The Philosophy of Horror

I’ve recently begun Noel Carroll‘s A Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, and though I’ve only just scratched the surface of the content I am already quite engrossed. Carroll’s intent is to take the horror genre, as defined by film and literature and other media, and put an academic lens to it; to cut the genre open and see how it works on the inside. Sounds familiar, right?

Carroll defines the emotion we get when we watch a scary film as “art-horror,” distinct from “horror” in that we know it to be fiction (watching Halloween doesn’t give you the same feeling as reading about Nazi concentration camps–that’s real horror). Art-horror is an emotion that rests on the line between fear and disgust. It is similar to suspense in that, when watching horror, the audience is intended to feel the same emotions as the protagonist. Carroll provides the following summary of his definition of art-horror:

I am occurrently art-horrified by some monster X, say Dracula, if and only if

  1. I am in some state of abnormal physically felt agitation (shuddering, tingling, screaming, etc.) which
  2. has been caused by
    1. the thought: that Dracula is a possible being; and by the evaluative thoughts: that
    2. said Dracula has the property of being physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening in the ways portrayed in the fiction and that
    3. said Dracula has the property of being impure, where
  3. such thoughts are usually accompanied by the desire to avoid the touch of things like Dracula.

The thing about the book is that, so far, it’s been incredibly validating. Carroll, writing in 1990, has arrived at many of the same conclusions that I have over the years. I saw applications of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion to horror; Carroll provides a similar definition of emotion that requires both physical agitation and cognitive context. For years I had trouble defining horror from, say, mystery and suspense, and thus fell back on a requirement that games contain “supernatural elements,” much to the dismay of many Dino Crisis fans. On this subject, Carroll writes,

Moreover, in order to forestall charges of circularity, let me note that, for our purposes, “monster” refers to any being not believed to exist now according to contemporary science. Thus, dinosaurs and nonhuman visitors from another galaxy are monsters under this stipulation though the former once existed and the latter might exist. Whether they are monsters who are also horrifying in the context of a particular fiction depends upon whether they meet the conditions of the analysis above.

I’ve even used this site to discuss horror as a “thematic” genre, that is, one that is defined by its themes rather than its game play or narrative context. When the “supernatural elements” definition proved too thin, I fell back on defining games for this quest by the “intent to scare.” Carroll writes,

[I]t should not be assumed that all genres can be analyzed in the same way. Westerns, for example, are identified primarily by virtue of their setting. Novels, films, plays, paintings, and other works, that are grouped under the label “horror” are identified according to a different set of criteria. … The cross-art, cross-media genre of horror takes its title from the emotion it characteristically or rather ideally promotes; this emotion constitutes the identifying mark of horror.

Carroll also raises a number of points that I’ve never considered that seem quite relevant to the study of horror games. For example, he separates horror monsters from other stories in which monsters appear (e.g. fairy tales) by requiring that the monsters be unnatural to the characters. In horror, the “monster is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world, whereas in fairy tales and the like the monster is an ordinary character in an extraordinary world.” Carroll’s correlation between horror and monsters (he refers to scary works absent monsters, like Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, as promoting “terror” rather than “horror”) is also interesting, as is his requirement that the monsters of art-horror appear revolting and unclean. There are some areas in this definition that I wonder about (how do ghost stories fit these requirements?), but since I’ve only just begun the book I’ll wait for Carroll to complete his argument before commenting.

Carroll also presents a characteristic of art-horror that might be a way out of the inane debate about “survival horror” vs “action horror.” He notes that, in works of art-horror, the feelings of the principal characters are intended to mirror the feelings of the audience. “[H]orror appears to be one of those genres in which the emotive responses of the audience, ideally, run parallel to the emotions of the characters.” If that’s the case (and it seems reasonable enough), we can easily differentiate between, say, Siren, in which the characters cower in fear of the antagonists, and, for example, Resident Evil 5, in which the protagonists pop a cap in anything that moves. It also explains why that moment in Dead Space 2 when Isaac must return to the Ishimura and we can hear the fear in his voice is one of the most effective moments in that game.

Though A Philosophy of Horror is formal, it is not heavy-handed or overwritten the way that many academic texts are. I have only just begun to delve into the text, but I’m really enjoying it so far.

The Lone Survivor of a Bygone Era

Once upon a time, not too long ago really, the horror genre experienced something of a golden age. This is the period, beginning in 1996 with Resident Evil, in which many fan favorites of the genre shipped. Silent Hill 1 and 2, the first two Fatal Frame games, not to mention Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica. We can think of these as the offspring of the original Resident Evil, as many of the conventions used that game defined the genre for several years afterwards. These games tended to deposit the player into sealed-off areas that slowly opened up into a larger maze as doors were unlocked recursively. They relied on save points, employed lots of items and inventory management, and deemphasized combat with underpowered protagonists. The golden age horror games blended item and traversal puzzles with documents and cut scenes to create slow-paced, methodical, narrative-rich experiences. The games of this period are what many associate with the term “survival horror.”

But then, sometime around 2004, the tide changed. The golden age model had been done to death, and developers were starting to change their approach. Games like The Suffering and Condemned were a direct reaction to plodding, repetitive nature of Resident Evil. Silent Hill 4 broke almost all of the conventions of the series. Perhaps most significantly, Resident Evil 4 discarded most of the mechanics for which it was known and became something almost entirely different. Within the span of a few years, the golden age model for games had almost entirely fallen away. The new breed was more linear, more action-heavy, and more mainstream. Horror games today are still part of the post-Resident Evil era; games like Dead Space, The Darkness, and even Alan Wake bear little resemblance to the titles that made the genre popular at the end of the previous century.

It’s been seven years since Resident Evil 4 was released, and though the horror genre has branched out into many interesting directions, the post-Resident Evil era is starting to feel stale. I think the dramatic success of games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Dear Esther suggest that gamers are ready to play something that isn’t strictly linear and doesn’t involve shooting zombies in the face fifteen times per minute. Perhaps they are even ready for games that unfold at a slower pace, games that rely more heavily on narrative than on game mechanics to make their mark. Games that, dare I suggest it, have more in common with golden era horror games than with the contemporary stars of the genre?

It is within this historical context that Lone Survivor is best understood. Created entirely by indie developer Jasper Byrne, Lone Survivor is a game that knows its roots and wears its influences on its sleeve. A 2D side-scrolling adventure game with retro pixel art, Lone Survivor looks like something that might have run on the SNES but it plays like a golden age horror game. In fact, it plays better than games from that era because it avoids design mistakes that were common back then. Like Cave Story, it’s a Rosy Spectacles retro game: it plays the way we remember old games playing, not the way they really played. Though it may look retro, Lone Survivor has managed to salvage the core elements that made the golden age great and insert them into its throughly modern shell.

Lone Survivor is ostensibly about the last person alive after some catastrophic event. Holed up in an apartment, the anonymous protagonist ventures out only to collect supplies. Between starvation, exhaustion, and the malicious flesh monsters that roam the halls outside his room, his life is defined by what he can find to eat and how long he can go without sleep. The game begins with his decision to try to exit the apartment he’s in once and for all, which is a much more harrowing endeavor that it might sound. Unless, that is, there’s something else going on. Perhaps it’s all in his head?

As the modern incarnation of a golden age horror game, Lone Survivor takes its cues from many games. It’s primary influence, though, is clearly Silent Hill 2. The whole game, from the ambience to the ambiguous state of the world to the protagonist’s own potential culpability in that state, exudes the Silent Hill 2 vibe. The level design involves slowly opening up the map and then eventually descending deeper and deeper until we arrive at a very dark place, underground, mostly defenseless, with only the dim beam of a flashlight to guide us. The game even sounds like Silent Hill–the chord played when an item is collected is extremely similar to classic Silent Hill UI “accept” sounds. While playing the game I had a mental list of Silent Hill 2 references or influences going, but there are so many that I quickly lost track. Suffice it to say that Lone Survivor is covered with Silent Hill 2’s fingerprints.

And perhaps that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as Byrne’s earlier work includes a retro “demake” of Silent Hill 2 called Soundless Mountain II. But make no mistake: Lone Survivor may have drawn heavily from the lessons of Team Silent’s second game, but it is in no way a knock-off. There are bits of the game that reach back further in time; Lone Survivor’s approach to item management and puzzles, for example, has more in common with adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island than any later horror game. Between the drug references and crazy dream sequences, there’s more than a little Twin Peaks in there as well. It’s a horror gamer’s game, through and through, with the best parts of a decade of scary titles deftly stitched together into a compact and efficient package.

I’m a big fan of the game mechanics and level design in this game, but the sound and music deserve special mention. Byrne’s musical talents are formidable, and he uses music and sound with dramatic results in Lone Survivor. Perhaps it is the soundtrack of the game that most resembles the Silent Hill experience. It alternates from quiet and foreboding to thunderous and metallic, setting the mode for each scene and turning the tension up at regular intervals. The whole project is quite impressive, especially from a single creator, but I was particularly taken with the sound and music.

Lone Survivor is $10 and you can buy it online. At a time when high-end AAA horror games are beginning to feel a little played out, this small indie game shows us that the golden age of horror game still has precious metals to be mined. Despite its retro look and affinity for game play that some might label passé, to me it was like a breath of fresh air: smart, interesting, short, and really fun. Just what the doctor ordered.

I suck at PC games

I am terrible at PC games. I don’t know why this is–I cut my teeth playing games on computers and didn’t really pick up a controller until I bought myself a Playstation 1 in 1996. It’s not that I lack proficiency with the games themselves, it’s that I can never finish anything. If you’re wondering why I haven’t written much about the Penumbra series, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or The Path, it’s because I haven’t finished them and I don’t like to write about games I haven’t finished. I really enjoyed all of those games, and in the case of The Path I actually was almost finished with the game when I decided to start it over again. I just restarted my Amnesia game a few weeks back because my understanding of this genre is woefully incomplete without it.

It doesn’t help that I’m playing on a laptop and most of these games are meant to be played on desks with mice. But that’s hardly an excuse. The real problem is that my computer does so many other things that I become distracted between play sessions and forget to come back to the game. I also do not use Windows, which limits my access to some games (most recently Dear Esther).

Last week my second child was born (hooray!) and I’ve found myself up at strange hours of the night, alone, without much to do. So I’ve been putting some time into Jasper Byrne’s Lone Survivor, which is a 2D, retro-art game that feels more like Silent Hill 2 than just about anything I’ve played. It’s fantastic, and I recommend it wholeheartedly, and I will write about it when I finish it.

I promise.

End Night

A couple of posts back I mentioned End Night, the new horror game for iPad. The game is out today and you can pick it up for $2.99. There’s also a pretty cool trailer if you want to get an idea of what its like.

The setup is that some sort of zombie plague has overrun the town and you, the only apparent survivor, are working on a vaccine. Your house has been converted to a lab where you can process samples collected around town to make experimental serums. Most of the game, then, is venturing out of your compound and into the infected town to collect more samples. The game is rendered in nice 3D from a top-down, 3/4 overhead perspective, which looks great but doesn’t allow you to see very far in any direction. You move your character with a virtual analog stick and fire with an auto-aiming fire button. There layout of the town is always the same but the location of samples and other items is randomized, so each play through is a little bit different.

Once you set foot outside of your house the zombies (or whatever they are–the game doesn’t spend much time on exposition) will attack from all directions. They sprint at you like the Crimson Heads in the Resident Evil GameCube remake, and since they can run faster than you can, shooting them is pretty much the only option. You make your way to a place where you can find another sample, usually a house or store or something like that, then quickly search it for items and collect the sample while keeping the never-ending waves of zombies at bay. Once the sample is collected you can run back to your house to process it into a serum. Some serums require multiple samples before you can test them out.

End Night is very clearly an attempt to take a classic horror game and repackage it in a way that makes it appropriate for a mobile device like an iPad. In my previous post I lumped it in with casual games because it’s designed to be accessible, but don’t take that to mean that the game is simple or easy. The controls are simple and the goal is straightforward, but there is tons of stuff going on in End Night.

First of all, there are a whole lot of stats to manage: your character has armor and health, he can get tired, if he has open wounds they can become infected (and must be cleaned off), he sometimes feels remorse for his actions, and of course he has to manage limited ammo and health availability. Almost all of these stats boil down to “find an specific object in the world and use it,” but it’s still a much more complicated setup than you might expect to see on this platform. It sort of reminds me of the crazy stat dependency system in Illbleed, though End Night is a better game. Some of the mechanics, such as washing infected blood off, are quite clever.

End Night also shows its influences when it comes to the actual combat. Guns auto-aim but may take several shots to bring an enemy down. Health and ammo are few and far between, and producing serums requires that you collect extra vials, which are also spread out over the map. The only melee weapon is an axe, and it’s been designed to be hard to use. Clearly, End Night wants combat to be hard and risky; the game is designed to make the player want to avoid combat by whatever means necessary. More than anything else, this gives the game a bit of an old-school horror vibe.

But what’s most interesting to me is the way that the old school formula is mixed with decidedly new school mechanics. This is an iPad game, and it’s been designed with mobile platforms in mind. To that end, the entire game takes place (as far as I can tell) in a single area; you play the same patch of town over and over again. When you die you must start all over, but each restart gives you the chance to power up your character a little bit more. This keeps the game interesting even when the mechanics start to wear thin; even a failed run has value because any points you collected can be fed back into the power up system. It also helps that the placement of items on the map is randomized with each restart.

End Night may be a new school horror game, but it’s one that knows its roots. Part of what made older horror games work was intense difficulty, which End Night also has in spades. The game is tough–each time you venture out of doors it’s likely that you will not survive to return. Part of the difficulty comes from the severe lack of ammo and health, but some of it is also a product of the control scheme. The virtual analog stick provides tight control but my thumb kept slipping off of it. After a while the friction on my fingers started to make them hurt. The shoot button is much better, though sometimes I had trouble picking up items that are scattered about.

I have some other miscellaneous nit picks with the title. The play sessions can get pretty long for a mobile game. Powering up is pretty easy (my character is almost completely powered up after four or five runs) but doesn’t seem to change much. There’s a little too much going on with all the various stat management. Running out of ammo equates to instant death. The game is super dark and can’t be played in any sort of direct light. Minor stuff.

Finally, End Night sports some interesting visual storytelling. There’s almost no setup to the game itself, but as you play things begin to subtly change. After collecting the third vial you start to notice messages, apparently left by the zombies, that casts doubt over your actions. I wasn’t able to get far enough in the game to see where the story goes (like I said, it’s hard), but the technique is simple and it seems quite effective.

End Night is not a traditional horror game, but it’s clearly an attempt at adapting traditional horror mechanics to a casual mobile device. There are very few horror games for mobile platforms at the moment (Aftermath and Dark Meadow are as close as it gets), and none of them have the horror pedigree of End Night. The gameplay is very simple, the mechanics are detailed, the challenge is high, and though there are a few rough spots I think it’s pretty fun.

Mapping Horror Games

One of the things that running this site has taught me is that people absolutely love to argue about categorization, especially on the internet. So often the discussion centers around whether a particular game should be sorted into this bucket or that, and the definition of the buckets themselves is often the source of intense debate. What bugs me most about this entire topic is that while we’re so busy arguing about categorization, we rarely spend any time talking about the games themselves.

Which games do you like? Why do you like them? Have you really thought about what it is exactly that you enjoyed? It’s not always easy to identify the aspects of a game that really hook us; sometimes we don’t realize how much we enjoyed something until it turns up absent. Furthermore, personal preference is entirely that: inherently subjective and individual. It’s a lot easier to apply a label to a game, or an entire genre of games, and then just decide that everything under that banner is ok with you. And while that approach might help you make a purchasing decision, it doesn’t really tell us much about the games. It’s not a high resolution way to determine why some games work and some do not.

So here’s an experiment. I’m going to try to identify gross traits of a bunch of horror games absent any concept of “genre.” I don’t care if these games are “survival horror” or “action horror” or “psychological horror” or “curse horror” or “naked cartwheel horror,”–those are just labels. I’d rather understand how these games work, or how the game industry that produces them works. I’ve argued on this site that difficulty is one of the core traits of many successful horror games. I’ve also argued that games can generally be described as “mechanical” or “cognitive”: most of the challenge is either in doing things, or thinking about what to do next. I’m going to use these two ideas to try to find relationships between games a different way.

So, without further ado, I present a horror game map:

I’ve plotted a bunch of horror games upon an axis based on my personal feelings about them. I just got done complaining about the subjectivity of personal preferences and the futility of debating labels online, so please, let’s not debate the placement of individual games. If you don’t agree, make your own map! It might teach you something about what you like. Anyway, for the sake of discussion, let’s take a look at where these games fall out without worrying too much about accuracy. Oh yeah, and this is hardly an exhaustive list, either, so don’t even think of complaining about that.

OK, so let’s get down to business. There are two axes, Easy to Hard and Thinking to Doing. Games that are easy are, well, easy (we can assume we’re always talking about “normal” game modes). Hard games are hard. Games closer to the Thinking extreme are about the challenge of deciding how to proceed rather than actually performing the actions required to do it. “Doing” games place emphasis on performing the actions required to progress. Since the axes are orthogonal we can express each game in terms of both its challenge format and the degree of challenge. Dead Space is a fairly challenging game that’s all about its mechanics–there’s not a lot of thought required. D, on the other hand, is very easy and is almost entirely a puzzle game; performing actions is simple, but the challenge comes from deciding which actions to perform. The center of the plot is the “average” point–the point at which games are equally balanced in terms of thinking vs doing and are of absolute median difficulty.

OK, great, we can plot these games on a graph. Hooray. But what does this tell us about the games themselves? To tell you the truth, not much. We can infer that certain games are similar to other games by their grouping (the games near the lower-right of the graph are what people usually refer to when they say “action horror”), but on its own this mapping isn’t very useful. It gets a lot more interesting when we apply color.

By Development Country By Release Date By Critical Reception

These are sort of ad-hoc heat maps. By coloring regions around each game we can more easily see trends and groupings.

The first image here is colored by the country of the game’s developer. We can see that the Thinking/Easy quadrant, which is home to Silent Hill and many other story-driven horror games, is dominated by Japanese developers. The Doing/Hard quadrant is almost entirely Western developers. We can also see that there are lots of Western games around the center, whereas the Japanese games tend to reach all the way to the extremes.

The middle map is about release date. This one is interesting because so much of it is the same color: the majority of games on this plot shipped between 2001 and 2005. It’s also interesting to see the big yellow splotch in the middle that extends a little bit into Thinking/Hard. That suggests that there have been more action-light horror games recently than we sometimes remember. With the exception of Ju-on: The Grudge way over there on the left and Catherine way on the right, it also suggests that newer games are generally a little bit harder than games used to be.

The last plot is colored by critical reception. It clearly shows that Easy/Doing games score poorly almost across the board, which makes sense when you think about it: if there’s no thinking involved and the actions to perform are super easy, why play? Easy/Thinking does a lot better, perhaps because a good story is enough to carry a relatively easy game (see my previous posts about “interestingness”). The Hard side of the graph scores better almost across the board, though it looks like games that are hard but do not clearly choose between Thinking or Doing get rated lower. That might be because balancing the two is difficult, or it might be that people generally want one or the other and are unhappy with a mix, especially when there’s a little challenge involved.

I think these maps are most interesting when taken together. By looking at the three plots above, we can pretty clearly see a shift in the development of horror games over the last decade. Prior to 2005, Japan ruled the horror space. Its games tended to be mechanically simple with a focus on puzzles and story, and it produced a lot of critically acclaimed games. After 2005 power shifted to Western developers, who tend to make harder games and tend to focus much more strongly on mechanics. There are several well-received games produced by the West after 2005, but a bunch of mediocre ones too–games that didn’t go far enough in any one direction to leave a lasting impression.

Why the shift? My guess is that 2005 was the turning point because it was the year that the Xbox 360 was released. The cost of development went way up and niche genres (e.g. Thinking/Easy) were dropped in favor of mass market genres (apparently Doing/Hard). The Wii is home to a couple of exceptions to this trend (e.g. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories), but the Xbox 360 and PS3 titles are almost exclusively “doing” games that are hard. You can see why Capcom has done what it has done to the Resident Evil series; years ago they saw where the train was headed and decided to hop on. The Silent Hill series has been more experimental, touching three different quadrants over the years, perhaps as a result of the sequels being developed by different teams.

So which games do you like? I’m a fan of Thinking games, generally, and I like stuff on both the Easy and Hard sides. I can enjoy Doing games too, but they have to be really good; my problem with Dead Space and F.E.A.R. was that the Doing is fun but sort of purposeless–there isn’t enough Thinking to give me reason to progress. Resident Evil 4 is only slightly higher on the Thinking axis but it has so much variety that I was never bored. Alan Wake got caught in the middle–there was a lot to think about but the information was ultimately inconsequential, and the actual game mechanics were a little too simple for the format. I also found out that I generally enjoy Japanese games more than Western ones, at least in this genre.

To reiterate, this is entirely subjective and these plots (and my conclusions) are not intended to represent some immutable truth. This exercise is a way to force us to look at these games a different way, to think about what we like and what we do not like. It’s designed to avoid the categorization trap, and to expose groupings of games that we might not have noticed otherwise. The experiment can be further improved by finding more ways to plot these games (different axes?) and more ways to group them. The goal is not to define what these games are, but to discover why we feel the way we feel about them, and to expose overall trends. Hopefully that will inspire a discussion more interesting than simple genre assignment.

The Rise of Casual Horror

Scenes from Juon, Night of Sacrifice, Nanashi No Geemu, and Calling. Can you tell which is which? Click for bigger version.

A while back I wrote about a Wii horror game called Juon: The Grudge, based on the film of the same name. In that article I focused on how Juon seems to be a great translation of a teen horror flick to game form, and that it is interesting because it appears to be targeted at women and played with friends. One of the other aspects that I glossed over was the fact that Juon is incredibly easy to play: it’s designed so that people who have no game skills whatsoever can still appreciate it.

Last week I finished イケニエノヨル (Ikenie No Yoru, “Night of Sacrifice”), a horror game notable for its use of the Wii Balance Board. I wrote a review, which you should check out, because I actually enjoyed the game quite a bit. It wasn’t until I finished that game that it hit me: Night of Sacrifice and Juon are part of a larger movement of casual horror games.

In fact, there are several other games that fit this description on the market already. And thinking about it, they are all very similar games. In addition to Juon and Night of Sacrifice, consider Calling and Nanashi No Geemu. All four of these games are first person exploratory horror games with no combat whatsoever. They feature only the most basic of puzzles, all shipped exclusively for Nintendo platforms, and all use a pointer and a single button to move and play (in Nanashi No Geemu’s case, the pointer is the DS stylus; all the others use the Wiimote). They are short, easy, and even feature similar-looking enemies. All four of these games shipped close enough to each other that they are probably not ripping each other off–it’s more likely that different developers are operating independently to target the same audience. Perhaps an art movement rather than a sub genre. These games are casual horror games: horror games intended to be enjoyed by people who don’t necessarily have a lot of gaming skills.

There have been other non-combat, first person explorer horror games before these, of course (think Echo Night: Beyond and Hell Night), but those games are not as simple or straightforward as the more recent games above. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an interesting edge case; like the games above, it has few mechanics and is mostly concerned with exploration. But it doesn’t feel like a casual game; it’s full of puzzles and mechanics that rely on a certain level of game experience on the part of the player. It’s a simple game to control, but it’s not a simple game.

Juon and the rest, however, are about as simple as can be. Yet, they can still be pretty scary; even with all of the complicated stuff removed, each of these games is able to put even a veteran player like myself under pressure. They must be absolutely terrifying for neophytes.

I think there is potential for this style of casual horror game to become a third “branch” of the horror tree, the other two being Adventure-style horror games and Action-style horror games (see the previous post, and probably the next one, for lots of discussion about that particular division). Casual horror games haven’t caught on yet, at least not outside of Japan, but I think they have huge potential. Horror is a mass market genre–it appeals to people of all sorts, which is why Hollywood insists on producing horror films ad nauseum. Horror games, too, have a wide, diverse audience. Anecdotal evidence suggests, for example, that the readership for this site is pretty evenly split between men in women; in fact, there may be more women reading this than men. Though horror games have wide appeal, thus far they’ve only been targeted at a small subset of the population: gamers. But the introduction of casual horror games suggests that the genre can be brought to a much wider audience.

The mass market isn’t going to play these things on Wii or DS, though. They are going to play them on their phone or tablet. iOS and Android are probably the grounds upon which the casual horror audience will be won. Consider Dark Meadow, an atmospheric RPG that, while not quite a horror game, certainly takes many cues from the genre. Or the Mystique series of first-person horror escape games. These games are scratching at the surface of horror on mobile devices, but they are all well received and, like Juon and the others on traditional consoles, might be the beginning of a real trend.

Last week I received a pre-release build of a game called End Night, which is scheduled to ship for iPad sometime in February. It’s an interesting mashup of traditional horror mechanics and tablet-centric pacing. The game is a single loop, played over and over, in which you try to guide your character from his safe house to more and more distant locations around town during a zombie invasion. Your mission is to collect samples from certain deceased persons and bring them back to your lab to produce a serum that just might cure the zombies. The moment-to-moment play is quite informed by traditional horror games: there are tons of stats to manage, health packs are few and far between, and ammunition is always scarce. Areas must be searched for items, wounds must be washed off to prevent infection, and car alarms may be sounded as a distraction. The game is also quite hard, and death sends you all the way back to the beginning. Mechanically, it’s very much a traditional horror game.

But End Night has been wrapped up in casual packaging. Each action in the game earns the player points, and points can be spent on upgrades after each death. So while you play the same (large) level over and over again, over time it gets easier as your character becomes more powerful. This short, engaging loop is what makes End Night throughly tablet-focused experience. The controls are pretty simple: just a virtual analog stick and a shoot button that auto-aims for you. The perspective is top down and the whole game is rendered in nice 3D. The game is complicated by tablet standards, but it’s dead simple compared to your average console horror game. It’s completely different from the Juon crowd, but its target audience is similar. I’ll write more about End Night when it comes out, but its existence alone is intriguing.

It is clear that many horror fans are less than thrilled by games like Resident Evil 5 because they miss the emphasis on narrative and slower pace employed by older games. These fans should be excited by games like Juon and End Night. They suggest that casual horror may become a bastion for “traditional” horror design, albeit structured in ways we might not normally associate with the genre. Tablets and phones may just be the market within which these games take hold.

Internet Chestnut #268: Survival Horror vs Action Horror

Today I received an e-mail from a guy named Ryan who, in the last 24 hours or so, has found himself at the center of a major internet debate about the classification of various horror games as either “survival horror” or “action horror.” The source of much internet angst is an collage Ryan assembled and posted on his blog. The image arranges games like Silent Hill, Resident Evil 1, Siren, and Amnesia on one side under the label “Survival Horror,” and places games like Dead Space, The Suffering, Dead Rising, F.E.A.R., and Resident Evil 4 on the opposite side under “Action Horror.” He posted it on Reddit (hey, remember Reddit?) and the comments section went crazy. A few hours later it showed up as an article on Kotaku (hey, remember Kotaku?), where the comments section also went crazy.

It is clear that Ryan has struck a nerve. His selections for the graphic have proved incredibly divisive; the Reddit story has a strong ranking of about 1000 votes, but that’s the result of 3000 up-ranks and 2000 down. Most of the comments there are about games he “missed,” or titles he incorrectly categorized. In his e-mail Ryan asked me to share some thoughts about it, so now I will, probably with about ten times the detail that Ryan was expecting. Seriously, he’s probably going to read this and think, “man, sorry I asked.” I’m not sorry, though, because his interesting graphic gets right to the heart of what this site is all about: understanding how horror games work at a fundamental level.

Vague Descriptors

I think that the argument surrounding Ryan’s graphic has a lot to do with the labels he’s chosen for his two columns: “survival horror” and “acton horror.” The definition of these terms is vague and imprecise, which is the root of many disagreements. For example, what does “survival horror” even mean? As a guy who runs a site with that term in the title, I can tell you from first-hand experience that it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some associate it exclusively with Resident Evil, since that game coined the term. Others take it literally and apply it only to games where the protagonist is struggling to survive (thus excluding games like Echo Night and Clock Tower: The First Fear because health and saves are not rationed). Some people associate survival horror only with fixed cameras, pre-rendered backgrounds, and tank controls. Still others use it to mean any game with horror themes.

“Action horror” is even worse, as the phrase doesn’t even invoke a particular game. It’s a phrase that is obviously meant to contrast Resident Evil’s “survival horror,” but Resident Evil has tons of action! Almost every game in the series ends with a monster taking a missile to the face and a helicopter speeding away from a giant explosion! It’s not like we’re talking about the difference between The Capital and a Chow Yun Fat movie–the supposed opposite of “action horror” is a game with a lot of action. It’s more like this category is designed to discuss action in minute degrees. In Japan they have a chili oil called (and I shit you not) “Spicy Looking But Not Actually That Spicy Well A Little Bit Spicy Chili Oil.”. I feel like the difference between “survival horror” and “action horror” is like, “Some Action But Not All That Much But Still Actually Quite A Bit Of Action Horror Game.”

What

This? Totally not action.

I’m saying is, these are lousy terms.

Parsing Horror Design

Still, even if the terms are vague, Ryan’s on to something. There’s clearly a major difference in approach between, say, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and F.E.A.R. 3, even though both are first person horror games. There might be others ways to parse these games in order to better understand why they are different. In fact, that’s what this site is all about.

Turns out, there are a whole lot of ways to skin the horror design cat. Let’s take a look at a couple.

One way is to consider the frailty of the protagonist. The games on the left side of Ryan’s chart tend to star characters that are not particularly powerful, while those on the right tend to feature unstoppable muscle-bound agents of death. It stands to reason that frail, vulnerable characters can be put in danger more easily, and thus give rise to game mechanics that are more often flight than fight. Back in 2005 I wrote an article about this very topic. The problem with this approach is that all effective horror games, be they action-heavy or not, need to be able to put the protagonist (or, rarely, other characters) in danger. Even if the protagonist is a killing machine. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space do it by having increasingly huge, bombastic enemies. Leon is plagued by the unstoppable Chainsaw Man because that’s what it takes to put a badass like Leon in danger. So while frailty of the protagonist is certainly an interesting trait, it exists in almost every horror game to some degree, and thus isn’t a good candidate for categorization.

Perhaps a better way to parse these games is the system I’ve suggested before: “challenge format.” The idea is that some games challenge you to figure out what the next appropriate action is, while other games challenge you to actually complete that action. David Cage calls this “Journey and Mechanics,” and I’ve called it “Cognitive vs Mechanical challenges.” Another way to put it might be “mostly involving the brain” or “mostly involving the thumbs.” Devil May Cry is all about your thumbs; there’s no puzzle solving or meaningful story involved, just room after room of punishing hack-and-slash. Silent Hill, on the other hand, has combat but never makes it difficult. The challenge is to find your way through the town, to understand what is happening to the characters in the story, and to solve little puzzles along the way; stuff that involves your brain more than your thumbs.

I like the challenge format categorization a lot, but it’s imperfect too. It’s very rare for a game to be entirely mechanical or entirely cognitive in its challenge format; almost all are a blend between the two. An extreme example is Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which swings wildly between the non-combat exploratory mode (cognitive) to the fast-paced, confusing running escape mode (mechanical). Resident Evil, too, has tons of puzzles and story for your brain to chew on but also features plenty of shooting and timing challenges. Fatal Frame’s combat mode is an entirely mechanical timing challenge, but the rest of the game is all cognitive stuff. The differences are only by degrees.

We might contort the challenge format idea into something about difficulty (e.g. the puzzle-heavy games tend to be harder to lose), but as one Redditor pointed out, many of these games have adjustable difficulty settings which dramatically change the game play. And yeah, we’ve talked about that here before too.

There’s a lot of meat here, and if you wanted to make a much more complicated graphic you could probably start to organize these games in terms of gradations of focus on different types of challenges. It would be some crazy graph and would probably blow your mind. Maybe there’s another angle we could use to approach this problem.

Brands of Horror

The one thing that ties all of these games together is that they fall into the thematic genre of horror. Now, genre in itself is neigh undefinable (quick, is Alien sci-fi or horror?), but let’s just assume we all agree that we’re talking about games that all wave the horror banner. It turns out that there are many different kinds of horror, both within games and in the media at large. Perhaps the real difference between Ryan’s two columns has less to do with interactivity and more to do with the type of fear that the games intend to create.

Resident Evil, for example, is about inducing stress by putting the player in an increasingly dire situation. The nonsensical backstory doesn’t matter much because our primary concern when playing that game is how to get from point A to point B without running out of ammo, using any health items, and not getting killed.

Siren is also about stress, but its brand of horror comes from uncertainty. You know that the shibito will kill you if they find you, and you know that a particularly nasty one with bleeding eyes and a scythe is about to pass by the closet in which you are hiding. Will he open it? Did he see you jump in there a minute ago? This helplessness in the face of impending death is where Siren gets its (considerable) scares.

Silent Hill, on the other hand, isn’t really about combat (fighting isn’t very hard), and there’s rarely any ambiguity about the simulation. Instead, it’s about the implications of the backstory that makes the game tick. The narrative drops just enough clues for your brain to turn the resort town and it’s hellish reflection into a seriously scary place. Often, Silent Hill doesn’t even have to show you anything; they just pitch you the ball and with a little bit of prodding and manipulation, you knock it out of the park on your own.

Horror format is a really interesting way to look at these games. Condemned is about high-stakes, visceral close-quarter combat and descent into increasingly claustrophobic areas. The Thing is about protection and trust of NPC characters (well, it tries anyway). Left 4 Dead is about overwhelming odds. Catherine is about personal failure destroying your life and the line between sex and fear. Fatal Frame is about high-stakes combat combined with classical horror cues about ghosts and curses. Nanashi no Geemu is about personally assaulting you, the player, through the DS. In fact, when looking for a game that might be like some other game that you enjoyed, looking at the horror format (instead of the game play) might be the right way to go.

On the other hand, as a genre classification “brand of horror” is probably too specific. Almost every game has its own unique brand of horror!

The Fallacy of Categorization

This brings me to the one last point to make on this topic before I leave it alone.

Arguing about the correct categorization is ultimately futile because any sort of interesting category is going to be subjective. Arguing about the labels for a category is even more useless because labels change in meaning and popularity over time. You’ve seen the graph describing how the genre called “doom clone” was replaced by “first person shooter”, right?

This reminds me of the time I experimented with a baiting article about the “horror-ness” of Resident Evil 4, and found that people pretty much took the bait across the board.

Instead of deciding which column to file games in, let’s talk about why they are different. Let’s come up with a system, not just a few key phrases, that can identify the common traits of these games objectively. A proper dissection of this fascinating genre requires more than a quick “YOU GOT STALKER WRONG” comment on Reddit; it requires that we actually play these games and understand how they work.

Horror games are a goldmine of interesting ideas. They are worthy of a deeper discussion.

Day of Scouring, Night of Sacrifice

This weekend I decided that I’d put it off for long enough: it was time to play イケニエノヨル (Ikenie no Yoru, Night of Sacrifice). You might have heard of this game; it made a bit of a stir when it came out in late 2010 because it uses the Wii Balance Board (!?) and had a pretty neat commercial of a pretty young lady having a complete meltdown while (supposedly) playing it (better video link). I bought the game last summer while visiting Japan, and had intended to play it right away–the inclusion of Wii Balance Board support had my curiosity piqued. But I got busy. I started a new company and made a video game and stuff. I bought a house. During the second half of 2011 I only played a couple of games.

So Saturday I decided that this weekend would be Night of Sacrifice Weekend. What better way to open the New Year than with an obscure Japanese horror game? I got the game out, unwrapped it, and put the disc in the Wii. I changed the batteries on the controller and installed a system update. All I needed was to get out my Wii Balance Board and the fun could begin. I hadn’t used it in a while, but I usually stash it in a shelf below my TV. I opened the shelf door.

No Balance Board.

I keep Guitar Hero controllers and a Dance Dance Revolution mat in another closet, so maybe I had left it there. I took a look.

No Balance Board.

Hmm, ok. Upstairs I have a box full of random controllers, including my Dreamcast keyboard, Seaman 2 PS2 controller (with mic), and DexDrive PS1 memory card reader. The Balance Board had to be there!

No Balance Board.

Now, I tend to pile papers and CDs and stuff wherever there is room, but when it comes to games I am more organized than a synchronized swim team. I’ve got all my games in one spot, sorted by multiple indexes (first by completion status, then by system, then by series and genre). My game systems are all carefully wired, stacked for optimal heat exchange, and split between multiple power supplies. I may not be able to remember what day of the week it is, but when it comes to my game stuff I am a flipping rocket scientist. Everything is stored in a specific place. Drives my wife crazy.

So the idea that the Wii Balance Board was missing was, to put it mildly, shocking and completely unacceptable. I spent a good part of Saturday ransacking my house looking for the damn thing. When I couldn’t find it in the obvious places, I started to look in spots where nobody in their right mind would store a game peripheral, like under my sink and above my refrigerator. Finally I had looked everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except for a pile of boxes marked “Baby Toys” in the garage.

Today, after six months of avoiding it, I cleaned out the garage. Exploded some old IKEA shelves, moved things around, compressed our stuff into a smaller amount of space. It’s good, the garage is nice and clean now, our stuff more accessible. But my real motive, of course, was to locate the Wii Balance Board. My wife finally found it this afternoon at the bottom of a box of baby clothing. Our theory is that the movers put it there when we moved last summer, and therefore we are blameless in its disappearance. The batteries had started to leak acid, and I am struggling to remember the last time I turned the thing on.

With the crisis over, I waited until my daughter was asleep to finally boot up Night of Sacrifice. I’ve only played for an hour or so, and I’ll post more impressions when I’ve sunk my teeth in a little further, but so far it’s awesome. The game mechanics are nothing special, just the same kind of first-person flashlight exploration and one-hit-kill ghosts that seems to be in vogue lately (Calling, Juon, and Nanashi No Geemu all share pretty much the same interface). But the use of the Balance Board completely changes the feeling of the game. You use the Balance Board to walk in the game: you walk in place and your character walks forward at the same rate (you can also play without the Board by hitting a button for each step).

I theorized that this might be an effective agent of horror because walking on it can get your heart rate up, and per the Two Factor Theory, elevated heart rates can make you more susceptible to fear. And it seems to work: the initial hour of Night of Sacrifice is much scarier than it really has any right to be.

The Balance Board also helps the game be scary for another reason: it links your movement directly to the movement of the character in the game. No longer do you just hold down a button or stick to “go forward,” now you’re actually controlling your speed by walking or running in place. It’s a much less precise form of input, but one that feels very natural and authentic. When you see a blueish ghost with black splotches for eyes coming for you, you slam your feet on that board like you’re trying to set a Wii Sports world record. Because movement is no longer a button, everything is more analog; it’s not clear how much speed is required to actually outrun the ghost. This ambiguity in the movement system is extremely tension inducing because the game is no longer simple enough to predict what will happen if you press the right buttons. You are robbed of the knowledge that the enemy can be outrun, and thus are never given a chance to relax.

This could all still go south, but for the moment, I’m pretty impressed. And as a plus, I got my Wii Balance Board back and totally cleaned up my garage. Thanks, Marvelous Entertainment!

From Russia With Love

On December 28th, 2011, somebody exploited a vulnerability in this site’s forum software (the popular phpBB system) to install a hacker control panel that gave them wide access to this server and its files. Actually, code was injected back in October, but the individual waited until the 28th to do anything with it. On the 28th, he (I’m guessing it was a he) used the code he had installed to do two things: he set up a malware redirect and inserted a front page for some Russian porn site (more likely another vector for malware, I suspect) in an obscure location. I am lucky that his actions were not destructive; he was careful not to make any visible changes to this site or any of the page content. Instead, the malware redirect only affected mobile browsers; if you visited this site on your iPhone or Android device at the end of last year, you might have been surprised to see a fake Opera update page that tried to force some Java code to download. The porn front page was also hidden (albeit poorly) so as not to attract attention by regular visitors.

I noticed the redirect while traveling in Japan. I reached out to my ISP, but like everybody else they were on vacation. Today they wrote back with some suggestions, and I’ve gone through and performed a little bit of investigation and cleanup. The malware is gone, the porn is gone, and the hole is closed. So far, nothing else seems damaged.

It is inaccurate to call the person (or persons; there are actually three separate IPs that accessed the inserted content over the last week) who installed rogue code “hackers.” Hackers are people who have skills, and use those skills to poke around systems, looking for ways in. Hackers may be malicious or benign, but they are defined by curiosity; they are a breed who figures things out on their own in situations where the interface is as obfuscated as possible. The folks who attacked this site are barely script kiddies. They are using software authored by somebody else (complete with Russian comments containing spelling errors), they know little about actual security (the control panel they installed was protected by a password: “root”), and their goals have nothing to do with exploration or curiosity; they are inserting code specifically for monetary gain. Malware runs botnets, botnets make money. These people might feel proud of themselves for exploiting a hole that somebody else found in a popular piece of software and then using it to install code that somebody else wrote, but there’s no glory in their work. They are just following directions written on some forum, without understanding what the steps mean. If real hackers are topographers, mapping territory that has never been mapped before, the guys who broke into this site are little more than assembly line workers, following the same instructions over and over by route. They could be replaced with a machine. In fact, they are quickly being replaced by machines. This is the extent of their skills.

I have removed the forum from this site. Over its 9 year history, this site has been hacked two times, both of which stem from vulnerabilities in the forum software. I’m good about keeping my software up-to-date, but phpBB and its ilk are simply too complicated to reliably secure. Maybe I will come up with a replacement; I have all of the forum posts backed up and might one day restore them. But for now, I’m sad to say that the forum has to come down. If script kiddies from Russia (who, by the way, left their ip addresses all over the place for me to find) can crack it, it’s too vulnerable to allow on the site. Perhaps we can set up a third-party solution, like a Google Group, or maybe a G+ page. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

This Time it’s Personal


This image turned out to be a hoax, but the fear was real

In March I was visiting Tokyo when Japan was rocked by a huge earthquake and tsunami. In fact, the earthquake itself caused relatively little damage; it was the resulting tsunami that claimed the lives of almost 20,000 people in Northern Japan. To my surprise the news didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the tsunami or its victims. Instead it focused on the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, which lost power due to the quake and experienced a meltdown. In fact, there was quite a bit of nuclear hysteria in the days and weeks that followed. People left Tokyo en masse, American and European news carried reports of threatening “nuclear clouds” that would purportedly carry radioactive death from the Daiichi plant across the Western world; the media followed the plant’s progress with rapt attention. Though the tsunami had wiped out entire towns and devastated Japan’s northern coast, it was the failure of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, to which no deaths were attributed, that caught the public’s attention. The abstract threat of radiation is apparently scarier than the actual destruction caused by a 15 foot wave.

I thought about that for a while. It’s sort of easy to write nuclear fears off as after-effects of the Cold War, a residual phobia rooted in an era in which the dangers of nuclear fallout were drilled into the national consciousness. The effects of radiation are certainly terrible; we know that many of those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not killed instantly but suffered prolonged, painful deaths. Even a small bit of radiation seems dangerous; after all, it causes cancer, and cancer is a horrible way to die. There have been other nuclear disasters; the Chernobyl explosion caused between 30,000 and 200,000 premature cancer deaths, depending on which report you believe. It’s easy to see why the threat of nuclear fallout, or perhaps contaminated food and water, might cause panic across the globe.

But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there’s another lesson about fear to be found in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake disaster. The way that the world glossed over the plight of the tsunami survivors (and the thousands of casualties) to focus on the reactor in Fukushmia isn’t just about nuclear hysteria. It’s the nature of the radioactive threat, something about the idea of an invisible cloud of death spewing from a burning reactor and wiping out everything in its path like some sort of contemporary Black Plague. Whether you lived in Tokyo or San Francisco this summer, the news on your TV screen was suggesting that you yourself might be in danger. Not somebody else in some other town or state or country, but you, the person sitting there in your house right now, might die because of events that took place in some far-off place. The people killed in the tsunami were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the scary part about some sort of airborne radioactive material is that nowhere is safe, not even your own neighborhood. It’s an intensely personal threat, and I think it causes a very personal form of fear.

In Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Robert B. Cialdini et al describe the concept of “social proof,” the idea that people tend to believe that a popular choice is a correct choice. If you can convince a person that people they associate themselves with act a certain way, they too will tend to act that way. To show how powerful the social proof can be, the authors ran an experiment involving the wording of a small sign placed in bathrooms throughout a hotel. The sign originally implored guests to reuse their towels to reduce water consumption in the name of saving Planet Earth. Cialdini changed the wording to suggest that most people who stayed in the room had decided to conserve energy by reusing their towels. He tracked the rate of towel reuse before and after the change, and found that by altering the wording of the sign he had improved towel reuse by 26%. The key was the “most people in this room” bit. By suggesting that other people who stayed in that very same room, people not unlike the guest himself, had reused their towels, he was able to convince more people to do the same.

Like the fear of nuclear fallout, social proof works because it is personal. Popular opinion is much more convincing if it comes from a group to that you include yourself in, whether it be defined by physical location or some other metric. Those Facebook “Like” buttons operate on the same principle. They invite an action while simultaneously reporting the number of people who have taken that action. When you see a Like button that shows 15,000 Likes, all by people who visited the very same web page you did (or so you may assume), the concept of social proof states that you yourself are thus more likely to click that Like button too. Because hey, 15,000 people are probably not wrong, especially if they are browsing the same corner of the web as yourself.

In 1938 a realistic radio presentation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, complete with fake news bulletins that interrupted the broadcast periodically, was so convincing that it sent people into a panic. People thought that Martians were really invading the planet. It worked, I suspect, because it portrayed the alien attack as an event happening just down the road. The fake news reports that accompanied the broadcast gave it a dose of realism and caused people to believe that Martians might be arriving at their doorstep in large robotic tripod ships at any time. It sparked fear (and subsequently outrage) because it was too close to home, too personal.

Which brings us to horror games.

At Dakota State’s conference on horror games back in November (which I disgracefully have yet to write about), Jacob Butcher gave a lecture called “Methods of Interactivity in Horror Video Game Narratives.” In it he suggested that horror game often strive for “sympathetic fear,” in which we the player are scared for the life of our on-screen avatar. But a few games also pursue what Butcher called “authentic fear,” which occurs when the game makes us feel that our own lives are actually in danger. Authentic fear is hard to come by, but one way to go about it is to make the game world appear to overlap with the real world. Butcher talked at length about the Manhunt instruction booklet, which looks like a catalog for a snuff film company (Manhunt 2’s booklet looks like patient records–cool!). The idea, Jacob explained, is to make the player a more active participant in the game by casting them as authors (or at least purveyors) of snuff; combined with the handheld-camera kill display featured in the game, the instructions are designed to make you feel uncomfortably close to the content of the game.

I think Butcher is on to something. I mentioned this idea myself while discussing SquareEnix’s DS horror game, Nanashi No Geemu: “[t]he story is about a person playing a corrupted game on a handheld gaming device, and it is presented by giving you a corrupted game to play on your actual handheld gaming device.”

Nanashi No Geemu uses authenticity outside of the game (in this case, the fake DS UI screens and NES-era RPG it contains) to snare the player into accepting the otherwise routine horror content that appears in its main 3D exploration mode. It’s making the experience personal by stepping beyond the normal boundaries of the game, just as Manhunt does with its instruction manual. When I spoke with Deadly Premonition designer SWERY about this game, he admitted that he wasn’t able to finish it. “I was scared that I’d end up cursed,” he told me.

Speaking of Deadly Premonition, it tries hard to be personal too. The way York speaks directly to the us (as “Zach”) makes us feel that we’re an active participant rather than a passive observer. SWERY explained at the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference that York has to shave, smoke, and change his clothing every so often in order to invoke a memory of the game when the player is doing those things himself. SWERY wants to use everyday actions to spark a memory of the game even when the player isn’t playing.

There are other examples, too. The insanity effects in Eternal Darkness that mimic the UI of your TV are designed to keep you (not your avatar, but you) guessing at the legitimacy of what you see on the screen. The use of the Wiimote as a telephone receiver in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is another attempt to bring the player closer to the game content, as is that game’s “psychological profiling” system.

These systems are not about increasing immersion, they are about increasing personalization. Immersion is when you feel that you are your avatar, but personalization occurs when you are scared for yourself, not just your on-screen counterpart. The radioactive cloud of death making its way into your lungs after crossing the ocean from Fukushima is a personal threat to your well-being. The social proof is a form of manipulation based on your own self-association with a personal group. The fake DS screen is just enough to trick you into substituting the cursed hardware in the game with the device in your own hands. The fake news bulletins and convincing narrative of War of the Worlds was enough to make people fear for their lives. These are intensely personal threats, and they cause a very pure (or “authentic,” as Butcher would say) form of fear.

Here’s to hoping that more games take advantage of this weird, complicated, and by all accounts effective approach.