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Spooky situations in games
5 years ago
I'm a big fan of haunted houses, Halloween, spooky games, and so on, and as ever, have been doing some musing on them.
I'm going with 'spooky' for the moment as something apart from just regular high tension, and apart from 'surprise' like a jump scare. Spooky being more that dread that leads up to a jump scare (when executed well). I play with design elements and gamemaking at times and one I've always wanted to do is a spooky/scary one.
I'm also considering it apart from specific fears. For instance, many people find spiders scary. But if I just plop a spider in front of someone - that's more a jump scare than dread, and relies heavily on the viewer's existing fear of spiders, if they have one at all. Zombies are a big 'victim' here of just being plopped in and the game going "See, scary, because zombies!" without actually creating any dread around them.
I often find, for me, that games defuse dread with action ("Thriller") mechanics. So for me (and I understand this differs for people), in order to be spooky or dreadful, those elements have to have high precedence over action, combat, etc. Taking Dead Space as an example, I would always lose my sense of dread or fear once gunfights got under way because the tone shifts to a power fantasy of killing all the monsters and I can't hold both in my emotional state at once (though I have a particular fondness for the Dead Space series, it's more as action games than scary games). So in a lot of ways, I tend to find games with less combat and less direct interaction with the scary elements to be, well, scarier than those that have a lot. So if it was just based on my own nature, I'd likely design a spooky experience to have very limited to no means of 'fighting off the monster'. et in some ways inevitability isn't that scary either... but counterplay reduces dread by making that the focus of the mind. If I can "outplay" the monster, then, I start to see "behind the scene and into the game as a game" as I start thinking more about how to play against a game obstacle, than I do about being afraid of something. I'm still strongly wondering on how to make a good line between "This is spooky and I should be scared" versus "This is a game obstacle and I should be analytical". I find the best scariness comes when the imagination is focused on what could go wrong, rather than how to resolve a problem.
I'm curious what you all find 'spooky' when playing a game! Where do your lines of "scary oh crap" vs "oh I wonder how to beat this obstacle" fall?
I'm going with 'spooky' for the moment as something apart from just regular high tension, and apart from 'surprise' like a jump scare. Spooky being more that dread that leads up to a jump scare (when executed well). I play with design elements and gamemaking at times and one I've always wanted to do is a spooky/scary one.
I'm also considering it apart from specific fears. For instance, many people find spiders scary. But if I just plop a spider in front of someone - that's more a jump scare than dread, and relies heavily on the viewer's existing fear of spiders, if they have one at all. Zombies are a big 'victim' here of just being plopped in and the game going "See, scary, because zombies!" without actually creating any dread around them.
I often find, for me, that games defuse dread with action ("Thriller") mechanics. So for me (and I understand this differs for people), in order to be spooky or dreadful, those elements have to have high precedence over action, combat, etc. Taking Dead Space as an example, I would always lose my sense of dread or fear once gunfights got under way because the tone shifts to a power fantasy of killing all the monsters and I can't hold both in my emotional state at once (though I have a particular fondness for the Dead Space series, it's more as action games than scary games). So in a lot of ways, I tend to find games with less combat and less direct interaction with the scary elements to be, well, scarier than those that have a lot. So if it was just based on my own nature, I'd likely design a spooky experience to have very limited to no means of 'fighting off the monster'. et in some ways inevitability isn't that scary either... but counterplay reduces dread by making that the focus of the mind. If I can "outplay" the monster, then, I start to see "behind the scene and into the game as a game" as I start thinking more about how to play against a game obstacle, than I do about being afraid of something. I'm still strongly wondering on how to make a good line between "This is spooky and I should be scared" versus "This is a game obstacle and I should be analytical". I find the best scariness comes when the imagination is focused on what could go wrong, rather than how to resolve a problem.
I'm curious what you all find 'spooky' when playing a game! Where do your lines of "scary oh crap" vs "oh I wonder how to beat this obstacle" fall?
A good example is Resident Evil 2 and 3, the zombies are just fodder but a 'Oh crap!' moment happens when the invincible boss finds you.
Of course, the bleak atmosphere and style of encounters brings it all in.
Meanwhile, games that manage to tease in real-world stuff are a breed of their own. I remember playing Eternal Darkness, and one of the insanity effects were random and loud door-knocking sounds. They genuinely had me wondering if someone was knocking on my door.
The Silent Hill series also comes to mind. Every room oozes loneliness, despair and decay, sometimes you don't even know exactly what you're looking at, yet it's so disturbing it makes you want to look away, and occasionally space and geometry distort in a way that seems malicious to you personally (like when you enter an elevator to find a perfectly normal-looking button that wasn't there before and takes you to a floor that shouldn't exist).
Stuff that makes the player question their gut reactions and question everything, especially if wrong choices may result in dire consequences; not just for the player, but for the world they're interacting with.
Far better than any jumpscare!