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Videogames Make Better Horror Than Movies?
Wired author Clive Thompson has up an article stating that, with today's jaded audiences, videogames are more effective horror-conveyances than movies. Thompson argues that the removal of the fourth wall, placing the player directly into the story, overcomes the obstacles movie-makers face when telling a scary story. "I'll start down a corridor, hear something freaky up ahead, then freeze in panic. Maybe if I stay quiet the monster will go away? S^!t, maybe it's already headed this way, and I should move! But if I move the monster will hear me ... so maybe I should stay quiet ... gaaaaah! Games already seem like dream states. You're wandering around a strange new world, where you simultaneously are and aren't yourself. This is already an inherently uncanny experience. That's why a well-made horror game feels so claustrophobically like being locked inside a really bad -- by which I mean a really good -- nightmare." Do you agree? Is your favorite scary tale a movie ... or a game? (Silent Hill, I'm looking at you.)
I've never been scared by a movie, ever. But I almost soiled myself the first time I played Resident Evil (the part where the dogs jump through the window in particular).
I don't agree. While you're playing the game, you have some sort of an adrenaline rush, that effectively makes you immune to any kind of scare the developers might devise. That, and the inherent stupidity of the monsters you'll encounter surely makes them less of a threat.
But, on the bright side, it's easier to make a specific mood in a game, and make the player be afraid of that, for example - I was absolutely scared of playing Ultima Underworld alone when I was about ten or eleven. There was something in those dark corridors, bones lying around, and the music that provided the tension needed to scare the hell out of me. And it works today, too. Not in the way Doom3 would like us to have, but, for example, BioShock manages to capture the freaky atmosphere perfectly, making you look around your shoulder far more often.
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The screeches of the monkeys in System Shock 2 always freak me out, no matter how many times I play it. (playing BioShock right now and it's nowhere near as scary as SS2 IMHO)
Or the sounds Haunts make in the Thief series.. eek.
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The original Half Life was a really classic example of this. You could make a decent monster movie along the same plot, but you wouldn't have quite the tension.
EG, the tension where you are creeping through the silo with the giant tentacles, the first time you meet the big shark-thingy, the elation and then horror as the marines come, etc....
A movie wouldn't be nearly as immersive.
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While it didn't have the whole game, there's a level in it - The Cradle - that's absolutely, completely spooky. Running around a burned-out building that used to be both an insane asylum AND an orphanage...
For me the experience of watching a movie is usually so far removed from that of playing a game that I can't directly compare them. While a movie can use a particular character or characters as surrogates for the audience, youre essentially watching things happen to other people. You can be sympathetically scared for them, but you don't really feel scared for yourself.
When you're playing a game, that avatar on the screen is, for all intents and purposes, you. You're not just watching some movie star go down the stairs to their doom, you have to choose to go down those stairs yourself. The experience of that sort of scare is very different, and to me much more personal, than the one-sided character/spectator relationship in films and such.
The only experience that for me sort of blurs that line between those two types of scares is listening to an audio play, such as radio drama or Big Finish Productions' audio CDs. When I'm listening to one of those I usually have my eyes closed and my imagination turned up high, and thus tend to see things from more of a first-person perspective in my mind's eye. A good horror story on audio can therefore approach the levels of immersion that a good video game provides, without being interactive.
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...was playing Fatal Frame in the pitch black of night. No movie has ever terrified me more than the tension that builds up with the ambient soundtrack and the tiny light that tells you something is near, to activate the camera and go into 1st person mode, creeping along to find the ghostly image before it jumps out at you.
Anyone who's played it will no doubt remember the chilling moment while you tiptoe down the Rope Hallway and the red light comes on, looking up and coming face to face with Vengeance.
... I was playing Bioshock. I had just killed my first big daddy. I was badly injured, I had almost no ammo left. I looked for a vending machine to buy some ammo and health when a SECOND big daddy comes around. I hid under the stairs in the game and hoped he wouldn't see me because I was so low on everything. I saved and went to bed.
Let me breathe a bit after that first encounter. That was brutal.
...but a great original 1985-era scary game was Rescue on Fractalus (it used actual fractals to generate an alien landscape, hence the title). You'd rescue downed pilots, who would see you land, run under your ship disappearing from view and (pause) there'd be a taptaptap to let them in. The trick was sometimes, after the pilot had disappeared from view, the "pilot" was really an alien and it'd SUDDELNY JUMP UP ON YOUR WINDSHIELD COMPLETE WITH SCARY MUSIC AND IT'S BANGING TO GET IT KILLITKILLITKILLIT!!! Great times, I'd play it with a friend and we'd both about wet ourselves.
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If you think the scary parts of Doom3, HL 1/2, FEAR, STALKER, etc are immersive when you are sober, try game night with a two drink minimum. One more reason games are way scarier than movies - you rarely watch movies (at the theater) under the influence, but you play all your games with a few drinks in you (at night with the lights off) and the last bit of disbelief fades away and you are there, living it. There are a few places in Doom3 where (a few glasses of scotch in my system) I had to turn it off and walk around the house turning on lights.
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