The Dark Age of Gaming Horror
Horror, as a genre, tends to lack any sort of interest for those of us who aren’t scared of it. The problem is, it exists solely to be scary, and if it isn’t, it falls flat and becomes simply pointless. The Grudge was a very good example of this: underdeveloped, uninteresting characters running around a plot that to call a cliche would be a gross understatement. Every so often, a film comes along that merges the horror genre with something else, like The Ring (which was a mystery), and Jacob’s Ladder (which was a drama), and the unscared can find interest once again in ghost stories. However, the fact remains that the vast majority of horror media follow the same tired formula of things that go bump in the night, and not much else.
This trend follows in gaming as well as film: designers try to build games that follow the same old formula: unreasonably intense darkness, atmospheric sounds, and highly gory visuals (which, because of our lovely developers’ obsession with specularity, often come off merely as ragdolls covered in jam). SomethingAwful’s sarcastic review of Bioshock is interesting:
This game, quite simply, is dark. It makes Doom 3 look like Kameo. Darkness does not automatically give a game creepy atmosphere. It’s just a crutch to hide lazy art direction. At least Doom 3 equipped the player with a flashlight. While the initial areas were amazing to look at, I had trouble navigating the dark generic hallways that were so persistent in the later stages. As the story progresses you’ll find yourself crawling through pitch black air ducts that you’ve seen time and time again in better titles.
Although those elements listed above certainly have value for this type of game, they do not make a game scary in and of themselves at the present time. We live in an age dominated by Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy; we view the world through media that makes itself known, and perhaps intends to make itself known. We see our character through an infinitely impermeable screen; why should we be scared? It’s not happening to us, nor to a real person: it is happening to something that is nothing more than polygons and math.
And therin lies the problem with modern horror games (and most other forms of horror media, for that matter). In order to be frightened, I must immerse myself in the game’s world. In order for this baptism to occur, I must have some point of reference through which to view the game’s world. In order to avail myself of the point of reference provided me by the game’s developer, I must sympathize with my avatar. And therein lies the problem with most horror games. Some do this well; most don’t.
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