Poll: Does a horror game need to be scary?

ninjaRiv

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BathorysGraveland said:
ninjaRiv said:
I see. But where does this leave gore films? I consider gore undoubtedly horror, regardless of people naming it "torture porn" or whatever other childish term they wish to apply to it. Does anyone really consider gore scary?
Of course but that's more "Shock Horror" than straight horror.

Although, I personally see most of it as "torture porn" mostly because they're trying to use cheap gore to scare the audience rather than relying on character development, lighting, sound, camera angles, plot, etc. Saw was a good movie, though. That one knew how to use gore. There's plenty of good gore movies that manage to be scary and disgusting.
 

BathorysGraveland

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ninjaRiv said:
Although, I personally see most of it as "torture porn" mostly because they're trying to use cheap gore to scare the audience rather than relying on character development, lighting, sound, camera angles, plot, etc. Saw was a good movie, though. That one knew how to use gore. There's plenty of good gore movies that manage to be scary and disgusting.
Well for me, it's a very good feeling of true horror. The whole idea of being helpless to resist and at the mercy of someone who holds no notion of the concept (that being mercy). One of the worst ways to die, I'd imagine, is a slow, suffering. So for me, gore goes hand-in-hand with the atmosphere horror tries to provide. Unless of course of the effect are terrible, then it becomes unintentionally comedic.
 

Roxor

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Does a horror work need to be scary? No. Do a good chunk of them fit that description? Yes.

If scary isn't the prerequisite, what is? I think it's that the work is, on some level, disturbing. Whether that aspect is playing to the primal evolutionary parts of our mind, like death and disfigurement, or whether it's something more abstract, like the idea of brainwashing, the thing which makes us consider something horror will be something which disturbs us, even if it doesn't actually scare us.
 

afroebob

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Dead Space is a perfect example of a horror game that's not scary. I never got one real jump out of that game but it was still fun. However, if the only appeal to the game is horror (which isn't a bad thing, we actually need more of that) than it HAS to be scary, Dead Space was only good because it was trying to be scary and fun, but only succeeded in the latter.
 

Bocaj2000

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If a horror game isn't scary, the it isn't horror. It is action with a dark aesthetic.

There's nothing wrong with action games, but horror is a completely separate genre.
 

Nouw

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someonehairy-ish said:
Nouw said:
No. A game doesn't need to be scary to be horrifying. It can be, well, horrifying. Take Spec Ops: The Line for example. Many moments in that game were very horrifying but I wasn't scared by any of it.
But Spec Ops was marketed as a military game, not a horror game. And I have the feeling that you actually mean disturbing or harrowing when you say horrifying.
While yes, it was marketed as a military game I don't think this takes away its place in the horror-game genre. It was marketed to be a military game to fool people into playing what was actually a horrifying experience.

Eh personally I put disturbing and harrowing under horrifying. I looked it up now just in case to see if I had been raised up to believe the wrong definition but apparently not. [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/horror?s=t]
 

Twilight_guy

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Nov 24, 2008
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If It's horror, then yes. That's the whole point. Dead Space is an action game though since it isn't scary. Calling it a horror game is like calling Star Wars a comedy because it has a few jokes.
 

w9496

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Well, technically it doesn't. Labels lie all the time.

It certainly does help though. People are going to like knowing what they're buying.
 

Ghonesis

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I don't expect it to be scary: I just expect it to mess with my mind... scary is different to all people anyway. :p (I used to think Dungeon Keeper was scary)
For the same reason not all games have to be fun not all horror games have to be scary. They can also be gruesome or mind-blowing, or something else you can think of.
However.. most horror games SHOULD be scary, just not necessarily ALL of them.
 

Nazulu

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Jun 5, 2008
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Yes and No, people are scared by different things. Horror is for horrible (not what you're thinking). It can be torture based, all about the dark, supernatural forces, natural disasters, tragedy, demons and witches and religious stuff, just through sound and music, that creepy neighbour next door, however you like to horrify your audience.
 

nexus

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Yea, I believe so...

I do not want "disgusting horror" either. "Slashgore" and other nonsense like that in film kinda died out in the 90's because people got sick of it. You see a resurgence here and there with something like Saw, or other franchises, but for the most part.. gore & slash has died out as a genre.

People much prefer a "haunting" story, or psychological thrillers. I consider Silence of the Lambs a good psychological horror/thriller. You don't need big scary monsters and buckets of blood, you also don't need a huge absurd disaster story to artificially raise the stakes in a video game world no one cares about.

"Oh yea.. so, if I don't complete my objective, the big scary monsters will destroy a city of people.. people that I've never met.. not even one.... ? --- Okay, how about we just stick to character stories, mkay?"
 

Asuka Soryu

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Does a comedy need to have comedy? Does an action movie need action?

Does a story need a plot? Does a book need pages?

The answer to this and your question is...

OF F%#$^ING COURSE THEY DO!
 

lunavixen

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NightmareExpress said:
To the same extent that you would actually need puzzles for a puzzle game to be what it is.
"Horror" is meant to startle, unsettle and instill a sense of dread. If it's a "horror game", it would need to have those elements as a core foundation rather than little thematic bits of a section (think Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 or horror-themed levels in non-horror games).

If it doesn't fit the definition of horror in the second sentence there, it's at worst an action game with gore or at best a psychological thriller (which are awesome). To put a more concrete genre definition down, horror is something "that is intended to, or has the capacity to, frighten viewers". So the answer is just yes.
Can i just point to you and say "pretty much this?"

Horror is meant to unsettle or disturb in some way, doesn't have to be violent or anything like that, but it does have to unsettle, disturb or scare you, otherwise it's a gory action game, a psychological thriller or just really bad (depending on the game). Resident Evil for example has really gone from a horror game (It did scare me a little as a kid), to a horror themed action game. Slender, Survivors (little indie multiplayer game), Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the first Condemned and the Silent Hill series (early games in general) all have the horror theme at their core, which is what makes them pretty good horror games, they use the environment and actions to send your imagination into overdrive, filling you with that dread and those little chills that make the hairs on your arms stand up.
 

Ryan Hughes

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Depends on what you mean by "scary." As for the poll, I chose "no." I do hate to be embroiled in semantics, but here goes:

Startling is when something jumps out at you. Scary is when something jumps out at you, then tries to eat you. Horror is something completely different.

Look, I am an Irish-American, so, I am scared of snakes. St. Patrick ran them all off the island more than a millennium ago, and the collective Irish sub conscience has not had to deal with them since. So, the common way to scare me -if someone was to build a game solely directed at me- would be to put a snake in a cupboard somewhere and have it jump out at me at some point. This is starling, it might even be scary, but it is not truly horrifying.

A truly horrifying game, like Silent Hill, would not bother to do this. It would simply lock me into a filthy, rusty room with a picture of a snake, and tell me that there may -or may not- be an actual snake somewhere in the room with me. For extra points, they could tell me that if I stared at the picture of the snake for long enough, the real snake might go away.

This is truly horrifying. Real horror always looks inwards to its characters, and inspires the audience to do the same, and to confront the truly terrifying inner fears, sins, and insecurities that we all have. Most "horror" now-a-days doesn't even have the characterization of a Jr. High creative writing paper, let alone enough to inspire the audience to look inward.
 
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Of course horror needs fear of some sort. Not necessarily of the player themselves mind you, but of the game's protagonist at the very least. I'm talking about fear by the way, not [/b]scares[/b] or simply startling the player. Any game can throw a scare in and that doesn't make it horror. Turning the sound low and the lights dark then having a loud noise and a monster jumping is a clichéd scare, not horror. That's what Dead Space does, that's what Doom 3 did.

I think the only fear I felt in Dead Space 2 was the eye-poke machine bit and a little with that invincible necromorph. Nightmare mode made it more intense because the safety net of checkpoints is gone and each room could mean death and the harsh penalty lack of checkpoints entails.

The game's protagonist and/or the player need to be afraid. An action game with monsters != horror.

I don't even really get afraid of the monstrous babies/kids thing that much any more. It's so cliché now (making a human form monstrous, making a human child monstrous even more) that I (almost consciously) no longer feel afraid by them. It's been done too much.
 

Auron

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Horror stories were used as an entertainment medium with a very clear purpose. Preparing the minds of people for the real life horrors of famine, loss, death and violence with a different kind of sense of wonder that lead to shock. The idea is that by passing through this kind of shock people would be less shocked when they passed through real life horrors of their own, violence mainly.

Even nowadays it's general purpose is the same, though less evident our world is still pretty violent and terrible. So not exactly "scary" but it should provide shock, tension and horror in order to be part of the genre. Lots of people have become desensitized to it all over the years due to repeated tropes in recent history(recent being since cinema was invented) Maybe the general shock values of the horror genre are not the same anymore with the mass exposition of violence and terror in modern media
 

Happiness Assassin

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I have heard people derisively call some RPGs as merely "action games with RPG elements." I have taken issue with that for a few reasons, none of which are relevant to this discussion. But because Dead Space 3 lacks the very element that makes it a horror game(namely, the horror) it can't be classified as such. The way I would describe the series now is an action game with horror elements. Not necessarily scary, but some of its elements are taken from some notable horror influences.
 

MeChaNiZ3D

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Horror games do. Whether or not DS3 is focussed on being a horror game, or an action game with horror elements is a different story.
 

surg3n

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It's a matter of perception, some horror movies/games will be scarier than others based on your own experiences.

For example, the scariest, creepiest thing I've seen in a horror movie was in Pet Cemetary - the aunt with the diseased spine. Now Pet Cem isn't exactly a scary horror, but it's got some creepy moments, much like the other classic un-scary horror movies like Elm St and Pumpkinhead. Horror movies are always scary to some people, but these days we're so de-sensitised that most horror films won't be scary to most people. I haven't actually been scared at a horror movie in about 20 years, but I still watch them, still enjoy them.

Games are different, because it's a game at the end of the day - for good and bad the experience is different. For me, a lot of the tension is lost with games because we all know that we are in control... like if the horrible monster jumps out and kills me, I can just try again - do that once or twice and no enemy is actually scary. Our fear of them often comes from knowing how difficult it is to kill them, not necesserily how the look or move. For me, the best/scariest survival horror enemy is the alien-looking experiment dudes in Res Evil 4 - when you have to use a thermal scope to shoot their internal maggots to kill them... jerky movements and magically appearing spikes - those are fairly effective survival horror enemies I think. So the fear is different in horror games as opposed to movies, we might not even call it fear.

I couldn't get into Amnesia, but I'm guessing that if you play that right - headset, lights off, late night - then it would be very effective. In Minecraft as well, when your in a dark pit and something attacks you from the shadows, well that can really make me jump - I guess that all the developers can do is try their best, if the game scares you or not shouldn't factor in how much you should enjoy it... maybe calling a game a horror game is a bit of a stretch - your never gonna scream like a little girl at a videogame, well not usually anyway.