How do You Define "Scary"?

[Vausch]

I see a lot of conflicting arguments over what types of games are scary and ones that try to be but don't quite work. And of course with the idiocy of Laura Meile saying that horror games are better when you have someone with you (Or why dead space 3 is Coop) and essentially proving [a href="www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.382671-EA-Dead-Space-Too-Scary-to-Handle-Alone"]she has no idea what the point of horror is[/a], it's worth asking what people actually consider scary in games and possibly other media.

Now for me, I didn't find Dead Space all that scary. It had some moments, that one guy bumping his head against the wall until he smashed his head open was, I thought, genuinely creepy and it kept me tense for a few minutes until it went back to monster shooting.

Most people praise Silent Hill 2 for being atmospheric and scary with an incredibly well told story. I tend to agree, the game got me very tense and worried very often that a monster was going to attack me at any moment and the ending was the only video game story that made me shed a tear (Water ending).

Nobody I talk to has yet to say Amnesia: The Dark Descent wasn't scary.

The general sense I get is the things that tend to work are: Slow building tension, gore, giving actual weight to the gore (See Heavy Rain), something grotesque and abnormal, a sense of the unknown, helplessness, darkness, and the sense you are not in control and are likely being watched and doing what someone or something wants you to do.

What doesn't tend to work: a reliance on jump scares (some are fine but too many quickly becomes predictable), co-op, being well armed and always having enough ammo, human enemies, too much gore (See Evil Dead 2 and Braindead (Dead-Alive)), being in a well-lit area.

What do you all think makes something scary?

 

[oplinger]

The general sense I get is the things that tend to work are: helplessness

That's kind of it. You could be in a well lit building, against humans with no blood anywhere and you'd still be scared if you can't help anything. They have guns, you're unarmed with a limp. You're going to be terrified.

The only problem with that scenario is...giving a shit about the character. So like..make his wife and kids hostages or something.

But really horror is mostly about tension. Especially with movies and games, because they pose no threat to you. They cannot be scary. You scare yourself with what you do to yourself from the tense atmosphere.

Helplessness builds tension, gore kind of does, but it's really used to display just how helpless you really are. Everyone else is dying, you couldn't help them...what makes you think you can even help yourself? Tension builds as the threat of doom crawls ever closer, but once it gets there, it's generally not all that threatening to you as a player.

It's sort of like..Silent Hill 2, tense as hell, really great atmosphere to bring the tension to a 10. Then you realize you can just run by everything without so much as a scratch, except the bosses.

Tension gone. SH2 is no longer scary.

 

[Vausch]

The general sense I get is the things that tend to work are: helplessness

That's kind of it. You could be in a well lit building, against humans with no blood anywhere and you'd still be scared if you can't help anything. They have guns, you're unarmed with a limp. You're going to be terrified.

The only problem with that scenario is...giving a shit about the character. So like..make his wife and kids hostages or something.

But really horror is mostly about tension. Especially with movies and games, because they pose no threat to you. They cannot be scary. You scare yourself with what you do to yourself from the tense atmosphere.

Helplessness builds tension, gore kind of does, but it's really used to display just how helpless you really are. Everyone else is dying, you couldn't help them...what makes you think you can even help yourself? Tension builds as the threat of doom crawls ever closer, but once it gets there, it's generally not all that threatening to you as a player.

It's sort of like..Silent Hill 2, tense as hell, really great atmosphere to bring the tension to a 10. Then you realize you can just run by everything without so much as a scratch, except the bosses.

Tension gone. SH2 is no longer scary.

Silent Hill 2 without the tension... Homecoming?

To say the least you gotta wonder what goes through the minds of the mainstream developers that makes them think what they're doing in DS3 is gonna be scary.

 

[Sean Hollyman]

How to define scary..

Hm...

Idk, things that.. scare me? D;

 

[FalloutJack]

Scary is not the unexpected, but when you know it's going to get worse. Scary is when you see something bad coming and realize ("Oh shit, I have to deal with that and it's coming over here...".

For my part, I give the game, Extermination, a good scary rating. I tend to mention it a few times, only because it makes for an effective Survival Horror game that isn't an RE game. It starts with a feeling that stuff has gone wrong and everything - down to your surroundings itself - gets progressively worse as you go from merely a few technical problems and parasites with an infection risk to...monsters are everywhere, water is ATTACKING YOU, and the base seems to be getting slowly devoured by purple flesh. Seriously, there will moments where you see someone's body sticking out of a wall of flesh - the supposedly solid and unmoving walls of flesh - and you have to wonder how the hell did that happen?!

Terrible dialogue, but pretty solid for early PS2.

 

[Milata]

I'll say it's jump scares that scare the living shit out of me, But the psychological scares that keep me thinking and worrying about it for days.

 

[NightShade]

Jump scares can be scary if they are completely unexpected. Nowardays in most horro movies/games, the jump scares happen in an often dark area with the horror element already established, with no music, and it becomes obvious when the jump will come and makes you feel cheated out of a good scare.

Often, the idea of a horror film is more frightening, especially if it is likely to happen. I mean, you aren't often in the same position as the characters. You aren't in a creaky old house. The only time you're likely to be alone in the dark is when you are just about to go to sleep. So dream or monsters under your bed are more likely to scare you than a killer who lives in Texas.

 

[krazykidd]

Honestly , i think it's all about being helpless AND immersion . Horror games thrive on a player being immersed in their games . Once you put yourself in the shoes of a character in a horror movies/game , that's when you get scared . If you play a horror game with te mindset "it's just a game , they can't hurt me , why should i be scared " then there is no way that game is going to be scary . If however , you play and you are heavily immersed in the game , putting yourself in the shoes of the character then the potential to be scared greatly increases.

I thinks it's 50/50 between the developpers and the players . The developpers work on atmostphere of the game, the players work on their mindset while playing the game .

 

[LaughingAtlas]

Being helpless doesn't scare me at all, so I haven't much bothered with Amnesia: Dark Descent. Having a chance of beating my potential murderer but having no idea as to what that chance is until I'm spotted and combat is engaged is a bit more frightening to me.
Played the Dead Money DLC for New Vegas yesterday and the Ghost people were pretty damn creepy until

Spoiler: I actually fought one and

I learned you can probably kill them with one head-shot of that rifle father laziness gives you while sneaking, if not it's pretty much "Shoot one to death, hack the rest to bits with his spear, because all you need to do is remove their limbs. Apparently there's a Marker somewhere in the Cloud and these necromorphs have the decency not to bother with weak jumpscares. I guess it might be scary if you didn't really use anything but guns, weaponry besides the Ghost peoples' own being in short supply, but I found my teammates would initiate combat if they so much as saw their shadows on a wall, so I'm not sure stealth is an option when you're not alone. Which is pretty often.

 

[Vault101]

while Dead space wasnt scary...it was frantic... like "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK FUCK" as your desperatly trying to get away while reloading but your out of ammo type thing

so I'm not worried about dead space 3 due to lack of horror...I'm more worried about changing the gameplay to be more generic shooterwise

and even if they do...well...I do like 3rd person shooters

 

[BLAHwhatever]

Feeling helpless or much weaker than oppenents
Good background music and sound effects
Impaired vision
Steady feeling that something is in the corner of your eye, but can't really see it
Being stalked/followed by an unidentified thing/person
and Darkness

 

[Aphantas]

I think you pretty much hit the definition of fear on the head with that original post.

I would define scary as the moments between the realisation of an unavoidable danger, and that danger occurring. The nature of the danger does not need to be known, all that needs to be known is that it is waiting for you, sometime, somewhere.

Also Humans can be one of the scariest things around. Some of the scariest monsters are the ones that appear to be Human. Vampires, Werewolves, Doppelgängers, serial killers, they all appear to be Human at first glance. That is what makes them scary. They beg the question,
"How do you know that anyone is Human?" after all they could just be something posing as Human, searching for juicy delicious Prey.
Now go and be paranoid.

edit:typos

 

[TrevHead]

Honestly , i think it's all about being helpless AND immersion . Horror games thrive on a player being immersed in their games . Once you put yourself in the shoes of a character in a horror movies/game , that's when you get scared . If you play a horror game with te mindset "it's just a game , they can't hurt me , why should i be scared " then there is no way that game is going to be scary . If however , you play and you are heavily immersed in the game , putting yourself in the shoes of the character then the potential to be scared greatly increases.

I thinks it's 50/50 between the developpers and the players . The developpers work on atmostphere of the game, the players work on their mindset while playing the game .

This, immersion is everything with horror thats why ppl watch horrors late at night and turn the lights off, and kids get scared easily. With a video game, if you make it more arcade / CoD like it breaks the immersion even futher. PPl who say Dead Space doesn't scare then just aren't feeling the game and are concentrating on the gameplay.

There is another type of horror where you don't really need immersion ie The Saw type shocker

 

[BNguyen]

I guess to define scary would mean to keep hidden the threat against you but always give the sense that whatever it is is close by and could easily kill you if you happen to slip up
Silent Hill 2 had a lot of that with its tight corridors and darkness, but I only felt that with pyramid head floating around
Deadly premonition kind of had the same effect, especially when you had to hide and you could see the enemy walking right up to where you were
Amnesia never really had that for me, maybe it was the PC controls because I think if I had say an xbox controller it wouldn't have been so tense. Fumbling for the controls in order to close a door didn't make it scary to me

 

[RJ 17]

Good background music and sound effects

I'd argue against that...or at least half of it.

I agree that good, creepy, ambient sounds can definitely add to the scariness of things. Take, for instance, the classic buh-beep....buh-beep...buh-beep of your motion tracker in the marine campaign of Aliens vs Predator 2 for the PC. For a first person shooter, that campaign actually is pretty damn scary, and despite the fact that the motion tracker serves as radar to let you know when something's close, 9 times out of 10 you're not going to be able to see it even if it says there's something right in front of you. That's what makes the motion tracker's sound so terrifying in dead silence. You don't know if it's just a phantom signal being sent by something, if there's an alien trying to sneak around you, or what the deal is.

Background music, on the other hand, might be good for building up creepy tension, but as far as actually helping the game be scary, I think it detracts from it. All too often does it give up the "scary" parts of a game before those parts even have a chance to try and scare. A perfect example of this is the Dead Space series. That music starts buiding up, getting creepier and creepier with that "crack-head violin solo". Just when it reaches it's peak: oh look, a room with 5 vent shaft covers...I bet something's gonna be jumping out in 3...2...1 "BLARGH! BOOGY-WOOGY-WOOGY!!!" Yeah...saw that coming.

This does bring up another thing that's necessary to keep up the scariness: unpredictability. People fear the unknown, as such for a game to be scary, they have to be continually "attacked" by the unknown. Going back to Dead Space: once you learn "Monsters only pop out of the vent shafts that all have the exact same cover", you're able to spot every ambush the second you step into a room. Ambush scares are startle scares, just playing off the refex of a loud noise and something moving fast to startle the player rather than scare them. However DS screws even this watered-down version of scariness up by telegraphing when and where the monster's are gonna pop out. Hell, even during the tentacle grab portions, most of the time you walk by the big hole in the wall that the tentacle is going to be coming out of to drag you down the hall. The first one might surprise you since it's the first time you've experienced the encounter, however after that point you know that you're likely going to have to deal with another tentacle in the near future every time you pass by a big hole in the wall.

Personally, one of the things that I find REALLY adds to the scariness of a game (and this ties in with the no background music) is silence. Not only does this aid in the "realism" of the situation (real life doesn't have background music to let you know when a situation is going to be scary), but it also ties in with one of the key elements of being scared which "Ms. DS 3 Is Still Scary!" fails to understand: being alone and isolated. Unless you're a jibbering madmman, silence means that you're utterly alone. Nothing but the sound of your footsteps and your thoughts. This makes all those ambient background noise all the more scary because you don't know what the source is. Could be something menacing, could be a treebranch hitting against a window in the wind. Silence is one of the ultimate atmosphere setters. It makes you super paranoid (which I'd define as being irrationally scared...or scared to the point of becoming irrational ) at every sound you think shouldn't be there, which allows the game/movie maker able to have a lot of fun with strange monster sounds.

 

[GiglameshSoulEater]

-Snip-

Eloquently and comprehensively put, though System Shock 2 is a very good horror game, and it has a strong, techno sidetrack that plays often. In a way, that makes it worse: the music is constantly frantic, and that combines with your general fragility.

I dislike QTE events in horror games above all else. Mainly because I'm terrible at them, and once you've been decapitated for the third time because you didn't mash e enough it gets a little tedious.

 

[purplecactus]

I have nothing to fear but fear itself. And spiders.

This. In spades.

OP: I agree with the helplessness thing, but there's got to be an atmosphere. That's music, sound effects, environment, unexpected happenings, all that kind of thing. If you don't get immersed in the game then I think it's safe to say the most it'll do is startle you from time to time. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that from time to time.

...and I didn't really find Dead Space scary at all.

 

[LordDPS]

Here is how I think it, take from it what you will. True fear (in a video game at least) is a sense of helplessness. We gamers get drilled into us that we are the "hero" or are in some way capable of dealing with the threat at hand. A good "scary" game is a game in which it is impossible to defend yourself effectively. Where your presumptions are shattered. This is why I hate people who call Dead Space or Doom 3 scary. They rely on jump scares that are easily dealt with and become annoying and monotonous.

Look at games like Clock Tower, Amnesia The Dark Descent, or Eternal Darkness for "scary" games.

I don't want to sound like a troll and if you disagree then you are entitled to your opinion. I'm just a teen with an opinion. It may be wrong but I hope people at least listen before they start discrediting me.

Then again this is the internet....

 

[Denamic]

You're in a dark, cramped space.
There's danger all around you, but you can't see any.
And you know that you're absolutely going to die.
You just don't know how. Yet.
Dark Souls is terrifying.