Resident Evil 4; My Reintroduction to Survival Horror

One of the few games I played when I was younger was the original Resident Evil. The classic “zombie dogs crashing through the hallways windows” scene scared me for weeks! The idea of a game scaring me well after I left the TV was impressive (not that I was or am a difficult scare). When I revisited the Resident Evil series two years ago with Resident Evil 4, the game had lost none of its creepy content or gameplay for me. Replaying RE4 this term has offered me a chance to review my gamer experiences in terms of the theory and concepts presented this term. This academic distance, and ten years maturity, result in a significantly less scary game experience.

RE4 tries to keep you on your toes (or, on your fingertips) by constantly changing the mechanics of how you play. You play as Leon, the main character and Ashley, the President’s captured daughter, in a typical action-adventure survival horror game fashion. Interspersed in the normal gameplay of navigating the environments and aiming and firing various weapons are sporadic (usually introduced by a short cut scene) quick-reaction button-mashing fevers (“press A to sprint” or “press L + R to dodge”). Some bosses, in addition to whatever particular puzzle or obstacle required, are played by totally different schema. The first boss fight is played by fighting a lake monster with a harpoon and motor boat. Though the button-mashing is the same, the order and presentation of the mechanic differs. This emphasis on variation keeps the game scary, because I am never able to get to a place of comfort within the game.

When a new monster or threat appears on the screen or in my ears, I characteristically shriek and mash whatever button allows me to go to the menu and as a result pause the game. I breathe deeply, make sure I am appropriately armed, and return to the horror. This “pause” allows me to recoup from my fright and prepare for whatever the fight offers. If I weren’t playing the game like such a wuss, the scariness of the “boo!” moment (often diegetic) and the gameplay battle itself (non-diegetic) might meld together a bit more.

My penultimate example comes in the form of the scariest enemy in the game, one of the only scenes I remember truly scaring me in my first playthrough. When I approach a zombie imprisoned on my way to a lever, the zombie bursts out of his metal bars and begins to attack me. This zombie is shown (in a cut scene) to have his eyes sewn shut. The blind “Wolverine”-like zombie chases after me when I run, but cannot hear me when I walk. To beat this character, I must distract him with sound (firing a gun, running footsteps, ringing a bell) to a place where he will charge and thrust his scissor-hands into the wall and get stuck. Shoot him in the back a few times, repeat. After spending the whole game running (not just moving directionally, but moving directionally and pressing B), taking my finger off the “run” button and walking slowly around this zombie (who is running) is petrifying! My expectations are defied as I have to re-learn game mechanics under these new conditions. The monster is relatively easy to defeat, but the initial re-learning of gameplay makes the slow walk around the monster terrifying.

In my brief reading about “survival-horror” games, I found the key characteristics of survival/horror to be content, under-equipping and overwhelming the character. The gore of RE4 (for instance, my cut-scene decapitation by a chainsaw-wielding zombie with a sack over his face) and the story of RE4 (a parasitic virus that eventually turns you into a ‘zombie’) never capture my imagination too much, and I blow through the game assuming an archetypal content behind the “posts” and “communication logs” I’m skipping. The gore, though occasionally inventively gruesome, is dismissible and almost boring compared to the “realistic” zombie situations my imagination is flooded with from film. I found the scariest aspects of RE4 to be the tension of consistently introducing different “types” of gameplay (described above) and when the game takes familiar situations and re-work them to surprise you. For instance, small open cabins line the pathways through the Spanish forest, but after the 5th or 6th empty cabin, I stopped entering with caution. Later, a zombie is hiding in one of these cabins, defying my expectations and scaring me in what I thought was a ‘safe’ space. Other, less dramatic examples keep the player alert- a portrait of the antagonist, a wooden box, a particular background rock- previously non-actionable, background aspects are rendered actionable and foreground. These somewhat mechanical changes in the gameplay and in my expectations of what the game would offer me were what made the content and gore of RE4 relevant, and ultimately ‘horrifying,’ to me.

The Path

A longer post on this will come later (probably when I've finished my paper), but I just wanted to say: this game is amazing. It's thought-provoking and incredibly creative. It's creepy, but not without a sense of whimsy. The character development is pretty mind-blowing considering the game's relatively brief length. And while the graphics have none of the realism of Fight Night 4 (a game that's so unbelievably, sweat-glisteningly, Mike-Tyson's-actual-physiognomy-usingly lifelike it's kind of unnerving), the game's aesthetic is haunting and undeniably beautiful in a way that I think painfully well-rendered realism could never be.

In short: everyone should play this.

Resident Evil 5

Nora and I played Resident Evil last week, in what was a truly memorable gaming experience. I've played a fair amount of Super Smash Bros. in my day, but I've never encountered anything like this game - the graphics were stunningly realistic (Nora and I were both shocked as the opening sequence began), the well-established narrative felt like something straight out of a movie, and the environment was appropriately (and effectively) creepy and sinister. Dead carcasses of animals were strewn everywhere. Barbed wire fences enclosed narrow alleyways. We ran in and out of low, bunker-type metal rooms filled with rusting shelves and the kind of metal hooks that are usually reserved for meat lockers. We saw a man's face getting subsumed by a parasite, transforming him into a fearsome zombie. And of course, all of the buildings were completely abandoned, comprising a veritable African ghost town.

Since I've got no real experience with this kind of gameplay (save for one truly ill-fated round of Halo 3), getting thrown into a mêlée of red-eyed zombie villagers was initially terrifying. My shots misfired; my punches only rarely connected with zombie limbs, and I ran out of ammo quickly. However, after getting killed once and having to restart the entire sequence, I began to get the hang of it.

After a while I got a bit tired of having to fend off the relentless onslaught of zombies, and grew kind of annoyed that I didn't have more freedom within the confines of the game. The game tracks on an incredibly rigid storyline, which is interesting on the one hand but limiting on the other. The game gives you choices as you go along - you can punch; you can help your partner; you can reload your pistol or save the ammunition for later; but ultimately you're satisfying a series of predetermined objectives that prevent the game from feeling as interactive and immersive as it otherwise could. While I did appreciate the movie-like quality imparted by the narrative - the game itself was awash with a load of historical facts and references clearly alluding to previous Resident Evil installments - I found myself getting irritated by the barrage of cut-scenes that reliably interrupted my explorations every few minutes. As a horror game novice, I suppose this made my life a bit easier, because I wasn't endlessly wandering around abandoned warehouses in search of an elusive objective, but I feel like this particular characteristic of Resident Evil 5 would start to become deeply obtrusive as my familiarity with the game advanced.

That said, I definitely enjoyed my first experience with horror games, and look forward to playing more over the next several weeks.

first-person versus third-person

Recently, Peyton and I went and played Bioshock and some other zombie-ish game with Nick. It was my first experience ever playing video games, so I was mostly focused on trying to learn how to use the controller seeing as I kept getting stuck in corners, etc. But something I noticed between the two games was how I found it a lot scarier to be a third-person shooter (as I was in the second game) rather than a first-person shooter in Bioshock. Having the first-person perspective that I experience in real life gave me a slight sense of comfort because of it's familarity, but being in third-person shooter made me more conscious/nervous of the fact that something could come up behind me at any moment. I thought this could be something that I could look into for our booklet on horror games- what players (especially those in our group) prefer and why, the number of first-person versus third-person shooter games exist, etc. So post a comment if you have anything to say on that!!

Also, I thought it may be interesting to see how members of our group feel about being able to choose his/her character in a third-person shooter game---which games give you this option, do you like having the option, do some games only give you the option of being male, does having a choice make the game less frightening, etc. Just some thoughts...

Character control in horror games

I am largely unfamilliar with the horror genre of video games, and have found it very interesting thus far that every game we are studying or have talked about studying involves either a first person view, over the shoulder view, or some other direct way of controlling your avatar. This makes lots of sense, since these games derive much of their scariness from the unknown. The overall scary environment created is most effective if the player is directly in control of the avatar, which creates a unique connection between the player and the game. This may be my personal naivety of the genre, but does a horror game exist without this first-person quality to the game? If so, I wonder what adjustments a game must make to sucesfully fit the horror genre. Traditional horror in all media forms follows the calm-before-the-storm sensation, dark corners, high single violin note, all preceding some loud and sudden event. Suspense is essential to any true horror media. Would it be possible to research what, if any, techniques could be employed to create a sucessfull horror game without being a first person game? Does anyone know if this already exists?

The Privileging of Vision

In Affective Response in Digital Games, Eugenie Shinkle notes that “the ostensible freedom of virtual environments is still calculated, in large part, on the privileging of vision..." (31). This is surely the case in Bioshock. Towards the beginning of the game you are forced to navigate your avatar into dark spaces. Often you will remain engulfed in darkness for a few seconds before the lights flicker on. Here’s probably the scariest moment for me in my experience of Bioshock thus far: I’ve finished clearing a room of crazy junkies and I’m searching through some containers. Unlike many other games, when you search through corpses and containers in Bioshock time continues to pass around you. You can be attacked while looting. This diegetic element keeps the player from feeling secure while rifling through rooms and bodies. I am eager to hack into any computer or vending machine in sight largely because that does pause the game. Anyways, I’m searching through a cabinet and some steam pours out of an overhead pipe. When I turn around I can’t see anything, but when the steam clears there is a splicer standing like two feet away staring straight into the screen. I cracked his skull open with my wrench but I still felt so vulnerable. The game scared me by preventing me from feeling safe, and it did this in part by limiting my vision. Bioshock doesn’t give you a flashlight, which in my mind is a good move because it makes you feel more helpless.

Horror movies often also rely on making the viewer scared of what she/he can’t see. In a movie the camera might move in close to a person as he opens the medicine cabinet above his sink and then reveal a man standing behind him with a knife when he closes it (a particularly interesting cliché because the camera angle has placed you, the viewer, in the physical space of the killer without your knowledge. But that’s aside from the point.) Part of the helplessness and frustration of the movie is that you can’t control where you’re looking, and you can’t tell what is off-screen. In modern first person video games the player can control the camera. The frustrated fear of movies is replaced with a more visceral fear. You can look into the corners and spin around but you still can’t see what might be there. In this way the privileging of vision that the video game camera affords actually heightens your fear because it makes the places you can’t see more profound and real. If I were to walk into some creepy dark shed in a bad part of town in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t be afraid because of the inability to turn my head and look around me. In horror games, like in real life, you can look but you often cannot see.

As Bioshock progresses, the limited freedom of vision becomes less disconcerting because you know what to expect and you know that you can handle it. Part of the drive to continue in the game is the desire to become more powerful and thus less susceptible to fear.