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.
My comment is based on my interpretation of "you can look but cannot see" means that you have the ability to change the direction of your vision, but you can't actually see because of darkness, steam, etc. So if that's what you mean, great, if it's not, my following comment might seem a little off topic.
ReplyDeleteI agree that one of the scariest parts of playing a game is when your vision is obscured. This happens a lot if Left 4 Dead. One of the "boss" infected, called The Boomer, can impair your vision when he vomits, and for a real one-two punch, the vomit attracks hordes of infected, so when you can actually see, you're about to be attacked by a mob. The Smoker, another boss enemy, also impairs your vision with a cloud of smoke. As far as for darkness, L4D does give you flashlights and this helps a lot. But I definitely feel that impaired vision and/or temporary blindness makes a game a lot scarier for it takes away one of your primary senses, leaving you feeling vulnerable.