Video games can't do horror.

[Drizzitdude]

I wrote a post for another thread, and after reflecting on it for a bit, I found that it's a very accurate statement.

[Horror] simply doesn't translate to video games. You can't accurately capture what makes Xenomorphs scary if the protagonist cannot fail. But if the protagonist was capable of dying permanently (whether through a scripted event or just persistence like ZombiU), then you would be right back here complaining that it's Call of Duty all over again.

Pure horror just isn't something that video games do well, because the aforementioned fact that you absolutely cannot fail. For example, Dead Space 2. They put a lot of effort into trying to make you feel unsafe in the vents...but the vents were where I felt safest, specifically because you were completely defenseless inside of them. If a Necromorph were to legitimately attack you there, then you would have no chance to stave off your death. A video game can't allow that, and so vents = safe.

I could even use Amnesia as an example. Amnesia wasn't scary because you were never backed into a corner. There was always a way to proceed, you just needed to find it. No matter how powerful the monsters were or how weak you are, as long as success is inevitable, it's not horror. There's just nothing to fear.

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.

Now, I want to know if anyone agrees with this viewpoint. That if you absolutely cannot fail given the mechanics of a game, then true horror cannot exist. If not, why not?

I feel like this is completely untrue. The only way that you can find this to be the thing that stops a game from being horrifying is if you are looking at the game AS A GAME and if you are doing that it obviously failed to immerse you in the experience completely. For a game to be a good survival horror there are a few core points that have to be done.

1: The story or protagonist is someone you can relate to: This is important because if we cannot relate to the person in some way or another you feel detached. The story is just that, a story, that the protagonist (not you) is following. This is why they are often portrayed as the average joe, the engineer, someone who has little to no experience that would help him in the current situation that he is in. Which leads on to the next point.

2: Feeling of being helpless: In order for a game to represent true horror there has to be situations where you feel completely helpless, or at the very least completely overwhelmed by the enemy even with the tools that you have. While the protagonist is allowed some form of defense against the all powerful dark force that haunts him, in the end it should be difficult or at least limited in some form (being in a fading light in some games, guns being restricted by low ammo, etc). In truth this does not even have to be limited to terms of combat, but also dementia. In dead space for example something that was completely unavoidable was Isaac slow fall into insanity, it was unavoidable and the player as did not have a way of defending themselves against it in any way.

3: The enemy has to be scary: This part is obvious but also one of the core things that is often messed up in the genre. The enemy you are fighting has to be horrifying, this can either be done by the more common method of making them visually disgusting (Dead space, Silent hill, Resident evil) but the far more immersive form is to make the enemy powerful and unseen. Something that the player is forced to avoid and only glimpse from time to time, it has to be some kind of towering, all powerful being, that you as the player should feel is impossible to fight. This is the best kind of antagonist, the one who hides and waits for your every mistake to punish you, whose force is so powerful that the player has to avoid them just to survive, where no matter how strong your weapons are or how skilled you are as a player this is the one thing you just need to straight up avoid. This is why games like slender and amnesia work, because the protagonist is forced to avoid confrontation. It is the same sort of element that we commonly find in most horror films (big scary monster or serial killer, completely helpless victims etc)m and it works even more so in videogames because it forces us, the gamer into the shoes of the completely helpless victim rather than that of the all mighty hero.

4: Enviroment: This one isn't so much of an issue today as it is commonly the priority focus in most games claiming to be survival horror. A player needs needs environment that force confrontation with evil, that force them into the helpless situation or make them scared at simply the thought of continuing in whatever twisted world they have arrived in. More often than not this is done by taking a normal scene (say a hospital) and forcing it into a an asylum of horror. The twist from normal everyday elements into something scary is mentally disturbing and keeps us on edge. At the very least the environment needs to have heavy implications either like the twisted world of silent hill or the abandoned living quarters in dead space, something that would just give players the inclination that this place used to be normal, and that people used to live here and go one with their everyday lives just like the player does. Once again it is all about relating the player to the protagonist and setting that makes a horror game.

I have to be heading to work now, perhaps I will add on to this later if I can think of some more essentials in survival horror, but for now I think we have the basics down at least.

 

[Kopikatsu]

I wrote a post for another thread, and after reflecting on it for a bit, I found that it's a very accurate statement.

So what in your opinion are good examples of horror (movies, books, etc). Also, do you feel that it is different for everyone, that horror is difficult to share with an audience?

I can't think of anything I would consider a good example of horror. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means that I have terrible memory.

The key elements to horror, to me, are this:

1. The protagonist(s) cannot ever learn the true nature of the threat. Speculation on the part of the character(s) is fine, but they can never know.

2. The threat is legitimately threatening. Every time it harasses the character(s), something severe should happen. Someone dies, a device they needed is irreparably damage, etc.

3. The capability of the threat is never fully explored. Whatever they throw at it seems to work, but it never does. Bullets might slow it down originally; an explosion might make it retreat for a short time...but it never stops. It never falters. Alternatively, whenever one is killed, another simply takes it's place ad infinitum. Any barrier made to stop it is either torn apart or easily circumvented.

4. Success is not guaranteed. Ties in with point 2, the threat should prove that it, without a shadow of a doubt, is immensely stronger than the characters. They should not be able to survive constant encounters with it and come out unharmed. In essence, the media should make it clear that the characters are truly hopeless. No matter what weapons are at their disposal, or how smart they may be...it does not matter. Nothing matters. Their fate is inevitable.

5. Mental degradation of the characters. The experience should screw them up, and it should show. It should make at least one of the characters rash and do illogical things. An example that is used commonly, as in Nightmare House (in one ending), Saya no Uta, and Dead Space: Extraction is that a character is assaulted by monsters, and so they kill all of them. Only to later discover that they didn't kill any monsters. It was their family, or merely bystanders. Since I'm on the subject, I'll say something that really disappointed me: The way the hallucinations were handled in Dead Space 2. If it were up to me, I'd have removed the orange tint (and let the monitors freaking out be the only indication that Isaac is freaking out), removed the glowing lights from Nicole, and added less clear hallucinations.

For example, when Isaac is first released from his bindings at the very beginning of the game. Halfway through that room, I would have had Isaac get grabbed my a Necromorph from behind, and then the room flashes to a pristine white room, with human arms around his neck and nurses rushing towards him while the person behind him yells for someone to restrain the patient because he's having an episode again. A Doctor comes up on the side and pulls out a syringe...then it flashes back to Necromorphs, with the syringe now being a Slasher's claw. Isaac draws his legs up and kick's the Necromorph's arm, causing it to be rammed into the Slasher's eye, which causes it to collapse while Isaac headbutts the one holding him. Then when he's running through the area, have it flash back to the white area once more before reaching the door. When the Slasher gets stuck in the door while it's trying to close, have it flash back to the white area with a Nurse stuck in the door instead. She reaches out towards Isaac and sobs, "Help...me..." just before returning to 'reality', where the Slasher is torn in half and dies.

Edit: After writing this list...I realized that the media that fits all of this criteria is the movie that really screwed me up as a kid. It was called They. It was about another dimension/world/something, it was never explained. But there were monsters that lived there, the titular 'They', but their forms were never shown. You merely saw snippets of them. The most you ever saw was when one was in a pool, and you could see a skull mounted on it's forehead. But even as it swam, you couldn't even tell if it was aquatic or humanoid. Anyway, they would kidnap children (The opening scene has a boy tell his mother that he thinks a monster is under his bed. She tells him to just put a blanket over his head and that will keep him safe. Later that night, he hears growling and the bed starts to snake, so he put the blanket over his head and it stopped...and then something reached under the blanket and grabbed his foot before dragging him underneath the bed) and implant shards of bone inside of them which They could use to track down the kids once they've grown, and then would kidnap them again to eat them.

So, the main protagonist is a woman who eventually meets up with other people who were taken, and they form a group to protect themselves from the monsters. One of the guys reveals that the monster's one weakness is light, and that they will never appear when the person isn't alone. It turns out, they're fully capable of destroying the lights- so light only slows them down. A guy had candles throughout his entire house to try and stop them...but one triggered the fire alarm, so the lights were extinguished. No matter what they did, they were hunted down one by one. The protagonist found the bone shard and tore it out of her head in an incredibly bloody fashion, but it did nothing. They still could find her no matter where she went. Eventually she goes crazy and attacks two guys, stabbing one of them in the throat with a shard of glass because she thinks they're monsters. She gets sent to an asylum for being insane, and is looking out of the little window on her door. She sees a room of patients and nurses, all of them playing games or talking and having a great time. She sighs with relief, just as the door to the other room closes...and then a dark shape fills the window. She ends up being dragged by the monsters into the closet, and is pulled into their world, although the door to the closet was left open, so she's still covered in light- which keeps the monsters at bay.

Two Doctors walk into her room after she's kidnapped and look around the room for her a bit before both go to look in the closet. One asks the other where she went, and the other simply says that she must have escaped and slowly starts to close the door, while the woman is screaming for them to help her. Then they close the door, removing the light as the monsters rush forward...and then it ended. I was about seven when I watched that movie. I spent most of my time trying to think of how one would survive against the monsters, but I couldn't. The best idea I came up with was flying in a plane to keep up with the time zones to always stay in the light. But that would be far too expensive, and you would end up spending the rest of your life on a plane. Who would you get to fly such a thing? There was just no escaping the monsters. Sheer hopelessness.

Edit 2: I'd planned on responding to more posts, but this one left me drained. So maybe a bit later...

Edit 3: Forgot, I didn't answer the second part of your post. Well yes. I do think that horror is different for everyone. However, that is why I said that I believe most forms of horror media 'cheat' and use techniques like infrasound to induce fear where it should not exist. The difference between artificially induced fear and true fear is that...well, drugs for example. Drug-induced bliss might feel the same as true happiness, but they are not the same.

 

[fwiffo]

Fear is created by your brain, not game mechanics. All this talk of "rules for horror" is scary to me.

 

[Nieroshai]

The sad thing is that you played Amnesia like a danmaku instead of putting yourself in the character's shoes. To be scared, you have to roleplay. You have to be the character. You can't just go in thinking "how can I win and show all my friends how un-scary this is?"

 

[Jfswift]

I wrote a post for another thread, and after reflecting on it for a bit, I found that it's a very accurate statement.

snip

I really like your idea for Dead Space. That would be freaky and unnerving if you kept switching between realities, wondering if the marker was screwing with your head or if you really were in an asylum being a difficult patient. As for that movie you mentioned.. wow.. that would have given me nightmares. Good stuff though and it plays on common childhood as well as adult fears. Fear of what's under the bed, of the unknown, of being helpless while trapped or being hunted. That scene at the end is a perfect way to end a horror movie, if not a bit disturbing. The idea of eternal damnation, suffering and/or helplessness makes me cringe. To see the door close and not be able to do anything about it.


edit: shortened my post a bit. Btw, check out the movie, "The Others" with Nicole Kidman if you haven't seen it already. It's not bad really and fun to watch.