The Walking Dead Isn’t Horror

A couple of years ago my brother, a comic fanatic (and indie comic artist/author/publisher), gave me a copy of The Walking Dead for my birthday. A few years later he gave me a DVD of the first season of the show based on that comic. And that is why, when I read that Telltale had released a Walking Dead episodic game on Xbox Live (as well as PSN, iOS, and PC/Mac), I made a mad dash for my television.

I wasn’t disappointed. The Walking Dead game is fantastic–it’s one of the best adventure games I’ve played in a very long time. The interface is simple but effective, the tried-and-true adventure game play fits the needs of the story well, and the writing is absolutely top-notch. It’s not easy to make a game like this today; somebody at Telltale has a deep understanding of how adventure games work and why they are still viable in the market, despite the failure of the genre over a decade ago. It is exactly the right game for this series, I think: no other genre could have hit the emotional notes that are the series’ signature as well as this one does.

And yet, although it concerns a small group of people attempting to survive a zombie apocalypse, with all of the dramatic zombie attacks and bloody dismemberment that you might expect, The Walking Dead is not a horror game. At least, not by Noel Carroll’s standards. In his seminal text on horror, A Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Carroll meticulously argues for the existence of “art-horror,” the emotion we feel when consuming works of horror (I wrote about Carroll’s ideas earlier this year). Art-horror has specific requirements that set it apart from related genres like suspense and mystery. One requirement is that a monster be involved. Another is that said monster must be plausible, dangerous, and disgusting, a role that the sauntering deceased for which the game is named clearly fulfill. But even considering the zombies, obvious horror tropes that they are, The Walking Dead fails some of Carroll’s other requirements for horror.

One of Carroll’s most insightful requirements is that the monsters of art-horror be “extraordinary.” That is, they must be something that isn’t expected, that surprises the protagonists, that isn’t a normal element of the world. This is in contrast to fantasy, in which monsters or other crazy beings are “normal” because the setting itself is extraordinary. Finding a troll in your back yard is a lot more surprising than finding one in Narnia. This “extraordinary being in an ordinary world” definition allows Carroll to cleanly separate works of horror from works of fantasy, even though both contain monsters that fit his other prerequisites.

The zombies in The Walking Dead, however, are not extraordinary. They are dangerous, sure, but they have become a fact of life for the main characters. The protagonists now live in a changed world; the new normal is a world in which the dead shuffle about looking for anything living to eat. Lee, the protagonist, is not surprised to see zombies. He encounters them, and kills them, regularly. Though they were initially weird, with time and exposure they have become ordinary. The world that these zombies inhabit, and how the protagonists react to that world, is The Walking Dead’s principal concern. Per Carroll’s requirements, this means that The Walking Dead isn’t going for art-horror.

Which, actually, you don’t need to read Carroll to understand. The Walking Dead has some intense scenes, but it’s not scary. It’s not trying to be scary. Carroll writes about how the emotions of characters in art-horror works ideally run parallel to those of the audience, but the characters in The Walking Dead are rarely scared. There’s no hiding in the corner or sobbing in a dark room for these grizzled veterans. They are competent, aware of their surroundings, and paranoid. They are angry, political, and scheming. And though they experience moments of vulnerability, the game doesn’t go out of its way to communicate how scared they are, because it’s not really going for scares. It’s got its eye on something else.

The real genius of The Walking Dead is that it forces you, the player, to step into the shoes of the protagonists and make hard decisions posed by the harsh world around them. The central question it is asking, I think, is whether or not you can maintain your humanity in the face of disaster. Do you act consistently when presented with the same problem in different contexts? How far will your moral compass sway when you are caught between starving, getting stabbed in the back as you sleep, or becoming food for some shambling corpse? Your decisions can’t be taken lightly, as they affect the way the rest of the game plays out.

My Lee is trying very hard to retain his humanity, to remain civilized. Even when it puts him in the line of danger, my Lee acts according to a strict moral code because he believes that deviation from it will result in chaos, and because he must set an example for the child in his charge. This leads to some significant hardship on his part, but he is confident in his decisions. There’s nothing requiring you to play this way: you could choose to be more opportunistic or vindictive depending on the situation; after all, isn’t surviving the most important thing at the end of the day? Even if it means somebody else doesn’t make it?

This uncomfortable middle ground between what is right and what is best in the face of absolute disaster is the emotional area that The Walking Dead wants to explore. Though it’s using zombies to get there, it’s not a horror game; the intent is to make you think about how you live your life rather than to raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

Donation!

Thanks to a generous gift by “mdowns2,” I am now in possession of Alien Resurrection for the PS1. Awesome! After …Iru! I thought about taking a break from old first-person games, but now I may change my mind. Hmm, so many horror games to play, so little time! Thanks, mdowns2!

Rise of Nightmares

I bought a Kinect a while back because I wanted to play Happy Action Theater with my daughter, as well as Once Upon A Monster. Both games are pretty fun, and they use the Kinect in ways that work. The other Kinect games I’ve played, like the Wii Sports knockoff Kinect Adventures, are all universally terrible. The controls don’t work, or they don’t work well enough, or you just can’t get into the damn game because the UI is impossible to navigate while flailing your hands like an idiot in the space in front of your TV. My daughter wanted to use a different avatar than the boy character that Kinect Adventures auto selected for her, but the device wouldn’t read her movements correctly, wouldn’t allow me to stand in for her to make a selection (it tries to switch players using facial recognition or something), and also wouldn’t allow me to use the regular controller to navigate the UI for her. After she became frustrated to the point of tears we turned the damn thing off, and since then the Kinect has sat, inactive and unmoving, at the top of my TV (we play Wii Sports, which she can control easily, instead).

But you know, once you buy the thing, you start to think about using it every once in a while. This is the train of thought that eventually led to the purchase of Rise of Nightmares, an event which I almost immediately regretted. If you haven’t heard, Rise of Nightmares is a first person Kinect-based horror game in which you punch the lights out of zombies while standing in your living room. Here’s a pretty funny video to give you an idea of what playing this atrocity of a game is like.

Anyway, though I’m not very proud to say it, I completed Rise of Nightmares and wrote a short critique.

Don’t Buy The Silent Hill HD Collection

I’d heard that there were problems with the recently released Silent Hill HD Collection, but I didn’t follow the complaints closely. The collection contains Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, and is supposed to be a high definition remastering of those games. I heard a bit about about the fog being broken and the voices re-recorded for these titles, and that was enough to make me avoid the release.

After seeing this video I am glad that I did. The video (and, amazingly, the follow-up) explore the problems with Silent Hill HD Collection in extreme detail, clocking in at over two hours of complaints (I’ve skipped the first 20 minutes in the links above, but it’s worth watching to the end of the first video at least). The problems are numerous: visual effects are broken or missing, sounds have been modified, removed, or completely replaced, and changes to the presentation (such as camera position and blur effects) reveal key information in the games that was supposed to be obscured. Not only that, the ports appear to be full of bugs!

The other fascinating thing about this video is that there are numerous comparisons between the Silent Hill HD Collection that came out this year and the Silent Hill 2 and 3 releases for PC that came out a decade ago. The PC releases look better in every scene!

Look, I’m not a rabid Silent Hill fanboy, but these are genre-defining games. Konami picked these titles ostensibly to please fans of the series, but the ports are so low quality that no fan is going to be satisfied; most will be enraged. Do yourself a favor and avoid the Silent Hill HD Collection at all costs.

The Absence of Fear in Project Zero 2’s Haunted House Mode Or, “I ain’t afraid of no ghost!”


Every Haunted House objective sounds simple, but the game’s mechanics turn them into a trial.

[This guest post was written by Bev Chen. Thanks for the interesting post, Bev! –Chris]

Project Zero 2: Wii Edition is without a doubt one of the best re-releases I’ve ever played. The updated graphics and substantial gameplay tweaks enhanced the game’s fear factor, as I discuss in my review of the game. However, I did feel the Haunted House mode, a new addition to the re-released version of the game, pales significantly in comparison to the main story in its attempts to scare, and I’d like to discuss why this is the case.

For the uninitiated, Project Zero 2 (also known as Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly in the US) is a horror game in which you play as a young girl trying to escape a village filled to the brim with spirits. Your only means of defense throughout the ordeal is the Camera Obscura, a camera that can be used to exorcise these spooks. The game places a heavy emphasis on exploration and the mythos behind the village. Played in third-person with a first-person perspective for combat when using the Camera Obscura, there is a real sense of your character’s fragility; ghosts move unpredictably and can do devastating damage.

Haunted House mode, on the other hand, is very different. As its name states, this mode harks back to haunted house attractions traditionally set up in fairs and amusement parks, and it is consequently much simpler than the main story mode. Haunted House mode is a first-person, on-rails experience in which you walk through various stages while spooky things happen around you, some of the jump scare variety and others that are more subtle. [Sounds like another addition to my running list of casual first-person exploratory horror games. –Chris] You start off with three haunted houses and can unlock more as you go, but every game boils down to three types of objectives:

  1. Don’t let the scare meter reach Level 3;
  2. Photograph a certain ghost a number of times;
  3. Search for a doll while avoiding a certain ghost.

So what’s this ‘scare meter’ I mention? Haunted House tracks how scared you are based on “unnecessary” movements of the Wii remote, with your totals being represented by a meter on screen. It’s a neat idea, one that might have given Haunted House mode a little more novelty, but it’s also the core problem.

Firstly, the implementation is deeply flawed. Supposedly only unnecessary movements count towards your scare meter total, but in practice the game fails to distinguish them from regular movements. Pressing a button to open the door should hardly be considered “unnecessary.” Moreover, the amount the meter increases by is disproportionate to your actual movements; a slight


Swarms of enemies can’t hurt you, only frighten you.

adjustment to my seating position once boosted my meter by 500 points. The system apparently cannot tell the difference between a reaction to a jump scare and a mild movement. Due to its finicky implementation the scare meter ends up being somewhat random; it is unfortunate that the value is considered at the end of each game when judging whether the player wins or loses.

Problem two stems from the fact that the scare meter is shown to players in the first place. Part of the beauty of Project Zero 2 is that the user interface is clean and unobtrusive, but in Haunted House mode it’s a very conspicuous on-screen element that doesn’t tie in aesthetically with the rest of the game. The inclusion of the scare meter is questionable to begin with–how frightened you are isn’t a currency that needs to be explicitly stated on screen. It’s not something you can compare to, say, health or ammo, simple numerical values that are predictably calculated over the course of play. Not only is the calculation of the meter flawed, its presence on the screen is superfluous.

These flaws essentially force the player to be cautious to the point that it is impossible to get immersed in the world. It’s obvious that the whole point of Haunted House is to scare the hell out players, but it quickly loses its power and becomes one of those steady hand tests. The other objectives are more successful, but these have glaring issues as well.

Objective 2 arms you with the Camera Obscura and requires you to take a number of photos of a certain ghost that makes scripted appearances. The problem is that said ghost only appears the exact number of times that you need to photograph it, meaning that if you miss it once, too bad. Haunted House is on-rails but the way the controls are phrased implies that you can turn around and revisit areas. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, and it makes playing Objective 3, during which you need to pick up dolls while being chased by a ghost, a frustrating experience as well. Did you miss a doll? Tough. This is in direct contrast to the backbone of the gameplay of Project Zero 2’s main campaign, in which exploration is key to advancing.

Even more annoying is the dissonance between what the game tells you and what actually happens; the game suggests that the ghost in Objective 3 can be banished by turning around. What the game actually means is that you should turn around when you feel the controller vibrate, or that ghost isn’t going anywhere.

With all these factors in mind, the game’s ‘scoring system’ at the end of the stage is an insult too. There are four criteria: Curiosity, Reactions, Strength, and Paranoia. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret each one, but presumably Curiosity corresponds to your propensity to explore (laughable, consider this is a very strict on-rails game we’re talking about), Reactions to your responsiveness to events, Strength to your heart rate


Ju-On for the Wii is a game with similar ideas, but much better implementation.

and Paranoia to how often you check your surroundings. If the scales at the end look fudged, that’s probably because you sneezed or had to scratch your head. If the scare meter is too low at the end, Lady Kureha, the caretaker of the Haunted Houses, notes that she will make subsequent attempts more frightening. Intriguing, given that that the appearances of ghosts in each stage are random, essentially making every playthrough different. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, this just meant that the same type of ghosts would appear more frequently, at least a dozen times in a seven or eight minute playthrough. Shocking the first time, laughable and/or irritating after.

Playing Haunted House mode, I couldn’t help but compare it to Ju-On, a game based on the popular Ju-On/The Grudge films that came out a few years ago. Similar to Haunted House mode, Ju-On bills itself as a first-person fright simulator in which players walk through decrepit locations while scary things happen. The difference is that in Ju-On, there is a sense of desperation that you would expect from a horror game. Unlike Haunted House mode, there is no easy checklist of objectives to complete; much like a traditional survival horror title, exploration is required to find items or trigger events that will let you progress. More importantly, exploration serves as a method to highlight the player’s vulnerability. Spending too long in one area can be dangerous: if you run out of flashlight batteries, it’s game over. Certain actions cause a ghost attack, and you must complete a quick-timer event to flee. Again, failure results in a game over. The fact that you can die in ways that make sense in the context of the game puts Ju-On leaps and bounds ahead of Haunted House mode’s attempts to convey horror. Furthermore, Ju-On also employs some sort of fear detector, but it doesn’t rely on a visible meter; the results of the detection are simply part of the final score displayed when a level is completed. Its implementation of this idea is definitely far better than that of Project Zero 2’s.

Suspension of disbelief is important in all video games, but especially in survival horror. When done right, such as in Project Zero 2’s story mode, it makes for an incredible and terrifying experience. Project Zero 2’s Haunted House mode makes a noble effort to replicate the feeling of visiting a haunted house attraction, but its hamfisted approach results in player frustration rather than fear. The only thing scary about it is how wrong it all went.

Bev Chen is a lover of horror and enjoys discovering how video games push the boundaries of fear. When she’s not writing for Rocket Chainsaw, she’s musing on her blog, Electronical Parade

…Iru!

I completed …Iru! a few days ago, and if you follow me on Twitter you probably saw a rather large stream of complaints about it over the past few weeks. …Iru! is a hard game to play–it came out in 1998 and has aged really poorly. It wasn’t a great game to begin with either, but I am glad to have finished it if only to learn a little more about the design of better horror games. You can read my short review of this obscure title for now, and sometime soon I’ll put together a more substantial article about its main problems.

The images here come from an old post on Endaso’s blog. The name of this game is so generic that it’s impossible to search for, so thanks Endaso for the images.

Slender

A couple of weeks ago I read about an indie horror game called Slender over at the Frictional Games blog. I booted it up and put on my headphones and was throughly impressed. It’s not much of a game–more of an experiment in setting and mechanics–but it works really well. I had my friend Jonny play it and a few minutes later he kicked his chair back from the table, let out a yelp, and tore off his headphones. Before you read more about it you should give it a shot. It’ll only take a few minutes and headphones are a must.

I think about 80% of the effectiveness of Slender is the sound. The sound is overwhelming. It demands your attention, forces your blood to pump in spite of the otherwise unremarkable graphics and presentation. The way the sound increases in intensity with each note you find also keeps the tension from falling with repetition. Without sound, I don’t think Slender wold pack such an effective punch.

The other 20% of Slender’s horror design is worth exploring. I think the genius of this game is that you are not allowed to look at the Slender Man. Because looking at him leads to death, you are forced to turn and run blind. This allows the developers to obscure his movement rules; you never see him walking or running, so you don’t know how quickly he moves. You don’t know how close he is to you. And you can’t turn around and check. I know he’s here but I don’t know here.

This obfuscation of the antagonist makes it very hard to treat Slender like a system. It’s hard to see through the fiction and divine the underlying game play rules, which is what you unconsciously do with most games. Actually, most other games want you to see the ruleset underlying the fiction. That’s considered clarity of design. The enemies in Metal Gear Solid always follow a predictable path so that you can anticipate their movements and sneak by them–so that you can treat the simulation like a video game. But Slender doesn’t let you get away with that so easily. It keeps its rules close to its chest. It’s not even clear what the failure condition is, or whether certain movement strategies can help you evade the Slender Man. By hiding the core rule set and giving you almost no visual information about the behavior of the game, Slender robs you of the comfort that predictability brings. It forces you to think on your feet, to accept the narrative rather than focus on the mechanic.

Siren does this too, on a much larger scale. And it’s really damn scary. Amnesia does this a bit too–you can’t look at the monsters and it’s never clear if your hiding spot is really good enough or not until it’s too late. This increases the difficulty, and possibly the level of frustration that the player experiences because it can feel arbitrary. What’s the point of playing if you can just randomly die at any time? Only, it’s not random. The narrative has told you that it’s not random. And that’s why you’ll try it again, not because you sussed the mechanical trick required to win, but because you have been enticed to continue by the narrative. The narrative, thin as it is, is now in control.

It’s simple, but pretty brilliant. You should definitely check it out.

Silent Hill Downpour

What separates a good game from a poor one?

Of course, games plagued by software bugs are generally considered poor. I recently reviewed Amy, a throughly broken horror game, and its problems are quite clear. But what about games that do not have obvious glitches? The type of game that you dislike even though there’s no one thing that really turns you off. What about games that are universally panned and yet the critics cannot agree on which problems are the most egregious?

Silent Hill Downpour is one of these hard-to-pin-down games. On the one hand, it’s been built out of component pieces from previous Silent Hill games. The combat system resembles Silent Hill 4, the weapons break like in 0rigins, the camera and movement are based on Homecoming, the otherworld draws heavily from Shattered Memories. There’s a dead dog scene a’la Silent Hill 3, a character with a problematic past a’la every game since Silent Hill 2, and even a reasonably interesting Pyramid Head knockoff called The Boogyman. Sometimes, especially in the early part of the game, I wondered if the developers simply included some of these bits to appeal to people like me who’ve played the entire series.

On the other hand, Downpour sets out to be a game fundamentally unlike every other Silent Hill game to date. Its design is based on a basic premise that is a radical departure from previous games, and its effect changes many of the core gameplay systems dramatically.

I’ve written a review of Downpour that is really an exploration of this basic design deviation and why I think it almost ruins the game. This is one of the longest articles I’ve written for a single game, and it took me a long time to sort my thoughts out. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Amy

I completed Amy this evening and wrote a short review. It’s short because there’s not much to say about Amy. I’m a pretty talkative guy and beyond the few paragraphs linked to here, I have nothing of value to contribute about this game.

(It’s really bad)

Slash and Burn

I have written before about how product marketing for video games and everything else appears to be driven by enormous, autonomous, self-propelling machines. Huge apparatuses, employing hundreds of people, designed to pounce on any work that catches the fancy of the public, capitalize upon it, and keep it at the forefront of public consciousness until it has been stripped of all value. Marketing behemoths, like the industrial washing machines in The Mangler, sucking in creative work and spitting out all manner of spin-offs, advertising, and cheap plastic toys. They perpetuate a property (not just a work–it’s now a brand) long after it should have been put to rest, forcing it to stand up and perform tricks until its skin sallows and its teeth fall out and it becomes disgusting.

Sometimes this iron lung works for a while. Perhaps the original creators use the opportunity to continue to create interesting work. Perhaps they leverage their new-found fame and resources to make something more interesting than before. Perhaps they’ve had plans for a series of works all along. Perhaps they were smart enough to negotiate for creative control of their art. But very often the work was never intended for serialization (we need look no farther than the sequels to The Matrix to see this phenomenon). The concept cannot survive significant extension without change, and change is exactly what the marketing machine does not want. In the mind of that metallic beast, the magic formula’s already been found; now they just need more of it so the promotion engine can be perpetuated. Even if the original authors quit the project, the marketing machine must continue. At some point, the marketing, promotion, t-shirts and keychains have become more important than the work that originally spawned them. As far as the marketing Neubaufahrzeug is concerned, any extension of the content is acceptable. In fact, if the original authors have left, they might as well make the new content themselves. And that’s when things start to get weird.

After my daughter was born I became aware of a rather sickening trend in the world of children’s books. Many authors of famous children’s characters (think Curious George) are no longer alive, but their books remain in high demand. In order to fill that demand, the marketing apparatuses attached to each character have spun their wheels, exhausted some steam, and produced new books by cutting and pasting pictures from other books and then making up some story to go with it. In some cases they’ve even hired artists to draw in the original author’s style. H.A. Ray wrote about seven Curious George books. He died in 1977. But Amazon has 109 Curious George books for sale, most of which have a publication date of 2008 or later.

Coming Soon: Curious George Calculates
His Tax Withholding

The titles cleverly proclaim that this is “H.A. Ray’s Curious George,” with no other author name in sight, but are careful to avoid actually attributing the work to Ray, since he is long dead. Predictably enough, these modern Curious George books are terrible; they are nonsensical and condescending to their audience. I mean, if you had any talent at writing children’s books, would you take a job ghost writing Curious George Saves His Pennies?

The faux children’s books are pretty bad, but occasionally the marketing machine gets so excited about something that their behavior becomes almost incomprehensible. Readers older than 30 will probably remember the absolute mania that gripped the country when the first Batman movie was released in 1989. There was a Bat-symbol in every storefront, a guy in the full movie getup peddling Bat-keychains on every corner. Stores unaffiliated with Warner Bros. made up their own unauthorized marketing materials just to get in on the action; I remember seeing a used clothing store that featured hand-painted Joker coat hangers in its window. America drowned in Batman merchandizing that summer long before the film was even released. In the end, the merchandizing pulled in almost twice as much as the movie’s box office sales. The guys who drove that particular marketing behemoth were probably high-fiving each other for years afterwards.

Something similar was afoot in Japan this spring. There’s a new movie in the Ring series, and to say that its marketing is aggressive is quite the understatement. Sadako 3D, as the film is titled, is a continuation of the Ring series. This time the curse infects people through an internet live stream, conveniently hosted (and prominently referenced throughout the trailer) by Nico-Nico Douga, a real social video site. Though ostensibly based on a novel by Koji Suzuki, it’s clear that this film exists because some slumbering marketing device woke up suddenly and saw an opportunity to wring more money from the series. Like Batman, Sadako is a character that is a part of the public consciousness. The target audience, as far as I can tell, is high school and college students; people who were probably too young to see the Ring when it was first released in 1998 but are nonetheless aware of the character. Who is Sadako? She’s a monster with long hair and she comes out of your TV. This is common knowledge.

In in attempt to exploit this knowledge the marketing machine behind Sadako 3D has apparently decided that they should remind the citizens of Japan of Sadako’s character with a coordinated media blitz. Only, we’re not just talking guys in Bat-suits selling keitai straps on the corner. We’re talking an army of people dressed as Sadako (complete with a TV on their chests for her to come out of) terrorizing Shibuya on the last day of a national holiday week. A giant Sadako is driving around on the back of a flatbed truck. Sadako apparently joined a boy band and attended the first screening of her new movie. Sadako has a tie-in with Hello Kitty. Sadako has even been recruited to throw the opening pitch at several baseball games. Though the movie appears to be serious, the film is being promoted as a parody of itself; Sadako has come an ironic symbol of a (slightly) older generation.

I bought a Sadako 3D mug. I had to have it. A parody of a parody, if you will. It’s a mug with a dark blue box on it and the words “404 File Not Found” printed near the top. When you put hot liquid in it, the blue vanishes to reveal an advertisement for Sadako 3D underneath. I drink my coffee from it every day to remind myself that the logical extreme for marketing isn’t logical at all–it’s absolute lunacy. We are watching a marketing behemoth systematically drive an already lifeless work (thanks to the original series of terrible sequels that came out years ago) further and further into the ground. It’s so far gone already that the only way they can continue to extract money from it is to turn the husk of the original story into a joke. Who knows if the movie or the novel it’s based on are any good; the effect of the marketing machine’s blitzkrieg is the total devaluation of The Ring as a series.

Hideo Nakata’s 1998 film set itself apart by rejecting the tropes that marketing machines drove to the forefront of horror in the 1980s and 1990s. It had no blood, no nudity, and no violence. There were no teenagers, no shower scenes, no stalkers, and no metal music. It was surprising and effective because it was simple and focused. It was the antithesis of the contemporary horror film mold at the time, a disruptive force that raised the quality bar for horror films around the world for several years. Now, thanks to relentless efforts to squeeze as much blood from this particular stone as possible, The Ring property has become everything it originally was not.

If we look to Batman as an indictor, increasingly terrible Sadako films will probably continue to be made as long as they can pull in a profit. Only when the franchise has been completely exhausted will it be allowed to rest in piece at the bottom of a well. That is, of course, until the inevitable reboot.