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[Melly]

Recently I had a discussion with a friend of mine about Alan Wake. He was playing the game, and said that it was a great game, with a very well written story and characters, a very good atmosphere, and enjoyable gameplay. But it was simply not scary, at all.

When I asked him why, he basically said that the game could not scare him because it was labelled as a horror/suspense game, and as such he already expected the game to try and frighten him. So he couldn't help but treat the game as any other action game. As he knows the game will try to scare him, he knows what to expect, and that destroys, for him, any fear he may have had.

He also mentioned that he can be frightened in games, but usually only in games that are not labelled as horror games, and play like any other game, up until a point in the game where, unexpectedly, everything seems to take a nose-dive to the seventh circle of Hell. It's unexpected, he's not prepared for it, he doesn't know how long it'll last, and he was used to feeling like Rambo, so suddenly having all that power stripped from him and forcing him to make do with a pea-shooter in a strange place makes him feel a lot more helpless than any horror game with purposely crappy controls or ammo conservation ever could.

I mentioned several design choices that could be made to make a game labelled as a horror game scary even to him, but in his words, a horror game is just predictable in its attempts to scare you, because you know it'll try, constantly. The enemies are not scary because you know they'll come at you from odd angles, the music always changes when they're near, and if you strip all that foreshadowing and make them truly unpredictable, he says he'd only feel the game was killing/wounding him unfairly and not bother.

So I'm asking you guys for your opinions on this. Are 'horror games' really not that frightening? Does true fear only come from the truly unexpected, and the truly unknown?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

hmm -- to me, alan wake isn't a horror game, really -- not compared to games like silent hill 2 and such at least. it's more a shooter first and horror second, rather than horror first and shooter second.

also, i disagree that the primary purpose of horror games should be to scare or frighten. it's usually more about setting an uneasy or creepy mood, not just shock or surprise. there's a bit of a distinction between a game feeling creepy and a game scaring you.

[Melly]

Yes, I too tend to enjoy a lot more games like SH2 that focus on building an uneasy, bizarre atmosphere than games that go for cheap scares.

He would answer that the same way, though, that because he would expect the game to have an uneasy atmosphere, that he would be less affected by it than if he didn't expect it.

[John Nesky]

In order for a game to scare me, I have to feel feel invested in it. I have to be strongly motivated to avoid losing. And the losing has to be infrequent, otherwise I'll expect it.

Quick-saves and checkpoints and unlimited retries all reduce my investment down to the few minutes that passed since the last time I saved. They make the game less scary.

The original Resident Evil tried something interesting with its save points: You could only save a limited number of times. Cute, but I think they got it wrong. What they should have done is limit how many times you can retry. As soon as you have finite lives, then your investment goes all the way back to the beginning of the game. That is how much you can lose. And that is why NES games are still some of the scariest games we have.

I still want to see a game inspired by Alien, where there's only a single enemy but it moves persistently offscreen and eats your crewmembers whenever it's hungry. Metroid Fusion is the closest I'm aware of, but the hunter in that game was totally scripted.

[s0]

What they should have done is limit how many times you can retry. As soon as you have finite lives, then your investment goes all the way back to the beginning of the game. That is how much you can lose.

The problem is, I can't see this working for long-ish games like Resident Evil. Losing an hour of gameplay time is one thing, but if I lost something like 10, I'd probably just stop bothering with the game. Also, RE being story-driven to a certain extent would add even more frustration. Being forced to go through the exact same story over and over again is neither fun nor interesting.

I think what Demon's Souls does works really well in that respect. If you die, you're forced to replay the level, die twice "in a row" and you lose all your souls. The game also forces permanent decisions via constant autosaving. It's pretty creepy too.

[Ego_Shiner]

actually i think metroid fusion was  a really good example of a game that managed to be scary without being a 'horror' game perse. i mean most of it wasn't really scary, but still had a kind of atmosphere that allowed parts like the sa-x scenes or the nightmare to scare you somewhat.

[John Nesky]

Losing an hour of gameplay time is one thing, but if I lost something like 10, I'd probably just stop bothering with the game. Also, RE being story-driven to a certain extent would add even more frustration. Being forced to go through the exact same story over and over again is neither fun nor interesting.

I agree that replaying a long story-driven game can be frustrating. So just stop playing when you run out of lives, problem solved. Just because you never saw the "good" ending doesn't mean the game was bad.

But yeah, there are other ways to get you invested in the game without putting 10 hours of progress on the line.

[Chromanoid]

i think a similar issue ( http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28735/Analysis_MIAs_Born_Free_And_Violence_As_A_Tool.php ) shock value of violence in video games...

[SirNiko]

Resident Evil had the impact of monsters being frightening, to me. You were frequently ill-equipped to kill them (very limited ammo) your sight and mobility were often restricted, and in some cases they could come back to life even after they were dead. To me, those elements were what made the game a successful attempt at horror.

One thing I tried once (in a D&D style tabletop game) was to make the key point that the heroes don't know what they're up against. If you say "Hey, it's a zombie horror game" they know it's zombies. If they're fighting demons, they know it's demons. So I left it open, and the heroes were eventually confronted by a strange virus that makes animals turn into giant electrified deadly versions of themselves. I thought it turned out pretty well, since it started off with them not knowing what was going to happen, then it turned into a mystery on how to fight the smaller animals, and then finally fighting big animals in a more determined manner at the end.

-SirNiko

[Tanner]

alan wake was never labeled as horror, at least by the developers. they chose to call it a thriller, and i'd say that i agree. it's tense, but not really too scary. i like it.

[Melly]

I still want to see a game inspired by Alien, where there's only a single enemy but it moves persistently offscreen and eats your crewmembers whenever it's hungry. Metroid Fusion is the closest I'm aware of, but the hunter in that game was totally scripted.

I have many times in the past thought of designing a game like this. The game world would be persistent, though small and claustrophic, like an abandoned military base. You were not the only person there, and you could try to collaborate or fight against other people for the very limited supplies and the itens and information you need to either escape or kill the 'creature'. The creature is a persistent entity that crawls around the base, mostly in ventilation ducts and other hard-to-watch places to which there were openings everywhere. You'd have a set of goals to survive, and as you go by them you never know when and where the creature will strike. It could stalk you, it could kill off your allies when you're not looking, and show a fairly high level of intelligence overall.

One thing I tried once (in a D&D style tabletop game) was to make the key point that the heroes don't know what they're up against.

I think this is effective as well, as fear of the unknown is one of the more primal feelings of human beings. It's best when the signs of something being wrong and something being out there, stalking you, are subtle and gradual, slowly creating a sense of dread, even though the source of the fear doesn't show itself at all for a long while.

[snowyowl]

To my mind, there are degrees of scariness, different ways to scare the player. You can have "screamers", which just bring up a flash and a sound effect to shock the player (pretty cheap, but it's just an example). You can have paranoia, in which the enemy could appear anywhere (or, in the case of shape-shifters, be anything) and you have to be ready for it. You can have fear of the unknown, as has been pointed out already. You can even scare the player by showing a happy and cheerful/normal and incongruous environment, but warped in unnerving ways (a surprising amount of nightmares are like this).

Pretty much the least scary thing I can think of is a zombie slowly shambling towards you.

[s0]

Resident Evil had the impact of monsters being frightening, to me. You were frequently ill-equipped to kill them (very limited ammo) your sight and mobility were often restricted, and in some cases they could come back to life even after they were dead. To me, those elements were what made the game a successful attempt at horror.

This. The whole "body horror" aspect of it had a pretty big impact on me as well. Things like the keeper's diary and those documents you find detailing Umbrella's experiments. Made me feel real uncomfortable in a "shit, I wouldn't want that to happen to me" kind of way. Also I thought the enemies got a lot scarier once I knew what they actually were, how they were created etc.

[rambling]
On a related note, it's interesting how most of the posters so far seem to define fear as "fear of the unknown". I think "fear of the unknown" is really fear of the irrational. What makes the "unknown entity" scary in most horror games that use the trope is that the player (and by extension, the player character) can't rationally explain the existence of the entity or why it's out to kill them.

Of course irrationality causes fear when used in this way, but there's a kind of "evil rationality" or "immoral rationality" that's potentially frightening too because it opposes the basic ethics of modern society. Resident Evil makes heavy use of that with its overarching "science gone wrong" theme.
[/rambling]

[SirNiko]

One thing I tried once (in a D&D style tabletop game) was to make the key point that the heroes don't know what they're up against.

I think this is effective as well, as fear of the unknown is one of the more primal feelings of human beings. It's best when the signs of something being wrong and something being out there, stalking you, are subtle and gradual, slowly creating a sense of dread, even though the source of the fear doesn't show itself at all for a long while.

I was thinking more along the lines of a mechanical problem: if you don't know what's out to get you, you can't prepare for it and your chances of survival are much lower. Once you've watched a scary movie once, it's not scary anymore because you know what's going to happen when.

Fear and surprise go hand-in-hand, I think. You cannot have fear without first having surprise.

-SirNiko

[Theotherguy]

I still want to see a game inspired by Alien, where there's only a single enemy but it moves persistently offscreen and eats your crewmembers whenever it's hungry. Metroid Fusion is the closest I'm aware of, but the hunter in that game was totally scripted.

This is actually a really great idea for a multiplayer game as well.

The only truly frightening multiplayer game I've played is called "The Hunted." It was a Source mod in which there were up to 16 players with guns that had limited ammo, and ineffectual "proximity sensors," etc. versus one player who was entirely invisible except for in rare circumstances, armed only with a knife. The armed -- "Hunter" -- players had to kill the Hunted within a set time limit.

It was extremely frightening for both parties. Frightening for the Hunted, because at any moment, you could rush around a corner and get shot in the face by one of the Hunters, and frightening for the Hunters, because you often had to split up to have a better chance of killing the Hunted, and when your team-mates would die, you wouldn't know but for the fact that they couldn't type back to you.

I'd often find myself with one or two other guys walking down silent corridors, only to realize that they weren't following me anymore. "Guys?" I would say into the microphone, and then I would hear a swift whooshing sound and my screen would go black.

It's a really awesome mechanic that really ought to be implemented more often.

[Seth]

I think John Nesky is on to something about investment--I sometimes find roguelikes scary even if they aren't horror themed at all.

[J.W. Hendricks]

Well, I'm too much of a scared little vagina to do anything even MILDLY scary, I wouldn't know much about horror games. But I did play through Resident Evil 4, which wasn't scary at all, so I can see where your friend is coming from.

[deathtotheweird]

STALKER was the only game to truly scare the shit out of me.

[Contrary]

I think gameplay difficulty is a big part of it.

How easy Bioshock is, even on hard, just ruined it for me. I'm ot trying to brag about how pro leet I am, but I think people who played it will agree it's really not creepy or scary at all when you can run straight at things and kill them and use so little ammo that in fact, you are full on all munitions 90% of the time.

[Zaratustra]

ahem