Terminal Station


Trunks in a storage room

About four years ago I was working in the game industry making video games. At the time I was getting ready to start on a PSP game (this was before the PSP had shipped, but game development was already in full swing), and I wanted to get up to speed with my company’s 3D graphics engine. So I decided to make a couple of simple game demos to improve my understanding of the tech. First I made a 3D knock-off of an old NES puzzle game called Lot Lot, which worked out well but wasn’t very sexy. At the same time I was trying to pitch the idea that my company embark on a 3D adventure game (horror or not), so to back up that proposal I decided to build a 3D horror game demo using the company tech. My good friend (and fellow hardcore horror game fan) Casey Richardson agreed to make the art, and our goal was to spend a month or two and make something that was playable on PS2 and showed that this style of game could be accomplished without huge changes to our existing codebase.

Since we were only working in our free time, the total duration of the project ended up being closer to three months (though we could have easily pulled it off in a month if we worked full time on it), but the result was pretty cool. What we ended up was an engine that supported fixed and tracking cameras, the Devil May Cry control scheme, dynamic lights and shadows, Silent Hill-esque film grain effects, and a pretty neat system for dynamically blending movement and animation to produce believable analog motion. We had a single test character named Trunks, which Casey hilariously made look like a pair of disconnected legs with a little bit of spine coming out of the severed hips, and a map containing a bunch of rooms that you could walk around and explore. Though we were just using test art (which turned out to be The Way To Go with this kind of game–see the next section), the game ran at 60fps and the game mechanics were immediately obvious to anybody who picked up the controller. Casey came up for the name: Terminal Station, taken from a 1954 film by Vittorio De Sica.

This exercise taught me tons of stuff about how survival horror games are made. One of the first things we learned was that placing regions in space that cause certain cameras to activate is way harder than it looks. You know how in Resident Evil you can run around and eventually see every corner of a given room because the various cameras in that room are set up to show different angles without overlapping? Yeah, setting that up is really hard. Casey did it by hand in the 3D modeling tool, but we quickly realized that a real game in this style would require a special tool to make camera regions. Otherwise it was too easy to make a room in which the player could walk off the screen, or simply be unable to explore a section of the space. Moving cameras make this a little bit easier, but it’s a much harder problem than I expected it would be.

Another thing we learned was that fixed camera games make so many real time 3D graphics problems easier. For example, our PS2 engine only allowed the character to be lit by 4 dynamic light sources at any given time, but we wanted to have rooms with a lot of localized lights (see the shot of the open refrigerator for an example). We realized that you can secretly turn lights on and off when the camera cuts and the player will never notice. This is a super simple solution and it worked great–we were able to make rooms with tons of lights and just link sets of four to specific camera angles. When playing the game, the player would appear to walk through the environment and be lit by all the lights in the room. We did the same thing with the shadow: the shadow can only be cast from one light (we only supported a single shadow), but depending on the angle of the camera we allowed which light was responsible for the shadow to change. That made it pretty easy to set up really dramatic shots without compromising the design of each room. (As an aside for the graphics programmers out there, this method also let us separate “shadow-receivable” geometry from “shadow-immune” geometry so our projective texture shadow only had to render a subset of the level art twice).

Though my company didn’t end up pursuing this style of game, I am extremely glad to have done this project because I learned tons about how many of the games listed on this site work. A lot of the code (or, more often, the general approach rather than the actual code) got reused in other projects (the blending motion and animation system survived for another year, only to be killed when the real game it was in got cancelled), and Casey and I learned a boatload. I’ll post some screenshots from our demo below. This isn’t a real game, and will never be a real game, it was just a learning exercise. But it was a lot of fun and it played pretty well!

Screenshots:

In the kitchen

Dorm hallway

Dorm room

A secret passage

The storage closet

Ju-On: First Impressions

Yeah, screw the loft.

I don’t usually buy games on the day that they come out because a) I have a lot of games in my backlog already, b) getting caught up in hype is a bad thing, and c) the longer I wait the cheaper games get. But as I was ordering something of Amazon the other night, I noticed that Ju-on: The Grudge was scheduled for release this week and that the online retailer had it for $10 off. So I bought it, and because shipping services in Japan are freaking awesome, it came on the day of its release (today).

You might have seen the trailer for Ju-On a while back. It’s a first-person Wii game based off the series of movies of the same name and supervised by the director of those films, Takashi Shimizu. Apparently the entire Western world mistook the developer’s logo as the name of the game, so you might have seen this title bouncing around news sites under the name “FEEL” (in fact, the name of the game is 恐怖体感 呪怨, kyoufu taikan juon, which is something like “fear sensation Ju-On”; the developer is a company called Feelplus). Anyway, it’s a first-person Wii game where you use the Wiimote to explore scary areas with a flashlight. Word on the street is that XSEED is bringing the game Stateside this year.

I’ve played the first episode and a bit of the second so far, so I thought I’d weigh in with some initial impressions. The game is well done, but it’s also exceedingly simple. You move around through the environment by pointing the Wiimote (on screen, a flashlight) in the direction you want to go and holding down the B trigger. This method of movement actually works really well; it’s so smooth that I thought the game was on rails at first. The side effect of this system, I guess, is that you move really slowly. There doesn’t seem to be a run button. Anyway, you move through the environment collecting items–particularly keys and flashlight batteries. If you run out of flashlight batteries it’s game over, but (at least in the first episode) they appear to be pretty plentiful. As you progress through the environment

Ghost kid on opposite side of window: check.

various scary things will happen, mostly involving stuff falling near you for no obvious reason, the series’ signature cat-ghost-kid running by, or the Dead Wet Girl antagonist grabbing your arm. These are almost exclusively pop-out-of-the-dark scares, and they get old really fast. There’s a few legit scares here, and the environments are very well done, but once it’s clear that something sudden is going to happen every two minutes or so, it stops being surprising.

What’s really intriguing about this game is that I think that it’s designed to be played with friends. It’s a one-player game, but a second player can cause similar pop-out events to occur by pushing buttons on the second controller. To me this sounds like an attempt to recreate the feeling of watching a horror film with friends–especially for teens–and trying not to get freaked out. This is really interesting; I love the idea that the basic horror premise might actually be improved if you were to play with somebody along for the ride next to you. The complaints from review sites like Famitsu are that the game is very short (5 hours, they say), but if the purpose of the design is that it can be played in a sitting or two with friends, that length actually makes a lot of sense. Perhaps this is the way in which Shimizu has influenced the development of this game: it’s clearly designed not to be played alone, even though it’s a single-player game. I haven’t seen that before.

The other thing that strikes me about this game is that it’s very close to being a more modern incarnation of Hell Night. Not that it’s nearly as good as Hell Night; it misses the beat when it comes to sound, I think, and since avoiding death is fairly easy there’s very little of the pressure that Hell Night applies. But the system, the way that the game works and is played, is very similar. If nothing else this game could serve as a reference for how a more competent game might get started; the game mechanics seem solid and slightly wasted on this particular game.

As usual, I should note that I’ve only just started Ju-On and my impressions are subject to change. Stay tuned for a full review.

Richard Rouse III on the creation of The Suffering


Richard Rouse III (photo credit: Marc Joly-Corcoran)

Note: I wrote this blog post over two months ago, but it sat lost in some dark corner of my hard drive until today. I think that this is probably one of the most interesting topics to come out of the Thinking After Dark conference for folks here on this site, so I wanted to make sure I got the content right. Apologies for the delay.

Slowly, slowly, I am running my notes through a hand-crank machine that spits out blog posts (and hopefully corrects my grammar and spelling in the process–looking back, these notes are all over the place).

One of my favorite talks at the Thinking After Dark conference back in April was Richard Rouse III’s discussion and semi-post mortem of The Suffering, which he designed. Though the pure academic talks were pretty thought-provoking, the game developer inside me was very happy to hear about the actual process of making a (pretty damn good) horror game.

Rouse described The Suffering as a clear-cut case of “action-horror.” He had an interesting formula for thinking about the elements of different games can be added or removed to change the experience. Devil May Cry, he says, is Resident Evil without the horror. If we added Quake and Resident Evil together we get something like Half-Life. So what would we get if we added more horror to Half-Life, or added the horror back into Devil May Cry? What about Max Payne + horror? This was the thought process that led to the initial pitch of The Suffering to its publisher as Devil May Cry frenetic game play combined with the horror of Resident Evil combined with the competent story of Half-Life.

Another way to think about this, according to Rouse, is to consider which elements the game team will begin with: game play, story, or tech? Half-Life is based around game play first, while Resident Evil is more story focused. For The Suffering, the goal was to be a horror-version of Half-Life + Max Payne, which means a focus on the game play first. Possible areas of focus for the development team are player controls, horror, the player character, interesting creature designs, realistic settings, or touching on serious subjects. For The Suffering, controls were #1, character #2, realism #3, creature design #4, and horror came in #5.

So given that breakdown, Rouse described how he and his team needed to determine if they were making, as Rouse put it, “Alien or Aliens.” In Alien, you have a sort of one-on-one duel, with a group of astronauts who have no combat training taking on a single alien, with a focus on tension and suspense. Aliens, by contrast, is a fast-paced, action oriented film about a highly trained military combat unit combatting a large collection of aliens. Though Rouse’s original intention was to create something closer to Alien, the focus on game play really made Aliens a better fit. Thus, the game was conceived as “action-horror.” As an aside, Rouse also noted that more recent Resident Evil games, starting with Resident Evil 4, have moved closer to the action side of things in order to expand its audience. Rouse believes that RE4 was so successful because it resolved the series’ famously difficult control scheme, which was a limiting factor.

So, in response to Midway’s request for a Devil May Cry-like horror game, Rouse pitched The Suffering and then got to work. However, at first he and his team produced a game that was clearly action but contained very little horror. When his publisher asked that he increase the focus on horror, he went back to horror films to figure out how. Rouse names The Shining, The Birds, and The Twilight Zone as major influences. The Shining was his source of inspiration for The Suffering’s flashback sequences; he had generated a huge amount of backstory concerning the island but didn’t have a good way to communicate it to the player. Very late in development the team shifted focus and added in the numerous flashback and storytelling sequences, as well as cut scenes about Torque’s family (according to Rouse, the family was absent from the entire game until about three months before ship; the final product is completely cohesive, so I never would have guessed).

Rouse used The Birds to illustrate how horror films can offer multiple, conflicting theories as to why the bad stuff is happening without ever really answering any questions. There’s always the question of how much of the real story to reveal to the player and how much to leave to the imagination. In The Birds, the characters debate the merits of various theories as to why the birds have all gone crazy, which keeps the audience from feeling frustrated that there is no obvious explanation. But The Birds never shows its hand; the theories proposed in the film are never validated or concretely discredited, and the audience is left with more questions than answers. Rouse decided to go a similar route with The Suffering by making each of the buddy characters that Torque meets have his own pet theory for why the island has erupted. And while Rouse admitted to having his own theory about what is going on, he refused to share it with the group and noted that he also never shared it with his development team: the point was not to have a single “correct” explanation.

Rouse concluded his talk with a very clear and concise analysis of why horror, including horror games, matter: they can be used to address topics that are otherwise socially untouchable. He used two quotes to illustrate his point:

The Twilight Zone doesn’t use scripts as vehicles of social criticism. These are strictly for entertainment.

This is a quote by Rod Serling, the producer behind The Twilight Zone, and Rouse was quick to point out that it’s a flat-out lie. The Twilight Zone was quite often used for social commentary, some of it particularly biting at the time that it was aired. They got away with it because the theme was science fiction, so pundits wrote it off while the actual viewing audience simultaneously grew.

In a horror film, you can address [slavery]. Which if you addressed it in a straight drama, all the corporate nay-sayers would say ‘ oh we don’t want to say that’ in a horror film, they say ‘it’s just garbage, some bloody nonsense for the kids.

This one is from Bernard Rose, director of Candyman. Rouse suggested that Candyman deals more directly with the topic of slavery than many other mass-market films, and is able to do so because it is also horror. In The Suffering, Rouse’s story, particularly the enemies, was

designed to make people think. He touches on all sorts of horrific events that have taken place in US history: the slave trade, which trials, ethnic cleansing, and most importantly for Rouse, capital punishment. Rouse made it clear that he wanted to make a game that caused people to think about capital punishment, but he could never have done it with a genre other than horror. The horror genre, Rouse says, gets a pass because people write it off, and that gives the genre real power.

I got a bit of time to talk to Rouse after his presentation and found that he’s a pretty cool, laid back guy. He was sort of the odd man out at the conference in many ways; not only was he the only speaker who had ever actually made a horror game, he was also probably the person who was least interested in horror as a genre. I’m glad to have met him and I throughly enjoyed his talk.

Struggling to Keep Up

Holy crap there are a lot of horror games coming out real soon. Ju-on: The Grudge is coming out in a few days here in Japan, a sequel to Nanashi no Geemu called Nanashi No Geemu: Me (that’s “Nameless Game: The Eye”) is scheduled for the end of August, Calling has been promoted from rumor to a real, live game, and Cursed Mountain is supposed to come out in about two weeks.

That’s not even considering Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which is supposed to ship this year, or the new Resident Evil PSP game that Capcom just announced, the game that materializes on the media radar once ever six months before vanishing without any new information, the still-in-development Dead Island, or the Saw game that is looking increasingly likely this year (sigh).

There’s no way I can keep up with this kind of pace! My goal is to finish my 50th horror game his year; that shouldn’t be too hard, as I only have about four more games to go. On the other hand, if I don’t pick up the pace a little bit finishing four games in the next five months may be rough.

PS: Thanks to all the folks on the forum for keeping me in the loop about new games and posting links

PPS: 4 out of 6 console games in this post are Wii-exclusive. Did I call it or what?

Fatal Frame 4 is pretty much like all the others.


“Hmm, maybe I should just leave? Nah.”

… which isn’t a bad thing. I’m of the opinion that if you don’t mind the slow pace and the unique combat system, the Fatal Frame series is probably the single most consistently frightening series out there. Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was the first game I purchased when I bought a Japanese Wii (making it my second Wii and fifth game machine connected to my TV–region locking can kiss my ass), but I haven’t been able to play it much because my wife refuses to be in the room when the game is on. Even when I play with headphones, the visuals are effective enough that she wonders if she’ll be able to sleep.

To tell you the truth, I was not expecting FF4 to be all that great. The chatter on the web about the game when it came out was that it was not sufficiently Wii-ified, that it was a poor port from the PS2 engine, and that it was generally a weak horror game. And the publisher decision not to export the game outside of Japan seemed to back up those concerns. I’ve played about two hours of the game now and some of the impressions I read on the net are sort of true: there are a few technical problems (loading of rooms seems to be way slower now than it used to be, there are noticeable drops in the frame rate when passing from one room to the next, etc) and using the Wiimote to aim is taking some getting used to. So maybe, I thought at first, the game isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But the thing is, this is a classic Fatal Frame game through and through. The art style, the sounds, the ghosts, the menu UI, the particulars of the story–all of core components of this game are right in line with the rest of the series. And the game looks pretty great; other the occasional drop in frame rate there’s nothing to complain about here on the graphics front.

What is most interesting to me is the ways the game has changed from its predecessors. Some of the changes are very subtle, while others are a little more dramatic. The controls, for example, have been modified to match the Wiimote: the thumb stick on the Wii Nunchuck drives the character around and the wiimote is used to look up and down.


The camera is placed pretty low.

I haven’t quite gotten the hang of this yet–it’s hard for me to remember to tilt my hand down to aim downwards when fighting ghosts, for example–but I think that phase will pass. It’s also now necessary to hold the A button down for a while to pick up objects; the protagonist bends down and slowly reaches her hand out before grasping the item. I am sure by the time the game is done there will be at least one moment where a ghostly white hand shoots out and grabs her hand in mid reach, causing my heart to stop (D2 did something similar with trivial action cut scenes). There’s also a neat “item filament” bar that glows blue when items are near (and some of them do not appear until you get close enough to grab them), which makes ransacking areas for items a lot less tedious.

A much more subtle and (now that I think about it) major change is the way that the camera works. Previous FF games have been one of the last holdouts on character-centric “tank” controls (though the series made a few neat changes), probably because character-centric controls enabled the series to have some of the most interesting and complicated camera shots that I’ve seen. Fatal Frame 4, on the other hand, has opted for a behind-the-character camera view. The camera sits much lower than in most other 3rd person games–the protagonist takes up a large portion of the screen. If anything, it’s most similar to the camera system in Resident Evil 4, though pulled back from the character a bit. Like I said, the change is subtle; despite having played all of the other Fatal Frame games to completion, I didn’t notice this particular difference right away. I’m also not sure what the goal of this change is; it probably is an attempt to get away from tank controls, but I’m not sure if it was necessitated by the single-stick Wii controller or if it’s a nod to RE4 and its brethren.

Anyway, I’ve only just started to play and the game is sufficiently freaky that I will probably play in short bursts. But so far my impressions of the core game mechanics and the engine it is built on are very positive. All that remains to be seen is whether or not the game content will live up to its potential.

Alone in the Park

I finished Alone in the Dark 5 this evening and posted a review. Hey, look at that, I posted something on this blog again! Holy crap, bet you didn’t see that coming, huh? I actually have two more articles about Thinking After Dark to post, and something about The Path still, but those are not ready to go yet and work has been even crazier than usual lately.

Long story short: I gave up on F.E.A.R. (only the third game so far that I’ve been unable to complete; Rule of Rose and Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within are the others) a few weeks back and decided to try Alone in the Dark 5. I still have some things to say about F.E.A.R., but out of order here are some thoughts on the latest in the Edward Carnby saga.

Alone in the Dark 5 is an ambitious title. I played the PS3 version because I heard that it was much improved over the unpolished and buggy Xbox360 version. Even so, there were a lot of problems. At the same time, there are certain sequences that totally blew my socks off. Overall I didn’t think it was a fantastic game, but there is certainly a lot of stuff we can learn by examining it. Check out the full review.

Thinking After Dark: Tidbits

I bet you thought I just wasn’t going to post any more about the Thinking After Dark conference that I attended last month. The truth is that I have pages of notes waiting to be turned into blog posts and I’m running very behind. So, in the interests of brevity, here’s some short thoughts about some of the other talks from the conference.

Clara Fernandez-Vara gave an interesting presentation on the Castlevania series about why it is not a horror game. It clearly uses themes from Dracula, and, as Fernandez-Vara points out, many other classic (and generally unrelated) Western horror tropes like Frankenstein. Yet for some reason it doesn’t come off as a horror game. This talk was an exploration as to why that was the case. Fernandez-Vara’s suggests that Dracula, as a symbol, has been iterated too many times and has lost its original meaning. She points to the beginning of Symphony of the Night in which Dracula is basically reduced to acting like Bowser: he shoots fireballs and eventually turns into some giant generic monster. No biting, mesmerizing, turning into mist; he’s not even killed by a stake through the heart, but instead by a whip. Dracula isn’t scary any more and the developers had to turn him into something else to make him a threatening boss.

Fernandez-Vara’s theory is that this reliance and modification of a worn-out trope empowers the player; by using Dracula (the “satanic lord” version; there are many others) as an antagonist, the designers are giving the player a leg up on the competition: we already know all about Dracula and all that’s left is to go into his castle and take him out. Fernandez-Vara also points out that in Symphony of the Night, the protagonist Alucard actually gains Dracula’s traditional powers, which ends up making him even more powerful.

Alexis Blanchet presented a bunch of data related to some fascinating research he has been performing for the last three years. He is trying to catalog and categorize all games based on films ever made, and his database appears to be fantastically complete. This talk was in French but I think you can get a lot out of just looking at some of his graphs. Rather than reproduce them here, check out his web site and blog post about his talk.

Jonathan Lessard’s talk was about Lovecraft’s influence on the adventure game genre. It turns out that there are a bunch of horror-adventure games (mostly for the PC) that use Lovecraftian themes or are directly based on his work. Lessard wanted to know what the appeal was specifically with regards to adventure game translations. Lessard points out that the license is practical because it is not under copyright and the Lovecraft name is fairly well-known (though it can’t compare to, say, Agatha Christie). There are also structural compatibilities between Lovecraft’s stories and the adventure mold: Lovecraft stories are often about researchers or investigators setting out to find hidden truth, which maps very well to adventure games. Adventure games are indirect and contextual, which is a better fit for Lovecraft than verb-oriented action games (not a lot of running and jumping in Lovecraft’s stories). So the mode of play and general format of adventure games seems to be a snug fit.

However, Lessard points out that most of these games fail to be scary because eventually the game-related goals come into conflict with Lovecraftian norms. Lovecraft’s “cosmic fear” concept is really hard to describe visually; it’s not about things popping out of the dark or gore. Instead, it is about knowledge leading one into the darkness rather than to reason. But in an adventure game, discovery of truth is a reward and not a method of alienation, so that same psychological evolution of the character is difficult to achieve. It’s also hard to get the characters in these games to sufficiently emote, and many end with the triumph over evil, which is hardly Lovecraftian. So most of these games are not very scary. Lessard points out one major exception: a game called Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, which apparently follows the Lovecraftian narrative flow to a T. Gabrial Knight also gets a mention for its attention to cosmic fear. So the format is capable of hosting Lovecraft in a very authentic way, but it does not happen very often.

Another interesting talk was Matthew Weise’s discussion of “rules of horror.” His idea is that it might be possible to make horror games by translating the rules and tropes from specific types of horror movies directly to game play. As an example he talked exclusively about Clock Tower: The First Fear (though I think that the focus on this game was forced by the very short time limit for presentations). Clock Tower is, Weise points out, a very authentic translation of the “stalker” type of horror film (Halloween, etc). The protagonist is clearly a Final Girl. She fits the formal definition (Clover’s model) to a T, and the game can be seen as a simulation of the stalker film genre. It is one of the few games to show the protagonist’s face up close so you can see when she is frightened, and this feature, Weise argues, is required by the genre. Weise suggests that one way to adapt horror games from films is to see the genre rules of the film as game systems instead of just lifting the narrative. If you watched the film, would you be better prepared to play the game? If so, that would indicate that the game play itself is based on rules and systems defined by the film.

And that’s all I have time for today. I have at least two more posts on the conference to write, so please stay tuned.

Thoughts on Genre: Thinking After Dark, Day 1 Part 2


From left to right: Ewan Kirkland, Carl Therrien, and Dominic Arsenault

You know, on second thought, I think it will be better if I post my notes with more background. I looked back over my post from last week and it seems like it’s almost meaningless to people other than myself because it lacks so much context. From here on out I’m going to post summaries of what I thought was interesting. If you are interested in a particular point, please ask and I will elaborate.

On the first day of the conference there was a fascinating discussion about how genres are created and defined. Dominic Arsenault and Carl Therrien talked about this topic at length, and I think that it’s a very relevant topic with relationship to horror considering all the arguments discussions that we’ve had about it here.

Arsenault makes the point that genres for games are problematic because there is no single authority. Genre is often defined in terms of a hierarchy of characteristics; GameSpot’s find-by-genre page, for example, sorts everything by pace, then mechanic, then view point, and then theme: Action > Shooter > First-Person > Fantasy. Other lists of game genres (such as this one, this one, and this one) do not agree, and some even contain a meaningless classification like “hybrid.” There is no definitive consensus, new genres are born and die constantly, and most games are combinations of other genres.

He went on to talk about how genres are created when they become necessary. Is it really possible, he wondered, to define a genre of spiky hair sword-wielding protagonists that can then contain both Final Fantasy VII’s Cloud and No More Heros’ Travis? Not really, and the reason is that “genre is not only defined from the elements of a [game], but also from a common cultural consensus” (Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film, 1974). So the genres that stick around are those that people agree upon.

At this point Arsenault had an awesome graph. He plotted the number of usenet posts per month containing the phrase “doom clone” against posts containing the phrase “first person shooter” from about 1990 through 2008. The term “Doom clone” appeared like a bell curve; it starts around 1992 and peaks in 1996, then dies off by 2000. Individual spikes in the usage of the term correlated with releases of games like Duke Nukem. “First person shooter” appearers in 1996 and rockets upwards, surpassing “doom clone” in usage by 1998 and then subsequently rising to much larger usage than “doom clone” ever achieved. By the time that Unreal is released, nobody is calling first person shooters “doom clones.” So, the conclusion is that game genres are not defined by logic, or by a central authority, but by “what we collectively believe it to be.”

Aresnault went on to talk about the separation of thematic and gameplay genres, which an especially important topic for survival horror games. He mentions that “survival horror” seems to be about gameplay (survival) + theme (horror), and is therefore a hybrid of both a thematic and gameplay genre. Survival is pretty easy to define in terms of game terms, but horror is more difficult. It turns out that people have been trying to properly define the horror genre for years, with a number of interesting results. Bruce F. Kawin, for example, separates horror from science fiction by suggesting that the end of the narrative is a genre signifier: horror games end with a “re-establishment of the status quo,” as the world goes back to the way it was before the narrative began, while sci-fi ends in a progression of understanding of the universe rather than a concrete resolution. But that sort of dichotomy does not help us categorize hybrids like Dead Space.

Perhaps, then, we should separate the hybrid into its gameplay and thematic genres. They seem to grow and change in different ways. “Gameplay genres are born from reiterations and successive imitations that aim to better the model, while thematic genres feed on transmedia borrowings with an aesthetic aim.” Aresnault references Fowler (1982) who points out that genre is not just a classification tool, but also a communication tool: it manages expectations. Hans R. Jauss (1978) points out that the “horizon of expectations is made up of first, the player’s knowledge and cognitive schemata, and second, the generic markers that puts the work in place.” (Or something like that; my notes are unclear if this is a direct quote).

Therrien (who referenced this site–thanks!) makes a similar point. Per T. Apperley, the problem with genre is that it doesn’t describe a particular game but rather tries to link it to earlier forms of media. Almost any game play classification we can come up with will have exceptions: rather than a strict definition the concepts involved in game genres are constantly evolving. “Evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm: every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species.” (T. Todorov).

Since we’ve had so many discussions on how best to parse the collection of horror games that are cataloged on this site, I found these talks particularly interesting and pertinent. I am still going through my notes but in the next few days I will post about subsequent topics that were covered at the conference. There’s also some pictures online now if you are interested.

Thinking After Dark: Day 1


Montreal is a beautiful city.

I have logged a lot of time in the air this month. I flew from Japan to the Bay Area in early April, then flew up to Oregon to see my family, and now I am sitting in a hotel room in Montreal. On Sunday I return to the Bay Area and on Tuesday I will get back in the plane and fly back to Japan. Hello frequent flyer miles!

I am in Montreal, which is a fantastic (but very cold) city, for the first time in about eight years, to attend the Thinking After Dark conference, which is all about horror video games. Today was the first day of the conference, which runs for three days. On Saturday I am giving a (very short) talk about using horror games to study Japanese culture, a topic that I think is a pretty predictable selection for me. The conference is located in a neat old building that was selected because “it looks like something out of Resident Evil.” I can tell that I am in the company of friends, though I have to admit that some of the lingo is so academic that I have trouble understanding it.

Today’s talks were all interesting, and I took a ton of notes. In fact, I have so many notes that rather than trying to describe each individual talk, I am going to just record some of the key interesting points that I heard today. I’m going to break the notes up into separate posts because there’s just too much information. Also, even though there’s a lot of content here you should understand that I am applying a pretty strict filter; these talks have way more info in them than I can possible transcribe here.

The first keynote, by Barry K. Grant of Brock University, was about horror cinema. Grant is the author of numerous books on cinema and had a whole lot to say about horror films. Some points:

  • Grant believes that “video games constitute the future of cinema.” He sees them as “the eighth art,” after cinema. Cinema is spatial arts + temporal arts, and games add interactivity to that formula.
  • Horror has the most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions (next to Sci-Fi): magazines, web sites, zombie flash mobs, etc.
  • Like comedy and porn, “horror is defined in terms of its intended affect,” making it a “body genre.” Contrast that with crime or mystery films which are about the narrative.
  • Consequently, a “good” horror movie is one that is scary, even if it’s not a particularly well-made film.
  • Grant shows how German expressionism, for example the painted-on shadows, artificial lighting, and hard, distorted angles in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) jumped to Hollywood when German filmmakers fled to the US in the early 1930s to avoid the Nazis.
  • “Horror movies are more about the time and place that they are made in rather than the time that they are set.”
  • Classic monsters are no longer scary because in the 1950s onward they were


    The venue. Not shown: entrance to underground laboratory.

    “juvenilized”: put on cereal boxes, made into toys, etc.

  • Psycho changed genre films by suggesting that monsters didn’t have to be aliens or monsters. The horror still descends from the gothic mansion on the hill to arrive at the regular Bates Motel though.
  • New vocabulary word: “splat-stick.”
  • Interesting idea that William Castle films (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, etc) are early experiments in interactive cinema.

Second was a talk by Tanya Krzywinska of Brunel University. She has also written extensively about games and film. Her talk covered tons of bases and is difficult to summarize, so I’ll just list a few interesting points:

  • “Orchestrated” (= linear, pre-scripted, pre-determined) game play sequences vs organic, open-ended sequences. Phantasmagoria is extremely orchestrated, even down to the points in space that you can visit (as the motion is all based on live film), and borrows much from cinema. 3D free-roaming games, on the other hand, are harder to orchestrate and thus were unable to directly apply shock and tension lessons from cinema and had to invent their own.
  • Krzwinska calls gamers “close readers,” that is, games require attention to detail and pattern recognition. Compare that to TV or film which can “take you places” without effort. In games, your life depends on your ability to “read” the details of the game.
  • She makes a distinction between game “grammars” for mechanics and for the genre. This is a similar idea to my idea about ‘mechanical challenges’ and ‘cognitive challenges’, but she’s framed it very well. The game grammar is “how you play” and the genre grammar is “what is happening in the game.” It occurs to me that game grammars must be as readable as possible (to avoid the frustration of not knowing how to control the game) while genre grammars may be intentionally misleading or obscured (in order to misdirect the player’s understanding of the environment or story).
  • She has a point about sound provoking action in games, as opposed to in films where it causes you to imagine an action. The radio in Silent Hill foretells of an approaching enemy which you can then encounter, etc.
  • She’s a big fan of Lovecraft and of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. But she points out that the game grammar and genre grammar are somewhat at odds (e.g. you must investigate things to learn about them, but looking upon horrors causes you to lose sanity points). Lovecraft doesn’t fit well with game grammar norms.

I’ll save the rest of today’s talks for a future post. In fact, at this rate I might just have to move everything to an article or present a less informative but more concise summary of the day’s events. Which would you prefer?

Crap, it’s already April 2?

So I missed April Fools this year. Sorry. My excuse is that I was on a plane over the Pacific, which is true. Next year I’ll have some totally mind blowing joke prepared for you all (I considered posting that Alan Wake had been announced as an iPhone exclusive, but I figured that probably won’t have gone over well).

I have a post in the wings about The Path. The short version is that you should go buy it. While it is in many ways a classic adventure game, it’s been filtered and twisted and it’s like nothing that you’ve seen before. It’s a different kind of horror game, one that will require you to think. I’ve only spent a few minutes with it but that’s more than enough to recommend it to you here. I’ll have a much more in-depth post about this game when I get to spend a little more time with it.

Last week was also GDC, and there’s been some horror-related news to talk about. Here’s some screenshots from the new Silent Hill remake, which looks, uh, odd. I’ll play it, and I’m very happy to see that somebody is finally using the Wiimote as a flashlight (ok, Fragile did this first), but I can’t tell much about it yet by just looking at the screenshots. Also, I was surprised to learn that the Saw game is still in development (apparently Konami is the new publisher), and even more surprised that there are screenshots available. The database is quickly falling out of date!

At the end of the month I will be speaking at the Thinking After Dark conference. The list of speakers is impressive, and the topics are all things I am interested in, so I am quite excited about attending. Any of you in upstate New York or Montreal should come attend!