Gore is a big thing in most horror games. Some gore is there when you arrive—you walk through the hallway in Fatal Frame II and you see bloody handprints all over the walls. Corpses are strewn across the floor in Dead Space and you are only left to speculate on how they got there. Other instances of gore occur in front of you without your participation. You watch as behind a pane of glass a man is drilled through the stomach by a big daddy, or a man is infected by a zombie-virus and worms crawl through his eyes as he writhes on the ground. These scenes are the terrain of horror movies. Pre-generated gore and bloody cinematics make the player feel like they are in a movie; they have no control over what happened or is happening. User generated gore, however, is the unique terrain of games.
Horrible things that happen around you without your participation can of course be very scary. Filmmakers have been creating horror movies for decades, and gamemakers can borrow their techniques and styles. When you are playing as the killer, however—even the killer of zombies—and you stomp on limps causing blood to spatter across the screen and room, movies don’t really cover this. The gore that you see onscreen is caused by the movements of your fingers on the controller or the keyboard. In my experience, user-generated gore isn’t scary. It relieves some of the built-up tension and it often just makes me laugh. I don’t know if I’m just a totally twisted person because I find it hilarious to rip off the limbs of a zombie and throw them all around the room with my force gun, or to blow away a necromorph’s legs and then wait until he comes crawling towards me to stomp on his head and arms. But it seriously is funny. A tense battle can be scary, but for me that is the same sort of fear that I might feel in a tense battle of Call of Duty. During many action sequences of FPS horror games, the FPS aspect dominates the horror aspect. The dread and the foreboding are far scarier than the actual fighting, because during the fighting I have some control and power, but before anything happens I feel helpless and vulnerable.
I’ve found this to be the case in Dead Space, Condemned 2, Left 4 Dead (though L4D is less scary due to multiplayer content—a subject for another post), and Bioshock. All of these games have seriously gory segments, some more so than others. A game that is somewhat unique out of the ones I’ve tried, however, is Fatal Frame II. In Fatal Frame, you don’t get a gun, a crowbar, a killer left-hook, or any sort of conventional weapon. You are only armed with a camera. When a ghost attacks you, you must go into a first person camera shot which narrows your field of vision as you attempt to photograph the ghost at key moments when your “exorcismal power” is at its height. The combat in FF doesn’t make you feel more powerful; it often makes you feel more helpless and keenly aware of your helplessness. This is especially true when the ghost keeps moving out of your line of vision and you have to scramble to find it before it attacks you. Fatal Frame II sidesteps the less scary gory combat in favor of combat where you are still only a spectator. It never truly exits the realm of horror movies; even as you fight you feel like you have little control.
This all makes me wonder: do horror games suffer from being games? Does their interactive aspect make them less scary than movies? My answer so far is yes and no. Some aspects of gameplay make horror games scarier. For instance, you are more emotionally involved in a horror game than a horror movie because in a game you control one of the on screen figures. As far as gore goes, though (for me), horror games so far can remain scary by making you feel helpless and unable to dismember people in brutal ways. It is way scarier to see a room covered in blood when you aren’t the one who put it there.
I’m wondering: would this change if you weren’t the victim of the horror but the cause of it? Do you guys feel the same way that I do about gore?
I think you've noticed something really cool about FF2: the combat in that game IS disempowering and, therefore, far more tense than bloody combat from horror games I've played that use weapons. For example, I don't find the combat in Condemned 2 scary at all, and the really foul 'trophy kills' in the latest promotional video for the Alien Vs Predator game seem like they'd just be kind of lame in a game, not really scary at all, even though they're about the most violent thing I've ever seen in a video game.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right about the role power plays in horror, anyway. Each individual dismemberment may have very little impact on the gameplay or the flow of the game, but each FEELS significant and empowering because of the symbolism tied up in the ability to decapitate/dismember/etc. Blowing the head off a single necromorph might not give you much of an advantage during a big fight in Dead Space, but it feels awesome.
A lot of horror in movies, however, comes from weakness, from characters who are in a trapped or helpless position-- from feeling NOT awesome.
So yeah, basically: I totally agree with you in many ways. But I think it could be possible to use player-initiated gore and violence in a game to heighten terror, if it was used cleverly. But the question is: if a player knows that they can do something violent whenever they want, how do you get violence to scare them? By tricking them into doing violent things without knowing it? In the original Half Life, I had no idea that the final boss's head opened up-- so when I shot it and it peeled apart, I was pretty astonished. Scared, perhaps. It's been a while.
The impact of gore in horror games underscores an important point about the genre: their ability to inspire fear is largely tied to the game's graphical capabilities. A text based horror game can un-nerve the player, but can it ever achieve the same impact as an advanced game that graphically shows you the violence?
ReplyDeleteI like the point indie gamers are making in reference to the combos in many combat games. It is pretty clear from our collective analysis that immersion is correlated with the "scariness" of a game. Disrupting the flow of a game with seemingly pointless but graphically impressive combat moves alienates this game among the horror genre. This sounds to me much more like any of the LOTR or Star Wars games, where the player can happily sit and mow through hordes of enemies with combos, but with little immersion.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your first question, whether or not the "scare factor" of gore would change if we were in fact the cause of this gore; I'd say it would be less scary. There wouldn't be any mystery of where this gore came from, leaving us in suspense; we'd know exactly how this scene came about. So in a game like Fatal Frame, in the room that you mentioned with the bloody hand prints, if we were the ghost or that crazy lady who killed everyone, we'd know why those hand prints are there and it wouldn't freak us out.
ReplyDeleteTo answer you second question, I've played Deadspace with you and have been a first-hand witness on you playing with limbs and it was funny. However, more so than anything else, it was gross. Perhaps, I was more easily grossed out by this because I'm not familiar with video games in general nor with gore in games. I expect after you've played games for a while, gore does become comical because it is no longer new.
Laura: Interesting question. My latest post tries to deal with that a bit... I have this game called "The Darkness" sitting around where you're this creepy monster who kills people. I'd like to give it a try some time and see if it is freaky at all.
ReplyDeleteHenry: I don't think that graphics are at all essential in order to make a good horror game. You should try out The Lurking Horror and see what you think. Also, there are good, freaky horror books and those have no graphics at all. At the same time, though, terrible graphics make for a comical game these days. Some of the old school Atari horror I've been checking out is just funny-- spurting blood is like 4 red pixels.
Matt: I think you meant to reply to Laura's post!
Joanne: It's probably true that some types of gaming desensitize gamers to gore. The first time I stomped on a necromorph and blood sprayed everywhere I was a little bit shocked and grossed out, but when we're talking about the 100th necromorph I've gunned down, I know what he's gonna get and it's a heel in the face!
Thanks for the comments, all.
I agree that with you statement/speculation that games can be less horrific because they are games. Sure, I definitely felt anxiety when I tried playing Bioshock. There was eerie music and gruesome scenes and I had a lot of trouble with the controllers, so the thought of "my death" was not far off. Even just watching other people play,I was on the edge of my seat and felt nervous about where the next zombie might possibly appear. But after playing, I walked home and feel asleep no problem.
ReplyDeleteThe same does not work for me with horror films. I can't sleep for weeks. After seeing The Ring, I was convinced I would die in seven days and every ring of the telephone petrified me.
This seems to be the case for other people as well. Not only just from some people within this blog group, but from the greater gaming community. I bought Left 4 Dead and the guy working at Best Buy told me that "it will scare the pants off of you." When I asked him why, he said it was because the game felt just like a horror movie. Playing the game, I felt the same, and many reviews also praise L4D for it's movie-like qualities.
Why this is the case- that I'm so much more scared after horror films than playing a horror game- I'm not quite positive but I have a few guesses at reasons why I may be more scared after movies, as well as a couple of reasons that are definitely not why. It's not because movies are more realistic, for as I described earlier, in eighth grade I was scared of being attacked by the ghost of a little girl who was seeking revenge for her murder. Reality check- probably not so likely. On the other hand, the scenario for L4D, in which a rabies-like disease has spread hysteria throughout a city, may be a little far-fetched but definitely not as much as ghosts. As creator Mark Booth pointed out, rabies turns friendly family pets into "attack machines."
But maybe horror films are scarier because they are more visually realistic. Movies often have real, non-animated actors and actresses and therefore, even though we haven't created the people experiencing the horror, we more closely relate to them. Most importantly, though, I think horror films are scarier than horror games because we have no control. We may know that the masked figure in Scream is standing right behind Drew Barrymore but we have no way to warn her, no way to alter the events. Having no control gives us a scary sense of vulnerability, even if it's not us or our avatar that's directly in danger, but in a game, you have that control, which can make you feel more secure and thereby less scared.