People really love horror games.
They gobble them up, playing them for hours and hours.
They live vicariously through Streamers, launching such household names as Pewdiepie to fame
simply through his reactions to horror games.
Browse Twitch or YouTube Gaming right now and you're bound to find thousands of people
enjoying a horror game, either by playing it themselves or watching others play them.
Horror is a genre of gaming that's been popular since the beginning of gaming, whether
it be Nostromo, Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, or titles like Outlast and FNAF.
People want to be scared, they want horror.
Unfortunately, Horror Games have a problem.
They're not actually horror.
What Is "Horror?"
Now, you know what horror means.
You've seen horror movies, you've played these games, you've been scared.
It's likely that if you're a horror fan, you've played these games, and you would
classify them as horror.
But, what is horror.
What does it actually mean?
Is horror being startled?
Is horror being grossed out, or seeing gore?
Is it the feeling of adrenaline when being chased by a boss monster?
Horror at it's core is something that shocks, frightens, and induces loathing.
And it's not new.
Horror has been a staple of writers since Ancient Greece--with werewolves, and vampires.
Ghosts.
We all know horror when we FEEL it.
When we are so frightened, and shocked that we think our heart is going to stop.
We feel horror when we suddenly jump, lash out, or want to run away as fast as we can.
Horror is something we know.
It's embedded in us by evolution and history.
The feeling when you step outside and hear a noise in the darkness, close enough to reach
you, but outside the spill of the light.
That moment when something clearly alive, moving, touches your leg in the water while
swimming in the ocean.
Horror gives you that feeling, that rush of excitement and adrenaline, the emotional release
of danger without the risk.
You're safe, you're at home, there is no real danger.
This is something Hollywood has spent a lot of time researching.
They've figured out the three things you need for horror:
Tension.
The mystery of what and to whom.
Why is this happening?
What's going to happen in the story?
Relevance.
Something we can identify with.
Fear of death.
Identification with the hero, or personal condemnation of the antagonist.
And UNrealism.
The fact that this is fake.
This is entertainment.
A smart combination of these three things and suddenly you're inducing the fight-or-flight
part of your brain, rushing dopamine and endorphins through your body, all while in a safe place.
Followed by the sense of relief at the resolution of threat.
It's probably not surprising that as soon as we invented video games, we created horror
games.
And continue to create them.
It's one of the best selling and most consistent genres of games.
We have horror shooters, horror survival, horror adventure.
Third person, first person, visual novels, open world, stealth--for every type of game,
there's a horror game as well.
Many horror titles are in fact modified versions of traditional games.
They take away ammo, or give you less health, using scarcity of utility to force the player
into caution.
They make the enemies invincible walking golems of death, where fighting isn't an option
and you're required to run.
Some games take away your ability to fight at all, forcing you into exclusively hiding
and running.
Ducking into small closets and watching the enemy immediately outside your character's
hiding spot as it searches.
They load up the game with obscene amounts of gore and viscera, throwing blood at the
player at every opportunity.
Modern games have the benefits of incredible technology, massive budgets, huge amounts
of previous work to build off of.
They come out throughout the year, not just bunched into Halloween season, but constantly
feeding the hunger of the millions of players who want to experience that horror.
To help fill this supply, modern games primarily look to the past, to traditional horror.
Whether movies or stories, it's rare that a game will not draw most if not all of it's
inspiration from proven horror genius.
The most common inspirations are the biggest names in the field: Edgar Allan Poe, H.P.
Lovecraft, masters of their art.
It is no surprise that Lovecraftian is a key phrase in many horror games' marketing and
descriptions.
Lovecraft wrote stories about fear.
The unknown unimaginable horrors of the deep and dark, monsters whose very existence drove
men to insanity.
This sense of scale and power is what led game designers to create the 'boss monster.'
The huge, nearly insurmountable beast enemy at the end of the game.
This is not the only way that video games have misunderstood horror.
Not for a lack of trying, this is often only scary for a short period of time.
Or, worse still, it's not scary or shocking at all, failing to repulse the player.
Jump Scares are one of the most popular options for scares, especially in the Streamer Era
we are currently living in.
There's lots of entertainment to be found in watching your favorite personality jump
on screen when a scary thing pops out, or a loud noise goes off.
Jumps provide the 'scares,' but they remove replayability and eventually you become immune
to them.
Too many cheap scares take away from the overall "fear factor."
The player builds up a resistance to them, and then that's it.
There's no point in it anymore.
Five Nights at Freddy's continued past the first game because of a hidden lore, rewarding
the most dedicated players, not simply because it caused the player to jump.
By the third or fourth game, the playerbase was hunting for clues on the story, the past
of the characters, and the cheap--and expected--jumpscares had to become more intense, more invasive,
in order to actually achieve the scare they were designed for.
Many FNAF players will happily admit that after playing the game more than once, you
won't be scared anymore.
The tension is destroyed because you know what to expect.
Players can often identify exactly how to trigger these jump scares, leaving the only
avenue of entertainment to be scaring others by leading them down the path those scares
lay upon.
The horror of titles like this is exclusively in surprise, and that surprise is destroyed
by expectation.
The Tension of horror is often what people most closely identify with a scary game, and
therefore it's the part that tends to get the most attention.
When a player talks about their favorite horror game, you start hearing words like 'Atmosphere,'
'Environment,' the 'feeling' of the game.
Even more often, the discussion of the horror is based around the beginning few levels of
the game.
Rarely do they talk about the ending of the game, or even the middle.
Instead, it's "the first time you see what's hunting you."
'The first time' you fight the monster.
The first jumpscare.
The first boss, or first big chase.
This is because the tension, while easy to build, is easier to break.
Dying at the hands of your enemy is a greater motivator when you haven't experienced it
yet.
The player has instead only their own imagination of how "very very bad" it would be to
be caught.
This imagined pain is far sweeter, leading to a greater sense of horror, than the actual
death itself.
Actually being caught by the Alien in Isolation only removes the sense of horror at the possibility
of being caught.
It's no longer something that cannot be handled, but instead is yet another game mechanic.
It becomes nothing more than another artificial time sink, resetting you a few steps back
and forcing you to find another solution to success.
Eventually, most titles will give you a way to fight back, further removing any sense
of weakness you might have previously felt as they fall into the need to wrap up the
story.
The easiest way to finish the arc seems to be to turn the victim into a hero, to give
you a 'good' ending, and satisfy the power fantasy.
Handing over weapons to the protagonist allows the game to magically wipe away the past several
hours of gameplay where the invincible monster was unbeatable, and allow for a victorious
ending.
All answered by handing over a gun.
However, promoting this combat simply removes the survival aspect.
This is why the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill games were so successful at horror.
Overpowering the character removes from the atmosphere, and keeping your character weak
forces you to avoid fights--adding to the tension.
In order to help further facilitate this weakness, games like this add in scarcity in ammunition,
health, power-ups overall in order to further convince you to avoid firefights to save your
dwindling resources.
Tension is created by the unease inherent in your own weakness.
Weakness is helplessness, and helplessness is fear.
But is scarcity actually scary?
Does it actually induce fear to base your gaming session around the balancing act of
scarce resources versus need to advance in the story?
Or, does it instead lead to hoarding, planning, and--eventually--the same overpowered character
from before as you dump all your expensive and well-saved resources into the final boss
without regard?
While the early game's tension is served well by this artificial scarcity of resources,
especially in the survival horror genre, it is plagued by the need to allow player characters
to improve, get stronger, see growth, and hoard materials.
That scarcity is gone later in the game, as resources become more plentiful to allow for
'better blueprints,' or to increase damage given by enemies (and therefore necessitate
better healing to counter act it).
Prey, a game I personally enjoyed immensely, lost much of its horror in the late game due
to a combination of both of these problems.
The player could craft literally anything they needed, including character upgrades,
simply by having enough raw resources from the endless hoarding encouraged in the early
parts of the game.
That player who was sneaking around is now able to dominate the previous terrors, and
the fear is gone.
Is it possible, then, for a game to achieve true horror?
If it is, could they maintain that horror throughout?
Shorter games certainly have the benefit here, It's unquestionably easier to build and
keep tension, create a general sense of identity, and maintain unreality for 30 minutes than
it is for 40 hours.
The player will, inevitably, get used to any horror a game can generate if you just expose
them to it.
And games do try to mix things up and encourage a sense of fear.
I just don't think they do it very well.
Permadeath is certainly a way to encourage a certain type of fear, but it's not outright
scary.
If anything, the loss of a character is more of an annoyance than any true repulsion or
fear.
The threat of permadeath without action is certainly more interesting, and some recent
titles have used that empty threat to some great effect--keeping you feeling that you're
close to losing your character without ever actually achieving it, is letting the Alien
hunt you without ever actually dying.
Unfortunately, as more players know of tricks like this they become less effective.
You could always just not kill the protagonist at all, but the incredible danger of fighting
a Big Daddy the first time you play Bioshock, knowing this is your first really dangerous
enemy, and then experiencing your first real death only to find yourself revived without
loss a few feet away from the still damaged enemy, being able to chip away at their life
through multiple lives yourself--well, that's just not scary at all.
Some developers have toned down their enemy AI so that as you get closer to death, or
as the enemy gets closer to you, it cheats you into a more likely win.
That's certainly viable, but eventually you have to draw the line and decide whether
you want to create an atmospheric but boring gameplay experience.
This is certainly the thinking behind titles like INSIDE, or even Out Of This World, where
the player gets to experience true moments of 'it almost got me' by leaping away
from the grasp of their enemy at the last second.
Timing gameplay so that a perfect run ends with the player truly feeling like they barely
escaped death is an incredible horror tool for those players who manage it perfectly
the first time.
It starts to fall a bit transparent to those players who have to die repeatedly to figure
out the solution to the puzzle, however, and this means for the average player you've
just created a gory but ultimately unscary rhythm game as they try to figure out the
exact steps to get a Perfect on the stage.
Perhaps the most effective, if commercially terrifying, solution is to stop trying to
create happy endings.
Instead of tying everything up in a bow and ruining their own atmosphere, titles might
be a bit more willing to have no 'good' endings.
Questions can be left unanswered, the courageous can fail, or perhaps the solution to the puzzle
is the players own death.
These are at least interesting, but would certainly be punished in Steam comments and
articles from psuedo-intellectual games journalists who couldn't find a cheat code to win.
Horror is an interesting genre because it's about the feeling of horror, instead of the
mechanics of 'Shooter' or 'Platformer.'
It's about the sensation and emotion felt subjectively by a player, and that player
is by necessity a generic cardboard cut-out when these titles are being developed.
In order to be successful as a horror title, you need to scare as many people as much as
possible, and that means you can't really focus in on being truly terrifying, truly
horrific, truly mind-bending or you're leaving behind the largest slice of the pie.
Additionally, it's hard to make a game that is able to adapt to the incredibly large amount
of hours a person is willing to invest in a game.
A movie is scripted and short.
You can develop a story that builds tension, introduces characters and builds identification,
and then reveal the horror and scares at a pace that is unchanging and satisfying.
The story arc is designed for these 90 minute experiences.
Building a game that can take you through the same peaks and troughs of horror and terror
every 90 minutes, changing up gameplay, introducing new twists and changes, new game mechanics
and surprises, and do so with a level of polish required to be commercially successful is
damned near impossible.
While we have good approximations of horror in gaming, we'll never really have true
horror games.
We have games that have moments of scariness.
Sequences of terror that are notable for their infrequency.
An entire ecosystem of moments, that we as gamers have taken to showing to other people,
leading streamers to experience them so we can remember that moment of revulsion and
fear we ourselves experienced so fleetingly and can never reclaim.
Perhaps, one day, we can achieve Lovecraftian terror in games.
A new mechanic, or series of old in new ways, will teach us how to achieve a sense of terror
at the unseen, insanity at the sheer knowledge of such great cosmic horrors.
It's possible, certainly, though I don't know how it'll be done.
One day a developer will figure it out, and we'll all marvel at their ingenuity.
Because the greatest horror game of all will be the one that never shows you the monster
at all.
Thanks to Austin from VNecks & VCards for helping to flesh out this idea, and get it
into a script.
And to Eren Black Edits who helped me to get through some of the tougher parts of this
video, as well.
I also want to thank every Patron from our Patreon, both past and present, who help make
this whole making content thing a little less painful.
I especially want to thank you, for watching this video to its entirety.
This is our 450th video, and knowing that you have decided to spend this time with me,
hearing my thoughts and listening to my opinions is literally the reason why I continue to
make these TALKS videos.
They tend to be some of the least popular videos on CryMor, but your interactions with
me are what makes it all worthwhile.
With that in mind, I'd really like to know what you think.
Is it possible for a game to achieve true horror?
Or, are we doomed to always seeing a weaker version than Hollywood is able to produce?
I encourage you to leave a comment, start a conversation, and join in with others down
below in the comment section.
I'll be down there, too, hopefully learning some things from you.
You can also send me all your hate on Twitter @CryMorGaming if you really want to try to
convince me that FNAF was totally the best horror game of all time.
The next TALKS video is going to be about your favorite game.
It's your favorite game, you love this game, and it sucks.
I'll tell you why.
Trust me, I'm right.
If you like it, like it, if you didn't like, don't like it.
If you did like this however, try watching another one on the screen now.
My name is Moriarty, and we'll see you on the next one.
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