In the last post I wrote a little bit about the value of uncertainty in the mechanics of horror games. The idea is that the game may obfuscate certain game play systems (health, remaining ammunition, the location of enemies, etc) in order to keep the player off balance. A key trait of effective horror is the feeling that one has lost control; denying the player precise information lowers his own self-confidence. It’s a lot more uncomfortable to make a blind decision than an informed one, to chart a new route rather than follow a routine path. Many horror games take explicit steps to hobble the player’s ability to see the system behind the context of the game, to keep him in the dark about key information in order to prevent the mechanics from becoming comfortable.

Another interesting trait of horror games is that the exact same logic is often applied to the narrative. Horror game narratives are vine-like, twisting and turning in ways that you don’t expect. Suspense is the feeling of knowing that something is coming but not knowing what, or when, it will arrive; this is true whether the suspense is generated by a static-emitting radio radar, a long staircase that seems to go impossibly deep into the ground, or the suggestion that an ancient curse may still be in effect. If the player knows what’s going to happen ahead of time, the feeling of tension is lost; as with the mechanics obfuscation, it is necessary to hide details of the story from the player so that they are forced to operate with incomplete information. They are not in control.

There are many names for this approach, but my favorite is negative space. In this context, the term describes the bits of the story that are never explicitly communicated to the player. If we write a complete narrative down on index cards, with one event per card, and then pour the whole lot on the table, the cards that land face down are in the negative space. The reader can probably piece the story together from the cards that land face up, but he’ll have to use his imagination to fill in the blanks.

Akira Yamaoka described his approach to the narrative in Silent Hill as “creating space for the imagination.” He provides a pretty nice framework for thinking about negative space: he talks about the “stacking” of clues, fragments of (often conflicting) information that provide enough detail for the player to form a working theory about what is going on. The key to Yamaoka’s approach is that these clues are designed to mislead the player into thinking they understand the story so that a late scene can pull the rug out from under them when the “true horror” is revealed. Remember, the goal is to keep the player from becoming comfortable.

It’s important to underscore the connection Yamaoka makes between negative space and the player’s imagination. In fact, the purpose of the negative space, above and beyond keeping the player uncomfortable, is to provide an area for the mind to explore. Noel Carroll writes,

Nevertheless, a great deal of the sustaining interest in horror stories concerns the discover of the unknown. The majority of horror stories are, to a significant extent, representations of process of discovery, as well as often occasions for hypothesis formation on the part of the audience and, as such, these stories engage us in the drama of proof.

We’ve all seen predictable horror films, and they are always terrible; even an artistically elegant film cannot sustain our interest if the arc of the plot is obvious from the onset. We enjoy horror in no small part because it allows us to explore that which we do not know–to try to map the negative space.

It’s also interesting to note that the mere suggestion of the existence of negative space can increase the effectiveness of a narrative. I’m a big fan of Haruki Murakami’s novels because they are always about that which is unsaid; The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, one of my all-time favorite books, has enough negative space to house the Titanic. Another Murakami work, South of the Border, West of the Sun, is a good example of negative space as a passing suggestion of something far below the surface of the narrative. In it a man is suddenly reunited with a childhood friend, and he begins to fall for her. But the years intervening their childhood friendship and adult romance are a mystery, and her behavior is sometimes unexplainable. The book can be read as a simple drama about a man having a midlife crisis, but in typical Murakami fashion the ending reveals a small detail that throws all of the preceding events into question: the protagonist realizes that he cannot actually prove that his mysterious lover exists. The key to this revelation is so minor that you might gloss right over it, but for an astute reader it is the equivalent of Yamaoka’s “true horror”: the author has just thrown us into the deep end in the final pages by suggesting, only suggesting, that things are not as they appear.

I’ve

written before about how culture shock can be a major horror affordance. The idea is that when we consume horror media that comes from another culture, we are thrown off balance because we cannot read the tropes and cliches. The work may not actually be complicated, but it’s almost certainly based on themes and patterns that are culturally specific. Another way to say that is that a foreign culture is often a large negative space upon which the work rests. When we look into the pool it appears to be very deep indeed. This might be why so many terrible foreign movies found resonance in the West in the early 2000s. After The Ring (a very nice film) opened the floodgates, all manner of cheap copycats and C-grade films from Japan, Korea, and China were suddenly snapped up by publishing companies, subtitled, and released to an unsuspecting public. Since the mere suggestion of negative space is enough to deepen the impact of a horror work, even the crappy movies seemed like a breath of fresh air because they were implicitly tied to foreign norms. People ate up films that would otherwise be regarded as absolute schlock because they were actually exploring an imagination space built out of unfamiliar cultural cues rather than one constructed by an agile narrative.

Negative space serves two major functions in horror narratives: it deepens our interest by forcing us to think about what is going on, and it keeps us unbalanced (and therefore, not in control) by reinforcing the idea that we are operating with incomplete knowledge. I’m a pretty hardcore Siren fan, and after 100%-ing that game I have a pretty good idea of what happens and why, but there are still a lot of questions that I don’t have answers to. Though most of the questions are eventually resolved, Catherine is keeps you guessing for most of the game. Hell Night doles its plot out in reliable chunks, but late in the game it does something that forces you to reevaluate all of your assumptions. And of course, Silent Hill 2, the king of negative space in games, remains one of the most highly respected narratives in game history. It’s no accident that these games are highly regarded; the existence of negative space is a boilerplate requirement for horror narratives.

My TV was hissing. It was a small set, 15 inches across, set on a short table in one corner of my ten-tatami-mat room in Kyoto. It was 1998, the middle of the night, and though my hosts were two floors below me, I worried that the sound would reach through the thin walls and wake them. It was a familiar hiss–it is the sound of an detuned radio, the sound of white noise, static. This particular static was coming from a radio clipped to the belt of a man standing in a dark hallway, a large pipe in his hand, his small flashlight casting a narrow oval of light around him. It was also a harsh sound, one that made me uneasy. I wondered if my host family could hear it. More importantly, I wondered where the mangled nurses that it was trying to warn me about were lurking beyond the beam of the flashlight. This is one of my clearest memories of my first experience with Silent Hill.

At the time I was convinced that the radio sounds played a key role in Silent Hill’s brand of fear. And a decade and a half later, I still think that the radio, and the greater soundscape that Silent Hill employs, is a big part of what makes the series scary. But the radio isn’t just a great sound, it serves a specific gameplay purpose: it is a fuzzy form of radar. Its job is to escalate the level of tension felt by the player and also to warn him of enemies in the immediate area. Though many games employ some form of radar, this one is a bit different because it is so indistinct. When the static sound flairs you know that enemies are close, but it’s not possible to tell how close, or in which direction they reside, or even how many of them there might be. It wasn’t the thought of lurking nurses that scared me, it was knowing that they were near and not knowing exactly how near. There’s something insidious about that, about having enough information to be concerned but not enough to act. Without the radio, the scares would have devolved into surprise attacks, which might work once or twice but would thereafter become routine. With a more specific radar, the uncertainty about the location of the enemies would be removed and dispatching them would become routine. Much has been written about how the sound of Silent Hill’s radio is itself a tension inducer, but I wonder if the fuzziness of the information it provides is also an important aspect of its function.

Silent Hill isn’t the only horror game with a fuzzy radar. In the early Resident Evil games, the sound of zombie moans and their lumbering footfalls warned you that danger was near, even if the angle of the camera restricted your view of the room. Like the Silent Hill radio, this communication was indistinct; it put you on your guard but did not give you enough information to anticipate the position

of the enemies. Fatal Frame has a visual radar, a glowing filament that brightens near areas of interest, but it too is non-directional. Enemy Zero is an entire game based around the concept of a fuzzy radar: the alien monsters roaming the space ship where the game takes place are invisible, their position revealed only by the incessant beeping of a warning device. The closer the enemies are, the faster it beeps; beeps beyond a certain frequency mean that you’re probably already dead. It’s an incredibly obtuse way to warn the player of impending danger, but then again, that’s probably the point.

Of course, none of these games have any kind of actual radar on the HUD–they don’t have a HUD at all. In fact, only a very small number of horror games actually have any sort of on-screen display. The absence of a HUD is often chalked up to “immersive” game design; the theory is that removing elements that do not appear within the game world itself increases the immediate believability of that world. I suspect that this is true, especially in games like ICO, but I think that horror games have another, more important reason to omit the HUD. Like the fuzziness of the Silent Hill radar radio, obscuring the HUD is a way to obfuscate the details of the game state from the player.

Obfuscation of game state is an idea that shows up in all sorts of places in horror game design. Take the Resident Evil health system: rather than a health bar or number, classic Resident Evil gives you a three state abstraction: FINE, CAUTION, and DANGER. Each state indicates a range of health values; sometimes you will take a hit and the state will not change, other times a hit may cause you to go directly from FINE to DANGER. Of course, under the hood these states map to something like a health bar, and dedicated players have deciphered the underlying system, but during normal play this system obfuscates the amount of health you have. Your health value is further obscured by the herb combination system. Are three herbs taken individually as powerful as three herbs combined? Is a green and a red herb combined the same as three green herbs? Does combining with a blue herb affect the amount of health recovered? The Silent Hill series has played with non-obvious health meters too: depending on the game, the information you get is limited to a pulsating color or an image that becomes more noisy as damage is taken. Siren doesn’t provide a health meter at all.

How near is the Slenderman in Slender? Can the creatures in Amnesia: The Dark Descent see you or not? You can hear the monster in

Hellnight coming, but which direction is he coming from?. How many bullets left do you have in your gun in Resident Evil, Silent Hill, or Siren? You can check in the pause menu, sure, but in the heat of battle there’s no way to tell. Speaking of Siren, how close does a shibito need to before he realizes you are there? How far away can your footfalls be heard if you walk rather than crouch? What’s in the darkness beyond the small oasis that your flashlight affords?

I think that horror games, more than any other genre, go out of their way to hide specific details about the game simulation from the player. It’s not that details such as health or ammo supply are not relevant to the simulation, it’s that the game wishes to keep you in a constant state of uncertainty. To that end these games obfuscate all kinds of details that are considered incisive in other genres: health, ammo supplies, enemy locations, and even the core rules of the game itself. The end result, I think, is a scarier game.

As a counterpoint, let’s consider a game that not obfuscate its game state: Dead Space. Though Dead Space has no 2D HUD, it still provides the player with plenty of information–much more than the other games discussed in this post. Isaac’s life bar is attached to his back, his gun prominently displays the number of shots remaining, and he has a special gadget that shows him where to go whenever he is lost. This information is reassuring. In the heat of battle, we can rest easy if Isaac has full health; even a couple of direct hits aren’t likely to kill him. We know where we’re going, and how much ammo and health we have, at all times. Though there’s some uncertainty in the narrative (a topic I’ll tackle next time), the game mechanics leave nothing vague. As a result, I felt that Dead Space lost a lot of its horror bite; it’s missing that overwhelming feeling of oppression that the others are able to pull off. All the information makes it a bit too easy to relax.

Uncertainty is a valuable commodity amongst horror games because it is part of the greater plan to make you feel that you are not in control of the situation. Loss of control, I have come to believe, is one of the core traits of all successful horror games; those games that evoke a feeling of helplessness are the ones we find the most frightening. Causing the player to believe that the events unfolding within the game are beyond his control is a complex task, and uncertainty is only a small part of it. But even so, making the player to feel uncertain about key game rules helps to knock his confidence down a peg or two. And when every system in the game is intentionally obfuscated, the feeling of uncertainty, and therefore lack of control, is strong indeed.