Final Post: Affective response in Horror Games.

Sorry for the reverse order...

While this may already be incredibly obvious, playing horror games is a completely different experience than playing any other game genre. After more than an hour of Fatal Frame II or Dead Space, I begin to feel tired, anxious and downright freaked out. Simply put, even if I want to keep playing, I am compelled to stop. My “affective response,” the unquantifiable rush I get from playing these games, causes me to abort play and step away from the gamespace. Yet from my experience as a gamer, this relation between affective response and player is unique to the horror genre. Shooting “grunts” in Halo 3 or doing backflips in Tony Hawk’s ProSkater effect compelling (or even better, propelling) affective responses. These games draw players forward through their diegesis with gameplay and affect working in unison. Contrastingly, in horror titles, gameplay and its associated affect is one that hampers progression through gamespace, forcing individuals to experience the games in episodic, stressful bouts.

According to Eugénie Shinkle, “affective dimensions” cannot “be programmed into a game” but are “nonetheless vital to gameplay” (Shinkle 22). I tend to disagree with this statement, however. I think the affective response in horror games is programmable to gameplay elements. Rather than being merely our “meaningful interaction” with semiotic images (which certainly is a scary experience in its own right), affect in horror games is fundamentally tied to a convention of gameplay elements, specific to the genre.

Let us draw our attention to Halo 3, an action game that (while exhilarating) is not very frightening. Traversing the linear space in H3 is more or less the same as any other FPS. Travel here, kill x enemies of y-type with z weapons until you reach the next checkpoint. Its simplicity is soothing. The gameplay leaves no unanswerable questions. Where is the next checkpoint? You’ll find it after a certain distance. How do I defeat this type of enemy? Keep shooting until it’s dead, and if that does not work, find a weak point in its armor? The simplicity and assuredness of the gameplay draws its players forward feeling confident. Even at the hardest difficulties, where a factor of uncertainty comes in with respect to reaching checkpoints and killing enemies, the gameplay elements remain fundamentally unchanged; death is simply a teaching device for the next attempt.

Now let’s take a look at Fatal Frame II. Playing the game for extended periods takes guts of steel (or a walkthrough and a nightlight); almost every element of its gameplay produces fear and apprehension. Taking the role of a young Japanese girl has a very different feel than that of the Master Chief. Instead of rocket launchers and assault rifles, Mio’s arsenal is limited to the “camera obscura,” a camera with exorcismal power. Fighting ghosts in FF2 is one of the most frightening combat systems in a horror game I have come across. Exorcizing ghosts requires the player to get as close as possible to the spirit without taking damage. Once Mio is rubbing noses with a mutilated spectral remnant, she has a split second to take the picture called a “shutter chance.” If you fail, the ghost will lunge at you, leading to one of several gruesome attack cinematics. The fighting alone is enough to make you drop the controller and turn off the system.

However, there is another form of resistance between gameplay and affect. Certain gameplay elements push you forward through the diegesis, acting against the tidal forces of the “horror” affective response. One example of this is the style of saving in horror games. Horror games such as Dead Space, Fatal Frame II, and the Resident Evil series all use “save stations,” checkpoints that require manually saving your progress at a given time and place in the gamespace. While playing FF2 with some group members, I spent the last quarter of the session just trying to find a save point so that the hour or so of progress since my last save wouldn’t be lost. After being scared out of my wits for an hour, I no longer wanted to play. Yet, the game offered no other alternative but to keep progressing through the plot to find somewhere to save.

From this observation, I believe that horror games develop counter-strategies to aborted gameplay. Manual save stations are just one of these gameplay mechanics to prevent individuals from leaving the gamespace before the diegesis has ended. Without sufficient strategies, players would never complete the game (this has happened with me on more than one occasion). The affective response of horror games is that of paralyzing fear, which peaks at a time when an individual will stop playing the game. This appears to be counter-productive to a business model. Why would people buy games that they are never going to beat, or for that matter, games that prevent people from playing them? The answer is not entirely clear to me, but I believe that it is through motivating gameplay mechanics that horror games can overcome this problem.