Final Post!! -Peyton

Aspects of Horror Games:

I’ve been asking myself throughout my blogs what it is exactly that places a game into the “horror” genre. Does it have to do with the mystical, frightening creatures? That can’t be all there is to it because then wouldn’t the Flood make Halo 3 a horror game? Is it the music? The setting? The title? Everything combined? Does a game become less scary after you have played it for a while? I feel like the more often someone plays a horror game, the less scary it will be. Once a gamer knows the ins and outs of the game- the game loses the element of fearful surprise. Some gamers claim that a game is “so scary I had to stop playing.” My suggestion is to finish playing and play it again and again. Once the game becomes routine then it can’t scare you anymore.

In some games, like Left 4 Dead, the game has many different ways the game can go so you never know exactly what is going to happen- but even that grows old after a while. Game makers predicted the methodic nature of video games and made sure that did not happen. Titles of horror video games also play a substantial role in the fear factor of games in my opinion. Not knowing what is going to happen, just knowing something is going to happen can be an even scarier concept. Walking down an empty alley, or long passageway can be extremely scary if you are expecting the worse. The wait time as the music quickens in pace with your heartbeat leads to excruciating fear that makes whatever does happen, that much scarier.

The feeling of being alone makes many situations very scary. Similar to movies, a situation where you are alone where there is scary music, and you are expecting something to happen becomes much more scary than it needs to be. Walking down an empty alley with a chatty fried who is talking about what she wants to wear the next day while Spice Girls is playing in the background is not a very scary situation.

Music plays an enormous role on making horror games scary. When the music quickens and you get that “Oh no!” feeling, you don’t want anything to happen- but you know it is coming. And sure enough, right on cue, something terrifying happens. The reason it is scary is because you know for a fact it is coming- but don’t know when. I once was watching a new movie from the Internet for free (illegal-don’t do it) but the sound was slightly off. It didn’t bother me too much until the music built up to a scary part- and climaxed before anything happened. It made the effect so much less dramatic and less scary that I decided to never watch movies off the internet ever again and always rent them legally from the store.

Horror games based on movies are an interesting category because a lot of times the gamer has seen the movie and that is why they found interest in buying the game. So, in other words, the gamer is already familiar with the plot. Knowing what will probably happen, but not how or when, is another scary element to gaming. In games, you almost feel like the situation is actually happening to you. The only positive side of gaming is that you can decide not to go through with the actions

Then again, the fact that I always am playing games from a beginner’s level might very well sway my opinion. Games are meant to be beat. The difficulty level of beating them is what makes a game fun. How can horror games capture your attention for long periods of time? By making you want to keep going, and want to win. If games are nearly impossible to beat, then that is not much fun for anyone; the same goes for if a game is too easy.

My conclusion to this whole experiment in horror games is that, like movies, what makes a game a “horror” game is the fear of the unknown. My other conclusion is that some games can have scary elements without being a horror game. Forcing me to game, like this project has, has really opened up my mind (and unfortunately my addictive gene) and made me see there are so many things out there that should not be dismissed. I just ordered my first game console- but I went with Nintendo 64 Super Mario… I think I’m going to take a break from horror for a little.