Oh The Horror!

Any good horror production, should be more than blood and gore and be able to play on the mind of the viewer by doing things like altering perception, provoking emotions, and exploring and exploiting basic fears.
In other words, their should be a big psychological element to it.

I think most people will agree with that.

But why is it that most of the horror offerings in gaming aren't very strong?
Well here's what I think the problem is...


The horror genre demands that you put the viewer/reader in a state of helplessness or weakness. (usually by proxy through the character he is meant to connect with in the scene)

However its long been the practice in game design to insure that the player feels powerful and able at all times.

Here we have a direct conflict.
Developers who don't see the conflict usually follow the usual game design practices which pretty much negate most of what a Horror is supposed to be.

What is their to really be afraid of, if you're holding a a fully loaded rocket launcher?
What is there to wonder about, if you've been told how everything is going to play out?

Guns may be the most empowering kind of weapon in existence. And more often than not, we give the player that power many times over.

Keener developers who realize this, tend to try and get around it by doing things like limiting the ammunition available to the player. That actually makes a lot of sense, and it even works, on paper. However, in practice, it usually just becomes a balancing game for the player. It becomes less about fear and overcoming obstacles, and more about keeping track of your ammo count while scavenging around for more of it.

It pretty much becomes Pac-man.
Avoid the ghosts/zombies in the maze/level, and collect all the pellets/bullets, until you become powerful enough to turn the tables around and go ape-shit on any bad guy unlucky enough to be in your path.
Pac-man is a good game. But its just not scary.

I think the only way to do a horror game properly, would be to respect what Horror is, yield parts of the game design to it, and build other parts of the the game design around it.

First I think its important to examine the audience.
We know that because they picked up a horror a game, they WANT to be scared.
Which means they probably wont mind all that much if we toss out that old game design rule of empowering the player at all times. Besides, its the main thing that's causing the problems anyway.
They wont mind feeling helpless or weak at all. If done properly, they will actually enjoy it.

Next, lets think about this thing with the guns.
In most situations guns are primarily an offensive weapon, there are a few moments when they can be defensive. But most times they are purely for attacking.

Like the first suggestion we “could” also toss the gun out completely.
But I think there is a missed opportunity if we do that.

So what if we included the gun and made it part of the horror equation?
We change the players perception on what exactly a gun is in our game, and inside of that we'll also exploit a basic fear.

We will start the player off with a gun in hand. Well also give him a full clip or two of ammunition.
Now you're probably thinking that I'm doing exactly what I said was wrong.

But here's the catch....

Shooting the bad guys doesn't work at all...
its useless against them. It does nothing.

This isn't something we'll come right out and explain to the player.
That's what all that ammunition we gave him is for.

Coming fresh into the game, the player will see that he has a fully loaded gun, and bring along a preconceived idea of what it is, what its for, and how it works.
Of course he'll be wrong, but we'll let him figure that out for himself.

By the time the player has fired his last offensive bullet, his perception of the weapon will have changed drastically. We will let him keep the gun for two reasons.
The first reason is psychological. You have in your possession, what under normal circumstances would be a powerful weapon, is now an ineffective one. This drives home the feeling of weakness and also reinforces in the players mind, that “these aren't normal circumstances.”
The second reason we have the player keep the gun, is to change his perception of it all over again.
Later on in the game, we will give the player a few more bullets. We're not going to suddenly make shooting enemies work now, but we are going to define a new use for the gun. Instead of the player looking at the gun as a weapon, we will make him see the gun as a tool. A tool that will allow him to hit objects from a distance...provided his aim is good enough.

Beyond the gun...
there are several other things we can do to improve the Horror genre in gaming.

There are things we can borrow from other genres. Like stealth.
The tension involved in sneaking around a populated environment trying not to raise the suspicion of characters that want to harm you is always nice and thick. We could use something similar to that in our horror game as it will provoke emotion while its being done, as well as setup a proper scare if the player fails. If the player is successful, we can also take advantage of his feeling of relief, and get him with a good scare there.
Good game design usually rewards players for successfully completing a section. A scare here might not seem like such a reward at first, but remember who our audience is. They WANT those scares.

Depending on what your goal is, whether it be to stop the big-evil from happening, return the evil to from whence it came, or just to survive and get out alive...
you'll probably want to add a bit of mystery to the game. Give the player something to wonder about, a kind of puzzle to ponder on that cant be solved by pulling levers, pushing switches.

They easiest way to do this is to drop clues in the environment.
logs, diaries, journals, etc...As cheesy as they are, they work. But there are still a few problems with them.
They break or distract from the game flow, the clues the give are rarely ever subtle, and they also beg a few silly immersion breaking questions....

”why is it that everyone who died felt the need to document everything? Sometimes even while they were dying.”

“why have the few living people I've met, never documented anything at all?”

“how come nobody here understands that a secret password is supposed to be a secret?”

I think a few logs can be useful, but only in places were they make sense.
In my opinion he best way to leave a player something to wonder about is to keep it visual and build it directly into the environment.

Having the player arrive at the scene of an event after it has happened is a great way to get the players mind cranking. Something as simple as a room in disarray with a blood trail leading out into the hallway has enough atmosphere of its own to tell a story without words. The more you look around the environment, the more clues you find, until you finally have enough clues to figure out just whats going on. Its almost like an episode of CSI. The player doesn't have to stop the game to read a lengthy chunk exposition, because he's standing right in the middle of it. More importantly, all of the story is quickly building itself up inside the players head.

That's what its all about at the end of the day. Messing with the players head...
Through gaming, getting inside a players head is easy because of the interactive nature of games.
But its all about what you do once you're in there. Perhaps that could be said of gaming in general.