Poll: What makes a game scary?

[Pieturli]

About a week ago, while nursing the mother of all hangovers, I got to thinking about scary games. My love of horror is a fairly recent thing, as not too long ago I was a massive scaredy-cat when it came to horror movies and games. I always loved spooky stories and all that jazz, but I could not cope with the really scary, visceral stuff.

Anyways, I started thinking about what makes a horror game scary. There are, after all, quite a lot of scary games out there, especially on the indie market. There also seem to be a lot of very different horror games. Silent Hill 2 and Amnesia are both scary games, but I don't really think they have a lot in common in terms of feel. Different horror games seem to invoke different kinds of fear. After an exhaustive 20 minutes of thinking, I came to the conclusion that there are three basic "types" of fear that games make me feel. I also think there are certain games that typify this type of fear very well. Here they are:


(I'm sure others have figured this out before me, but I hadn't seen this before, so I thought I'd write it out. Let me know what you think!).

1. Anxiety (or atmosphere)
This is the kind of fear where your mind really does all the work. Darkness, weird background noises, and faint shadows glimpsed at the end of a dark hallway. It's the kind of fear where you feel like something awful is about to happen, but you can't put your finger on what it is. In some cases, I think this kind of feeling can be added to or even produced completely with something that you would not ordinarily think of as being "atmospheric", like text for example. A piece of paper with a creepy story found on the table of a well lit room in the middle of the day can create quite an unpleasant atmosphere.

Best example: Silent Hill 2. All atmosphere, all the time.



2. Shock (or jump scares)
This one is pretty obvious. You are in a dimly lit room, and a monster jumps out of a closet yelling at you like everything is your fault. Of course, this also works in a well lit room, with no atmosphere whatsoever, because hey, sudden noises make you jump. Thats pretty much a normal response to a sudden noise. Jump scares can be used, I think, in an almost comedic way, like one of those "Ghost train" rides at amusement parks. You get the scare, and then you burst out laughing. However, I think that for jump scares to work properly in a pure horror sense, you have to team them up with one or both of the other types of fear I'm listing.

Best example: I don't know, one of the SCP-games?




3. Panic (extended jump scare?)
For me, this is the one that freaks me out the most. This one seems pretty self-explanatory as well. This is the feeling you get when you are being chased by something in the dark, and you don't dare to turn around and see if its getting closer, because you don't want to get a face full of monster teeth. I'd say that this one depends somewhat on atmosphere, but not entirely. You can have a fairly serene and normal feeling, and the panic still kicks in when something seriously gnarly happens.

Best example: Amnesia: the Dark Descent (what else would it have been?)


I think that usually the scariest horror games succeed in combining all three. Lets take a random situation from amnesia as an example: You are creeping through a dark basement feeling pretty freaked out because its so damn dark and you keep hearing things and you know that a crazy person lives here (atmosphere), then a monster suddenly bursts through a door (jump scare), and proceeds to chase you while you poo your pants in an attempt to lessen your weight so you can run faster (panic). It's like a triple punch, or some other, better analogy.

For a game/situation in a game to be truly scary, I think it requires certain things. A helpless feeling I think is one of those. The reason dead space didn't really scare me was because I always had the means to defend myself, and effectively at that. Slime monsters with spiky bits growing out of them lose a lot of their scariness when I can carve them into convenient chunks within seconds. Another, slightly contradictory thing, is that I think you have to feel like you have a chance, if that makes any sense. You have to THINK that you could make it. If your death in a situation is a foregone conclusion, it takes all of the tension away. If you think you can survive, it becomes scary as hell because the panic sets in and you have to run like the fucking wind, instead of just sitting there going "Welp, I'll try again later" as the monster of the moment chows down on you.


Anyways, thats enough out of me. As you can see, I've put up a poll to ask which of these, if any, scares you the most. If you have a better, fourth option, just choose "Other" and explain why you think you know better than me, you arrogant bastard.

Also, if you have any other "rules of scariness", please feel free to post them as well. Lets get this discussion rolling!

Thanks

 

[Johnny Impact]

4. The Unknown.
Everyone understands an ax murderer. He'll try to get his weapon into you because he's messed up in the head. That's pretty much it. It's much more difficult to get your head around nameless cosmic horrors. In Silent Hill, you get the strong feeling that the town itself -- not the creatures in it -- is your enemy. How? How is a town aware of anything? Why does it hate us so? What does it want? What needs could an abandoned town have? And what about the creatures? That game has excellent enemy design. We don't know what the Mannequins are, we just know they look wrong, they move wrong, they're just wrong on a deep level we don't fully understand. If they were ever to be explained, it would lose something.

5. Helplessness
Dead Space 2 is most scary in the first ten minutes, when you are straitjacketed and weaponless. Pelting down a corridor filled with horrors who can kill you with impunity -- that is true, harrowing fear. Necromorphs simply aren't as scary after you discover you have a very respectable arsenal to deal with them. But the morphs aren't the real problem, they're essentially just a symptom of the cosmic madness that is the Marker. We are introduced to a larger, nebulous, more menacing threat, something we can't fight directly, something we maybe can't understand no matter what. Morphs can be dismembered systematically, indeed this is what we do for most of the game. What do we do -- what can we do -- against a mysterious psychoactive force which controls the dead, drives us insane by mere proximity, and may or may not rely on the Marker to make us feel its will? What if we can't do anything at all? What if we destroy the Marker and it doesn't help?

There is overlap with your entries.

 

[Pieturli]

4. The Unknown.
Everyone understands an ax murderer. He'll try to get his weapon into you because he's messed up in the head. That's pretty much it. It's much more difficult to get your head around nameless cosmic horrors. In Silent Hill, you get the strong feeling that the town itself -- not the creatures in it -- is your enemy. How? How is a town aware of anything? Why does it hate us so? What does it want? What needs could an abandoned town have? And what about the creatures? That game has excellent enemy design. We don't know what the Mannequins are, we just know they look wrong, they move wrong, they're just wrong on a deep level we don't fully understand. If they were ever to be explained, it would lose something.

5. Helplessness
Dead Space 2 is most scary in the first ten minutes, when you are straitjacketed and weaponless. Pelting down a corridor filled with horrors who can kill you with impunity -- that is true, harrowing fear. Necromorphs simply aren't as scary after you discover you have a very respectable arsenal to deal with them. But the morphs aren't the real problem, they're essentially just a symptom of the cosmic madness that is the Marker. We are introduced to a larger, nebulous, more menacing threat, something we can't fight directly, something we maybe can't understand no matter what. Morphs can be dismembered systematically, indeed this is what we do for most of the game. What do we do -- what can we do -- against a mysterious psychoactive force which controls the dead, drives us insane by mere proximity, and may or may not rely on the Marker to make us feel its will? What if we can't do anything at all? What if we destroy the Marker and it doesn't help?

There is overlap with your entries.

EDITED QUITE A LOT:

Those are both good points, but I do kind of think they are more things that cause fear, as opposed to types of fear. What I meant with the original post is that I think there are specific different emotions that could all be called fear, and those feelings could be triggered by different things. For example, a feeling of helplessness could produce both panic and anxiety (or atmospheric fear, maybe thats a bad term to use?). I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone but me

Although I suppose you could argue that they are distinct types of fear as well... I don't know. Well, thats why I made this thread in the first place. As you pointed out, there is overlap.

 

[The_Lost_King]

Jump scares don't get me all that much. Though if you put me in an atmosphere that scares the crap out of me I will be like, "FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!" For instance, the hotel scene in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. I was barely scared at all until I switched on the generater and all the banging and clanging and that made me expect of types of horrors coming at me and I just ran.

 

[Pieturli]

Jump scares don't get me all that much. Though if you put me in an atmosphere that scares the crap out of me I will be like, "FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!" For instance, the hotel scene in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. I was barely scared at all until I switched on the generater and all the banging and clanging and that made me expect of types of horrors coming at me and I just ran.

Haha, I loved the ghost hotel place. The snuff film with those freaky little creatures creeped me out even more though.

Thats one really underrated game btw:O Maybe I should replay it... again...

 

[SonicWaffle]

1. Anxiety (or atmosphere)

I found Fallout 3 quite scary in this regard. Not all of the time, because I was often too busy blasting mutants with a shotgun, but sometimes I'd be trekking through the bleak ruins of a broken city and the music would unexpectedly die, leaving nothing but the wind whistling through the buildings. I'd feel more alone than I have done in any other video game, and I'd have cause to ponder the futility of my quest - this isn't a game where you win and save the world, it's a game where you and everyone else are struggling to stay alive. Even a victory has only minimal impact, because the entire world is still just as fucked as it was. It was a genuinely creepy sensation, standing silently in the bones of a dead world with the knowledge that nothing will ever be the way it was again.

 

[PeterMerkin69]

Long answer? There's a vast difference between being startled and being frightened. Emotional fear, and anxiety, and dread, are very difficult to pull off, and require some degree of participation from the observer. Startling, on the other hand, as in the case of, say, the dogs and birds bursting through the windows in Resident Evil, is cheap, and plays more on physiology than the other. The line between the two are often blurred, and they're definitely capable of reinforcing each other, but that's not always the case.

Consider a ceramic plate in a restaurant. If someone suddenly dropped it behind me, I would jump. I'm jumpy. There's absolutely nothing scary about plates. In contrast, a video game has never evoked fear in me. I've never been afraid to play a game without the lights on, or had nightmares or trouble sleeping after playing one, or anything like that. Not even a vague sense of unease from the atmosphere in, say, Silent Hill. I don't think I've ever felt fear in that context.

So while I don't think cheap startles are scary, they definitely work better on me.