Andrew Rambles Incoherently About Games and Game Design

[AndrewRogue]

Honestly? Then horror is the wrong genre for you. Period. You will not like them ever.

Empowerment is the EXACT opposite of what horror should attempt to convey. Because once you're empowered, you're not afraid anymore. And when you're not afraid anymore...

Yeah, you can do a lot with environment and the like. The problem is, environment alone isn't scary. This is why Silent Hill: Shattered Memories fell flat as a horror game. Its never capable of delivering on the threat that the environment.

Same for Dead Space, really. It did, occasionally, put up some really great environment at times. The problem was, of course, that it couldn't do anything more than startle me past a certain point because I just dismembered whatever necromorphs tried to jump me! Easy peasy.

So yeah. Really, I can't think of any successful horror where you spend any notable fraction of the experience empowered. I mean, it can work at the end (Leave Ending, in Silent Hill 2), but ultimately, the thing that digs at your soul is your utter inability to do anything (In Water, Maria, Silent Hill 2). And THAT is what's going to leave the impact.

Amnesia, thus far, has done a great job of scaring the shit out of me, and I've barely even seen a monster. Its mainly because I know I don't have a weapon to defend myself. I glance about, looking for places I could hide, dreading what could be around every corner because, not only is it gonna startle me, but it is going to hammer home exactly how helpless I am!

It really preys on real fear. The sensation that you could just step outside and be killed by something so easily, without any real chance to defend yourself. That you are literally nothing. Etc. I'm getting all mythos in this ramble! But its true. That sort of concept IS scary. That you are absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. That your life is nothing. That you can do nothing to protect yourself. That your only option is to run and pray.

Fun times.

[Nephrite]

I think that's a rather close-minded view of things. Because a player has the ability to fend off his opponents it doesn't make for a good horror game? Really? Or do you just mean "If you can kill all the enemies" or something?

I don't think you need to have a Rocket Launcher in every game (except when you beat it) or need to feel like you can take on every opponent. Silent Hill 1 did a rather good job in this regard, it gave you ammunition but not so much that you could kill everything.

I mean, did anyone like the stealth section in Metroid? (Was it Zero Mission or Fusion?) Granted, the game didn't sell itself as a stealth-related game so it shouldn't have been very good.

Either way, I firmly believe horror genre games can get you on atmosphere as well as powerlessness by not actually making you powerless. Look at your Silent Hill 2 example. You see Pyramid Head every so often and can't do shit about him, either because of a cutscene or because he's behind bars or what have you. Those are good examples of how to put fear into your heart by making you powerless without -actually- making you powerless. I don't know if that made a lot of sense though.

[Cmdr_King]

I know I've commented before that Silent Hill, even Shattered Memories, is at its scariest before anything happens, even knowing EXACTLY when you transition into "the game can hurt you now" territory.  But I think it goes further, and this will sound silly but stay with it.

Horror games are less scary the more powerless your are, and the more lethal the horrors from beyond the veil are.  Because here's the thing; when your character is powerless, or the things that should not be can kill you effortlessly, then you die a lot.  At which point you... start over.  Since you're still powerless, and still completely over-matched, you probably have to try over and over to finish each section.  At which point you're no longer experiencing ever-mounting terror.  You're replaying a level over and over in a video game.  You just cannot maintain any consistency in narrative or emotional flow and ultimately kick the player out of the experience.

[Carthrat]

A lot of horror games aren't actually all that hard to not die in, even when you are supposedly powerless. forex, I don't think I actually died at all when I played SH2 or SH3, and I don't think it took any particularly special gamer cred to get it done, there.

Atmosphere comes from a lot of places and is not something that can be rendered entirely external from your character; playing a weak character, or someone who isn't a physical superhuman instantly changes the tone and feel of the game from one where you're playing another bald space marine.

[Cmdr_King]

Well, in this case I'm mostly thinking of Shattered Memories; the first nightmare level, where I died once, was reasonably tense, but watching LPs for the rest of the game I just can't imagine being scared of the rawshocks after a point because of repeated losses.  Meanwhile, just wandering around town was incredibly nerve-wracking, even though you can't possibly be attacked.  Shit, in the forest levels, the music has a point where it's just dissonant and bizarre and I honestly jumped around thinking I'd wandered into the nightmare world without realizing it.

[Grefter]

SMT series noted for not being designed as following the Tabula Rasa self projection model and having a well characterised main character that is explicitly designed not to be projected on to.

Edit - Oh look a second page that makes my snark completely without timing or impact.  Hi Djinn.

Edit 2 - There can be a huge gap between playing a weak character and straight up having terrible controls which is honestly what has more frequently put me off the horror games I have tried.  Again to go to SH4.  I am playing a horror game where I am supposed to be being scared, can't fight stuff at all.  So on top of fighting with enemies that I can't fight, having the safe spot inevitably taken from me, fighting with stupidly frustrating limited inventory and rifling through said stupid inventory, I have to fight with basic walking around and directing attacks so I don't hit stupid escort quest woman.

Bad game to try out series again.

[Nephrite]

SMT series noted for not being designed as following the Tabula Rasa self projection model and having a well characterised main character that is explicitly designed not to be projected on to.

Edit - Oh look a second page that makes my snark completely without timing or impact.  Hi Djinn.

Edit 2 - There can be a huge gap between playing a weak character and straight up having terrible controls which is honestly what has more frequently put me off the horror games I have tried.  Again to go to SH4.  I am playing a horror game where I am supposed to be being scared, can't fight stuff at all.  So on top of fighting with enemies that I can't fight, having the safe spot inevitably taken from me, fighting with stupidly frustrating limited inventory and rifling through said stupid inventory, I have to fight with basic walking around and directing attacks so I don't hit stupid escort quest woman.

Bad game to try out series again.

Don't forget the burping zombies. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiDz69EqlFk

[DjinnAndTonic]

SMT series noted for not being designed as following the Tabula Rasa self projection model and having a well characterised main character that is explicitly designed not to be projected on to.

Edit - Oh look a second page that makes my snark completely without timing or impact.  Hi Djinn.

Oh yes, because we all know how much I ranted and raved about how much I liked the Silent Mains of the Persona games! Seriously, some RPGs try to make you insert yourself into the main character and I pretty much loathe the experience universally.

Immersion is good, but I prefer it in the form of good world-building and consistent story-telling. I don't need or want a blank slate to project on to be involved in the interactive experience of an RPG.

Horror games pretty much rely on this aspect to make themselves scary.

I half-agree with CmdrKing in that Horror games are at their most frightening right before they transition into some kind of combat-light mode... especially (perhaps only) when you don't know when that transition is going to happen. Once you make that transition into fighting though... it generally starts to feel like a action game, and perhaps it's just me, but I don't find those scary.

I like Silent Hill, but it's not particularly scary. Fatal Frame's very unique battle system is a lot closer to being scary and I want to praise it, but half-way through each of those games, the sense of fright was overpowered by "Man, I died, I need to practice."

[Hunter Sopko]

Horror games really need to maximize the Fight or Flight response. It shouldn't matter if you can fight back, but if you don't feel you are always in mortal danger, no amount of atmosphere is going to work.  Running away needs to be just as important an option as fighting or it just won't work. When this is achieved, the time spent agonizing over decisions becomes the bread and butter, because that can lead to panic. When this becomes commonplace, and the atmosphere supports it, boom. Horror. If Demon's Souls could be modified into a horror game, I'd fully support it.

The problem is true horror and gaming don't go hand in hand, really, despite the medium on the surface being pretty good for it. There are plenty of gamers like Nama who play games as escapism, and trying to fulfill that and still have the game be actually scary... doesn't work. Sometimes you can't fight the extradimensional creatures, true! But doesn't work for the goals gaming generally sets for itself.

Not being able to fight back is pretty freaking scary, and being able to fight back and still fighting a losing battle is far scarier. (Well depends on what you prefer: Terror or Doom). But again, both don't work for gaming because people will always want to win, or at least kick some ass. Game Theory 101, really. People aren't gonna have fun when the likely outcome is death (Demon's Souls notwithstanding, because... you can still win). But then again, it's not a problem to make a game that isn't for those people, you just have to be okay with them not liking it.

Offhand, this is kinda why slow-moving zombies are awesome. No matter how dumb and easily killed they are, there are still a million more, they are out there, and eventually, no matter what you do, you will slip up and one will get you. But when oh when will that be? It's just... hard to slip into this mindset from the outside though. Fast moving zombies are boring to me because they're generally handled no different than slasher movies. Terror vs. Doom again. Terror is you shit your pants and then you die. Doom is pervasive, degenerating and generally leads to you killing other people out of paranoia, then you die, possibly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

[AndrewRogue]

DJ: You may not play RPGs to project onto characters, but its certainly a genre with a lot of conceit toward this built into. Even setting aside games with silent mains, many RPGs are still built with some level of projection in mind. Character decisions? Form of projection. Relationships? Form of projection. Plot decisions? Form of projection. I mean, the genre is originally built off the idea of role-playing in the first place. >_>

I'm actually pretty curious, again, about what games you've played to get this impression (that horror game rely on blank slate to project onto) because my shining example (Silent Hill 2) certainly didn't. Hell, part of why I tore Dead Space down, amusingly, was the fact that Isaac was a blank slate, making it completely impossible to really care about the central conceit of the game. No concern for him/his girlfriend, no real fear of something bad happening to them.

You don't actually need to be able to project onto a character for horror to be effective. You just need to either relate, sympathize or empathize.

Neph: Nah, not saying that you need to be absolutely, 100% powerless. Horror can be done perfectly fine with combat. It just also risks minimizing fear of enemies. I wasn't kidding about the Shotgun and Silent Hill 2. Once I pick that guy up? He is a wonderful security blanket against the monsters.

CK: Kind of disagree? I mean, functionally, you are correct that horror is best right before something happens. The problem is that a lack of delivery on said threat of scary drains tension about pretty fast. About halfway through Shattered Memories, the game just... stopped being scary to large degrees, because, by this point, I had accepted the conceits that the town couldn't hurt me. And once I accepted this, it was over. The game could occasionally build some concern, but it was just hampered by the knowledge that, if the world wasn't icy, I was cool.

Which isn't to say there aren't other types of horror that you can fall back on in these situations (because it does come from more than rawr monsters, as people have pointed out), but you are definitely losing some strength.

To the second point... that's more about difficulty than anything. As Carth said, powerlessness does not necessarily equate to hard (nor does powerful equate to easy). Though I'd consider this a subject for a different time!

Sopko: Interesting distillation that I'll have to think on.

[DjinnAndTonic]

DJ: You may not play RPGs to project onto characters, but its certainly a genre with a lot of conceit toward this built into. Even setting aside games with silent mains, many RPGs are still built with some level of projection in mind. Character decisions? Form of projection. Relationships? Form of projection. Plot decisions? Form of projection. I mean, the genre is originally built off the idea of role-playing in the first place. >_>

I'm actually pretty curious, again, about what games you've played to get this impression (that horror game rely on blank slate to project onto) because my shining example (Silent Hill 2) certainly didn't. Hell, part of why I tore Dead Space down, amusingly, was the fact that Isaac was a blank slate, making it completely impossible to really care about the central conceit of the game. No concern for him/his girlfriend, no real fear of something bad happening to them.

You don't actually need to be able to project onto a character for horror to be effective. You just need to either relate, sympathize or empathize.

Ugh, playing Console RPGs to Role-play is doing it wrong.

As for Silent Hill 2, it's a great game and I love it and I certainly won't fault it for making a great, sympathetic main. In fact, in the exploration phases of SH2, I certainly did empathize! I think it's a limitation of horror-as-games that makes it hard to stay immersed in the atmosphere when I suddenly have to have my Avatar fight monsters/serial killers/whatever. Like... I empathize with James or Miyu or whoever just fine until I have to fight, then they feel like a blank slate and it's up to -me- to practice the clunky battle system to not have to die so that I can keep watching my horror/suspense movie/interactive storybook.

I see the potential for games to make the immersion work and become truly scary, I just haven't seen it realized yet. I generally get more anxious watching /someone else/ play horror games because then it's essentially a horror movie but I can't easily predict when the main character is going to die~

[Anthony Edward Stark]

They really should have used a different name for the genre 20 years ago, cause that bugs the crap outta me now. "Playing a console role-playing game to role play," indeed.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I'm sure they would have if "Math-Influenced Interactive Storybook" sounded as good.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

"Power-Gaming simulator" is pretty accurate when you look at Dragon Quest.

[AndrewRogue]

Ugh, playing Console RPGs to Role-play is doing it wrong.

As for Silent Hill 2, it's a great game and I love it and I certainly won't fault it for making a great, sympathetic main. In fact, in the exploration phases of SH2, I certainly did empathize! I think it's a limitation of horror-as-games that makes it hard to stay immersed in the atmosphere when I suddenly have to have my Avatar fight monsters/serial killers/whatever. Like... I empathize with James or Miyu or whoever just fine until I have to fight, then they feel like a blank slate and it's up to -me- to practice the clunky battle system to not have to die so that I can keep watching my horror/suspense movie/interactive storybook.

I see the potential for games to make the immersion work and become truly scary, I just haven't seen it realized yet. I generally get more anxious watching /someone else/ play horror games because then it's essentially a horror movie but I can't easily predict when the main character is going to die~

Its not ideal for it, no, but it also isn't completely without merit to give the player some role playing ability. That's mostly a conversation for another time, though. Probably my next ramble, wherein I explain why ME2 is the greatest game of all time and humbles all other previous gaming experiences (or, alternatively, why it was a really solid game that was surprisingly worthy of its praise).

Really though, based on your commentary lately, you're problem seems more like you want to be reading choose your own adventure books instead playing games. >_>

That, and if you had to practice Silent Hill 2 combat, you may need to revoke your gamer's license. Like, seriously. Fatal Frame, I'll give you. But SH2?

[DjinnAndTonic]

Nah, Choose-your-own-adventure books have terrible character designs.

Though honestly, there -is- a lot of disconnect between story and gameplay in CRPGs. I generally have no problem with that when I like both parts, but when we get to a situation like DA:O, where the gameplay is trying so hard to integrate into the story (and doing a fairly decent job, at least in terms of exploration-as-immersion and how-character-builds-level-up), but the gameplay is just no fun at all, I'd rather it have been a visual novel.

With lesser JRPGs, the opposite is normally true - I like the battle system but the story can drag. Of course, I tend to like a lot of the tropes in JRPGs, so this isn't as often as it would be for the standard gamer.

Still... drawing direct comparisons between CRPGs and Survival-Horror games probably isn't going to contribute much to the general discussion of the genre. I mean, I guess Shadow Hearts and Koudelka might be a good discussion point? Koudelka scared me on one or two occasions simply because I wasn't expecting it (not in the cheap surprise scare way, but just in the 'I didn't predict this' way). And there were some neat ideas in Sweet Home, the very first (only?) survival-horror-RPG~