Video games can't do horror.

[xPixelatedx]

No matter how powerful an enemy or obstacle seems, it is not insurmountable. You can overcome it. You are inherently better than it, simply because you can defeat it without exception.

...No? I have faced plenty of enemies in games that actually weren't meant to be defeated. Putting that aside the dispatch-ability of an enemy has nothing to do with how scary it is. The Xenomorphs in the movies are killable, and get killed all the time. Someone will always survive in an alien flick to, so you know the odds aren't actually insurmountable even while you are watching it.

Of course videogames can do horror. The first Resident Evil has some genuinely creepy moments that weren't jump scares, like when the hunters first arrive. Yeah I could kill it, but that didn't make me feel any better! After that first encounter the sounds of those deep footsteps around every corner freaked me out. I would argue Silent hill 1 & 2 are more horrifying then any horror movie made in the west, and most people who played them would agree.

Hell, when I was a kid first meeting that eel in Mario 64 was pretty horrifying, especially when it became obvious I had to antagonize it to progress. Horror is pretty easy to do in games, when you have people making them who understand the ins&outs of the genre.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I don't agree with the quote. Obviously, horror isn't about the possibility of failing. It's not about dying either, otherwise Zelda would be horror.

Plus I don't know what he's talking about with Amnesia. I was backed into a corner plenty of times.

 

[Imbechile]

the protagonist cannot fail.

Why are you equating horror with fear of death/fear of failing?
There a more fears other than fear od dying.

Nothing can truly capture horror, other than experiencing it in real life.

But....... as far as diffrent media goes, games are much better in capturing horror than films or books.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

WRONG. If videogame horror doesn't fit your personal definition of horror, there's no need to come trumpeting it in our faces as an objective fact.

You're ignoring the the main aspect gaming can probably do better than any other media: immersion. If the game is immersive enough, you start to feel like you're actually the person you're playing as and forget about all the game mechanics. Would some people want to play Amnesia alone in the dark with heaphones if they didn't think it was scary? When I'm walking down into a dark tunnel in Amnesia with only the faint light of the lantern to guide my way, I'm not thinking "Nah, I can't fail so it's not scary". I'm dreading what's ahead, because I don't know yet. As Lovecraft put it: the oldest fear of mankind is the fear of the unknown. Just because I can't fail doesn't mean I can't get paranoid about the noises around me, shocked by the grotesqueries that kill me or feel unsettled when I know there's something on my tail, but I don't know what.

It would seem you're quite lonely with your opinion.

 

[Padwolf]

Horror is a personal thing. If horror means permanent death to you, then none of the usual horror games are going to appeal to you. If permanent death alone was horror then Fire Emblem would be the most horrific game to cross our paths. To me horror isn't death or monsters that jump out at you or a haunted house you have to get out of. It's more of a journey, it's a look into the minds of characters and their plights and how they deal with the world around them. Silent Hill 2 is the perfect shining example of this. All the characters are losing themselves, there is no real success story here, it's a psychological downwards spiral.

Another good point to bring up is something that video games do best and that's immersion. Immerse yourself in the world and see it through the eyes of the character you are playing, where you don't know what is coming around the corner.

 

[loa]

Of course you can fail what are you on about.
That's the key component of games: interactivity.
Ripley will always with 0% fail sneak past the aliens and survive in aliens no matter how many times you watch aliens.
If you play penumbra, sneaking past enemies is not something that will always work with 0% fail.
That's the whole point of it being a game.

Games also don't always have a happy end or have to have the main character even live through the game so what you're saying makes no sense at all.

 

[rob_simple]

You're basing your entire argument on what you assume horror to be. Death isn't as scary, to me, as living forever and being forced to go through the same thing over and over, but that's just me. You can't use personal opinion when making blanket statements like 'video games can't be scary'.

I agree that most of the games you mention aren't very scary just because they are predictable and I can usually tell when something is going to jump out or someone is going to die.

On the other hand, I've never finished Silent Hill 2 because it scared me too much. It was nothing to do with dying, but the fact that it was impossible to predict what was going to happen next that left me feeling constantly helpless so I could only play it in short bursts before I was a nervous wreck and had to go do something else.

Also, your assumption that horror can't be horror without real peril means the entire horror movie genre is rendered irrelevant because, 9 times out of 10, the protagonist overcomes the evil and survives, and we all know it's going to happen.

 

[Trivun]

Personally I don't see why death needs to be in horror titles at all. Films don't threaten that you're going to 'die', in a film sense (maybe having the film end halfway through before the actual finish if the protagonist does something wrong?), and don't have any kind of 'punishment' for the audience, yet they still manage to invoke terror at least temporarily. It's all about pushing the right buttons in your mind, not just the consequences of what's happening, but rather tricking the brain into thinking of the potential consequences. I still get creeped out every time I play Riven, a puzzle game with absolutely no death or possible way of dying save in scripted sequences affected only by the very end of the game - for most of the run it's just a standard puzzle-based adventure, and yet the atmosphere and eerie ambience of the environments (amazing photo-realistic graphics for a game from the mid-to-late-90s) and the music all combine to push those buttons that make you feel like something is going to turn up and scare the crap out of you. The best thing is it isn't even a horror game, just a standard adventure title, but screw me if Temple Island and the throne room and Ghen's 'spider chair' don't have me fearing the worst every time I play.

Horror isn't as simple a concept as just providing some sort of consequence for your actions. Play Silent Hill or Amnesia and take a good hard look at how they use the environment itself to tap into those primal fears. There are plenty of parts of Silent Hill where the enemies aren't going to hurt you at all, yet the simple presence and atmosphere are pretty scary. You hardly see the monsters in Amnesia for the most part, but the fear that there's one behind you right now is a constant reminder of your helplessness in the situation. Hell, even Bioshock - the Houdini Splicers are no harder for me to kill than any other Splicer in the game, but their habit of flitting all over the place and being where you don't expect it made them so much more scary for me than any other foe in the game. It's all about how the developer uses the tools they have available to push those buttons, not just whether or not you can fail or whatever.

 

[mitchell271]

RAGE Really. Go play Eternal Darkness or Slender and come back to tell us that games can't do horror.

Reason That does raise a few good points. The point of horror games is (usually) to give a sense of unease and tension instead of outright terrify. Most AAA horror games are like this and are trying not to scare people away, literally. That's why when a game that is genuinely terrifying (see above and SCP: Containment Breach) make a big splash in the media and pop culture because we usually don't see stuff like that. We reward ambition, especially if it pays off.

 

[WickedSkin]

Snip

I disagree. There are great horror games.
Look into some here: http://www.frictionalgames.com/site/games
and Silent Hill 1-3 (maybe even 4). No need to discuss anything else or break down other statements.

EDIT: Maybe I should add at least Resident Evil 1 and 2 as good horror.
I'll also add that Dead Space 1 and 2 (and probably 3 as well) are not scary and does not compare to the above mentioned titles.

 

[The White Hunter]

You should play roguelikes. You can die in those. Permanently. A horror-based roguelike game has the potential to be amazing, unfortunately it's never really been done so far. I hear ZombiU kinda sorta is like that, albeit not very well, but that's the only example I can think of and unfortunately I've never played it myself.

ZombiU is pretty good stuff, got a critical hammering from most US publications though, did fairly well in Europe and Jimothy Sterling loved it. But for everything it does well it does something irritating as well, the combat is slow and difficult, thats fine, but the guns don't handle well and you end up wasting ammo because of the lack of more precise aiming, things like that.

But it's fun to play, it's tense and creepy and it's an enjoyable horror game, if there was a sequel it need alot more polish though.

OT: Horror does work in games but it has to be a different kind of horror to a movie, but games aren't scary, you are correct, they are never scary.

 

[Lilani]

-snip-

Horror isn't about what you can and can't do. It's about what you feel like you can and can't do. The certainty of a way out can be forgotten if the player is driven to think that the path might be more than they want to go through. I hit that sort of a place many times playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I found myself running through corridors being chased by monsters, scared shitless because I wasn't sure if I had the skill or the nerve to get to a safe place. I knew the safe place existed, sure, but what scared me was the path to get there. Horror is a very large picture made up of many fine details, and I think you're using too broad of a brush here.

 

[EvilMaggot]

i to this day still get freaked out by F.E.A.R. ... Alma.. you cant kill her, you are not entirely sure what she is.. but i know.. everytime she shows up.. something creepy stuff is going to happend T_T..also.. play "horror" games in a darkroom at night..

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

It's not about stuff being "insurmountable". By your rationale, true horror is found in games you cannot beat (Slender comes to mind, and that horrible Ju-on game that ends every one of its chapters in the death of the character you've been playing as). I think we're in need of distinguishing between HORROR and TERROR. To quote the Merriam-Webster:


ter·ror
noun \ˈter-ər, ˈte-rər\
a state of intense fear


hor·ror
noun \ˈhȯr-ər, ˈhär-\

a: painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay
b: intense aversion or repugnance


I'll concede that both words allude to "intense fear", but terror seems to focus on a [sustained] state, whereas horror is about "aversion or repugnance" (as in, reactionary emotions). We're to commonly distinguish this two as one separates fear of the unknown from the fear of that which we know too well.
Generally speaking, it is very easy to provoke horror: a few seconds of disgust, a scare chord, etc. Games do that a lot. It's just that horror isn't worth a lot beyond those few seconds. Terror, though, is an even more delicate art, since it requires a careful set-up and build-up that involves atmosphere, pacing and dread of the subtle.

 

[Mr. Eff_v1legacy]

An interesting argument, though I almost want to use the word "ridiculous." That's exactly the point is that you have to find the way to proceed. Playing a video game takes your desire to flee and hide and outs it in direct contrast with your desire to advance through the game.
I've read an interesting article called "Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games." I won't get into it here, but the argument is that the goals of horror and the medium of video games directly overlap. I can say horror games have scared me much, much more than any film or text. Any weaknesses the genre has are vastly overshadowed by its strengths.

 

[Kopikatsu]

the protagonist cannot fail.

Why are you equating horror with fear of death/fear of failing?
There a more fears other than fear od dying.

Nothing can truly capture horror, other than experiencing it in real life.

But....... as far as diffrent media goes, games are much better in capturing horror than films or books.

I'm not. As was previously explained (This goes for everyone else who brings this up as well), it's not that failure is scary, it's that the protagonist is always stronger than the adversaries, whether it be through guile, strength, or what have you. No matter what the situation is, the unknown cannot genuinely be unnerving if you will always have the tools to overcome it. It's not about failure. It's that you are inherently better than whatever the game has to throw at you. A protagonist in a movie or book can very well be killed, or succumb to madness, or become that which they have fought against. But a video game protagonist cannot. Even if their mental state begins to degrade, they will overcome it. Even if surrounded by invincible, insta-killing minions, the narrative will continue.

The fact that you cannot fail in a horror game is not scary because failure is scary. But there is no such thing as the unknown. Everything is explained, whether through the narrative or the game mechanics themselves. Even if you die, the knowledge that you've obtained carries over, unlike in other media where the character is fully capable of being removed from the narrative (by death or some other means) without even having learned anything about the threat. Necromorphs went from unnerving to punching bags within the span of about three chapters in Dead Space. The fact that the game was riddled with text and audio logs to tell you exactly what they were didn't help either. By interacting with the game, you as the player learn about the limitations of your enemies and of your own strength. You learn how to beat them, and then they just become like any other enemy in any other game. Any attempt at trying to show the darkness within the human mind is doomed to fail for the same reason. The protagonist will not succumb to madness. They can't. That's what makes them the protagonist. They can be affected by the experiences they suffer over the course of the game, but they can't be affected.

James from Silent Hill 2, to use a more retro example. Despite what happens over the course of the game, James does not change. The James you control at the beginning of the game is not fundamentally different from the James you control at the end of the game. His fate is merely revealed in a single cutscene- and is therefore largely meaningless. I mean, the only memorable thing about Silent Hill 2 was the Dog ending, because it was hilarious.

 

[josemlopes]

STALKER and Minecraft, bro.

How about this, you can win if you happen to go through the right places or you can loose if you happen to get fucked up with a bunch of monters.

Scripted horror certainly doesnt work as well in games as it does in movies but unscripted horror is where the horror is, and its where it gets even better then the ones in movies because you honestly dont know if you will make it or not, and in case you dont and restart at the nearest checkpoint you still arent safe because even though you know that doing X will get you you still can do Y,Z,A,B,C,... and none of those options can garantee you safety.

 

[Abomination]

The first time I was really really terrified by a piece of media was playing Daggerfall. I was visiting the city of Daggerfall for the first time at night and heard the sudden "Vengeance!" scream of the dead king. I turned my character around to see a shade slip behind a house. For the first time I was the hunted creature. Not some foolish girl who runs UPSTAIRS to escape a murderer or some guy in a book. I had the first person experience of being the poor sap this undead king wanted to punish for the transgressions of others.

You aren't supposed to defeat this king. You're supposed to run and hide from the bastard.

No other media can do that. No other media can make YOU the decision maker on how to survive. The horror comes from the fact that you might make the wrong call.

Of course, by your definition the only "real" horror is if someone was to be placed in legitimate danger... so I guess sign up for the armed forces?

 

[Zhukov]

Video games can't do horror my arse.

Sure, most of them fail, but it can be done.

I would attribute a lot of the failures to many developer's apparent inability to conceive of a game where they don't give the player a weapon.