed to help humanity only accelerated their destruction?
;)
(while we're giving out spoilers anyway)
And in the end, you're given one last day with your girlfriend, before you and your world disappear?
From the article the "disturbing" being discussed isn't merely being creeped out or scared, but more like the game forcing you to do things that you find wrong, with the emphasis on the "forcing". Rather than simply a choice between whether you want to play nice or not (GTA, KOTOR, etc), a game where to get to the next level you must put living hamsters in a microwave and watch them cook. Of course, as another poster mentioned, what distresses some people is fun for others.
The game that springs to my mind though, is Ultima 4. When you started, you were given a series of questions to judge what "virtues" you held highest, and some of the questions were very hard to answer honestly (I just answered them to get the character class I wanted
When I played the Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Omaha Beach level (aka "D-Day"), it was the first of it's kind (before 8 zillion clones), and it was simply... disturbing. It was produced by Steven Spielberg and was definately in the tradition of Saving Private Ryna. I was 22 at the time, so I thought first off that every boy there was my age. I'd die immediately when the boats opened the first 10 times or so. I died tons more on the way up. You'd look over and see other soldiers, grown men and ppl your age kneeling under a bunker and crying. Others mortally injured and screaming for mommy simply made the game "How would you have done if you were at this event in history" (answer: I would have *died*) rather than "Enjoy this video game level."
I had for sometime was a game based loosely on the old RPG (boardgame) Orgre. The thing that was appealing was that you were being hunted relentlessly by a (virtually) unstoppable (technological) force. I always thought if you removed the "virtually", you could really have something.
I've yet to see a game that presents an undefeatable boss. The idea being how long you survive IS the game. The environment could be anything but you could slowly ramp up the pace and create traps that would confound the player as they're being pursed. Sometimes slowly - sometimes quickly - but never stopping. You could slow the "ogre" down, even delay it - but never stop it. You would die - and then the game would end. When you would die was up to you. How you would die was up to IT.
It could even be done in a multiplayer deathmatch environ where you would watch all the other players get destroyed one by one. You could gang up - and perhaps really delay things - but never defeat it. Even being reduced to a spectator when you die could be fun - watching each player be killed one by one until the end of the round. You do see this in deathmatch shooters, but that's just a gaggle of humans whacking each other. Man vs. unstoppable machine would be - or could be - much more fun.
Most good horror films have this in some shape or form but in video games today - you always "beat" the protagonist. Take THAT element away - and you could have something very-very disturbing. It's what made the zombies (initally) scary in Resident Evil. The idea that you only were putting them down for a while - and that they could get back up and pursue you. Until you killed them again which suddenly didn't make them nearly as much fun.
Just email me for the royalties - or hire me, I'm a freelancer (mgabrys@netherworld.com).
And it doesn't stop there. The various body parts acting as part of the machinery are everywhere, complete with vaguely humanoid pumping noises. Some of the bodies are missing most of their limbs, others are fairly complete but are attached in cruciform positions and writhing in response to various stimuli.
And Quake 4 is not the only one out there in that genre. System Shock 2 (especially with the enhanced graphics mods) gets right inside your psyche and keeps hitting. To say that there are no disturbing games out there either indicates that the reviewer hasn't played many games or is remarkably blind to the horrors around.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I'd have to disagree with that. While I'd agree with you that Doom3/etc. had little "nightmare" factor and quickly became predictable, there is one game that kept me having flashbacks for some time. The game was called "The Suffering", by Surreal/Midway.
Quick plot line: You have just been sentenced to death row for killing your wife and daughter in a crime you can not remember. Your first night in prison, all hell breaks loose, leaving you to fend for yourself and find a way off the prison island... The most effective scare-tatic of the game is that it combined lots of "flash-backs" of the horrific murder you supposedly commited, at RANDOM times, over your field of view. Could be in a slow game point when you have already cleared a room, or in the middle of a battle. Overlayed with the typical dark hallways, ominous sounds, and various "bad things waiting" of a typical game, it convincingly created an environment where you quite literally don't know what might happen next...
You're right. People here know the difference between a game and reality. You were probably looking for the 'man hating dykes who think everything is misogynistic' room. Its down the hall to your right.
Slashdot really is endlessly entertaining when these subjects come up. First of all, I'm male. Second of all, the point isn't that it wasn't reality (hence the reason I tried it to see what actually happens), it's the fact that someone put it in the game and thought it was funny that was disturbing. It was obviously someone's fantasy, and that's a part of his psyche that I really could have done without exploring.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
System Shock 2, maybe. Silent Hill titles are silly. If we're talking morality as the source of the unease, instead of or in addition to mood, I'm back to Morrowind Fanboi. A grown-up game for grown-up players that also worked as a fun title for those not seeing or choosing to ignore the deeper currents. Much like Gene Wolfe's fantasy novels: many of them can be sucked down as generic Slurpees, and enjoyed at that level, but for those paying attention the implications are appalling.
Feeling so good natured I could drool
1. Less 'personal space.' Face it, every good gamer knows how to use every little bit of space, environment and layout of an area to avoid enemy attacks. If I want to be scared I don't want to be able to dodge fireballs and pouncing imps just by moving three feet to the side.
2. Weaker weapons. Unless I'm going up against hordes of enemies Doom 1 or Serious Sam-style, I should NEVER EVER get a one-hit kill weapon (with the possible exception being a sniper rifle). Face it, its hard to be scared of a zombie when you have a shotgun that can decapitate them in one shot. Rocket launchers? BFGs? Wth?! Why not just give me a nuke and be done with it?
3. No truely scary monsters. Face it, with the exception of next to/completely impossible to kill monsters (the spirits in Silent Hill 4 come to mind) horror games have not delivered in the monster department. Sure, some monsters (usually bosses) come to mind but compared to the great horror characters of cinema (the Alien, Dracula, even The Thing) nothing comes to mind. Silent Hill's Pyramid Head was easy to deal with for its slow speed, every enemy in Doom 3 was a joke for gamers with years of FPS experience under their belt and Half-Life 2's enemies were overly predictable with poor AI or were artifically difficult (Combine soldiers were a joke as long as you didn't run in guns blazing and fighting an helicopter or strider was difficult simply because you didn't recieve the necessary weapon needed to defeat it until you simply ran past it to progress through the game.)
Course the problem with these ideas is the more you apply them, the less they remain games and more they become movies..