I finished Alone in the Dark 5 this evening and posted a review. Hey, look at that, I posted something on this blog again! Holy crap, bet you didn't see that coming, huh? I actually have two more articles about Thinking After Dark to post, and something about The Path still, but those are not ready to go yet and work has been even crazier than usual lately.

Long story short: I gave up on F.E.A.R. (only the third game so far that I've been unable to complete; Rule of Rose and Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within are the others) a few weeks back and decided to try Alone in the Dark 5. I still have some things to say about F.E.A.R., but out of order here are some thoughts on the latest in the Edward Carnby saga.

Alone in the Dark 5 is an ambitious title. I played the PS3 version because I heard that it was much improved over the unpolished and buggy Xbox360 version. Even so, there were a lot of problems. At the same time, there are certain sequences that totally blew my socks off. Overall I didn't think it was a fantastic game, but there is certainly a lot of stuff we can learn by examining it. Check out the full review.

I bet you thought I just wasn't going to post any more about the Thinking After Dark conference that I attended last month. The truth is that I have pages of notes waiting to be turned into blog posts and I'm running very behind. So, in the interests of brevity, here's some short thoughts about some of the other talks from the conference. Clara Fernandez-Vara gave an interesting presentation on the Castlevania series about why it is not a horror game. It clearly uses themes from Dracula, and, as Fernandez-Vara points out, many other classic (and generally unrelated) Western horror tropes like Frankenstein. Yet for some reason it doesn't come off as a horror game. This talk was an exploration as to why that was the case. Fernandez-Vara's suggests that Dracula, as a symbol, has been iterated too many times and has lost its original meaning. She points to the beginning of Symphony of the Night in which Dracula is basically reduced to acting like Bowser: he shoots fireballs and eventually turns into some giant generic monster. No biting, mesmerizing, turning into mist; he's not even killed by a stake through the heart, but instead by a whip. Dracula isn't scary any more and the developers had to turn him into something else to make him a threatening boss. Fernandez-Vara's theory is that this reliance and modification of a worn-out trope empowers the player; by using Dracula (the "satanic lord" version; there are many others) as an antagonist, the designers are giving the player a leg up on the competition: we already know all about Dracula and all that's left is to go into his castle and take him out. Fernandez-Vara also points out that in Symphony of the Night, the protagonist Alucard actually gains Dracula's traditional powers, which ends up making him even more powerful. Alexis Blanchet presented a bunch of data related to some fascinating research he has been performing for the last three years. He is trying to catalog and categorize all games based on films ever made, and his database appears to be fantastically complete. This talk was in French but I think you can get a lot out of just looking at some of his graphs. Rather than reproduce them here, check out his web site and blog post about his talk. Jonathan Lessard's talk was about Lovecraft's influence on the adventure game genre. It turns out that there are a bunch of horror-adventure games (mostly for the PC) that use Lovecraftian themes or are directly based on his work. Lessard wanted to know what the appeal was specifically with regards to adventure game translations. Lessard points out that the license is practical because it is not under copyright and the Lovecraft name is fairly well-known (though it can't compare to, say, Agatha Christie). There are also structural compatibilities between Lovecraft's stories and the adventure mold: Lovecraft stories are often about researchers or investigators setting out to find hidden truth, which maps very well to adventure games. Adventure games are indirect and contextual, which is a better fit for Lovecraft than verb-oriented action games (not a lot of running and jumping in Lovecraft's stories). So the mode of play and general format of adventure games seems to be a snug fit. However, Lessard points out that most of these games fail to be scary because eventually the game-related goals come into conflict with Lovecraftian norms. Lovecraft's "cosmic fear" concept is really hard to describe visually; it's not about things popping out of the dark or gore. Instead, it is about knowledge leading one into the darkness rather than to reason. But in an adventure game, discovery of truth is a reward and not a method of alienation, so that same psychological evolution of the character is difficult to achieve. It's also hard to get the characters in these games to sufficiently emote, and many end with the triumph over evil, which is hardly Lovecraftian. So most of these games are not very scary. Lessard points out one major exception: a game called Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, which apparently follows the Lovecraftian narrative flow to a T. Gabrial Knight also gets a mention for its attention to cosmic fear. So the format is capable of hosting Lovecraft in a very authentic way, but it does not happen very often. Another interesting talk was Matthew Weise's discussion of "rules of horror." His idea is that it might be possible to make horror games by translating the rules and tropes from specific types of horror movies directly to game play. As an example he talked exclusively about Clock Tower: The First Fear (though I think that the focus on this game was forced by the very short time limit for presentations). Clock Tower is, Weise points out, a very authentic translation of the "stalker" type of horror film (Halloween, etc). The protagonist is clearly a Final Girl. She fits the formal definition (Clover's model) to a T, and the game can be seen as a simulation of the stalker film genre. It is one of the few games to show the protagonist's face up close so you can see when she is frightened, and this feature, Weise argues, is required by the genre. Weise suggests that one way to adapt horror games from films is to see the genre rules of the film as game systems instead of just lifting the narrative. If you watched the film, would you be better prepared to play the game? If so, that would indicate that the game play itself is based on rules and systems defined by the film. And that's all I have time for today. I have at least two more posts on the conference to write, so please stay tuned.

From left to right: Ewan Kirkland, Carl Therrien, and Dominic Arsenault You know, on second thought, I think it will be better if I post my notes with more background. I looked back over my post from last week and it seems like it's almost meaningless to people other than myself because it lacks so much context. From here on out I'm going to post summaries of what I thought was interesting. If you are interested in a particular point, please ask and I will elaborate. On the first day of the conference there was a fascinating discussion about how genres are created and defined. Dominic Arsenault and Carl Therrien talked about this topic at length, and I think that it's a very relevant topic with relationship to horror considering all the arguments discussions that we've had about it here. Arsenault makes the point that genres for games are problematic because there is no single authority. Genre is often defined in terms of a hierarchy of characteristics; GameSpot's find-by-genre page, for example, sorts everything by pace, then mechanic, then view point, and then theme: Action > Shooter > First-Person > Fantasy. Other lists of game genres (such as this one, this one, and this one) do not agree, and some even contain a meaningless classification like "hybrid." There is no definitive consensus, new genres are born and die constantly, and most games are combinations of other genres. He went on to talk about how genres are created when they become necessary. Is it really possible, he wondered, to define a genre of spiky hair sword-wielding protagonists that can then contain both Final Fantasy VII's Cloud and No More Heros' Travis? Not really, and the reason is that "genre is not only defined from the elements of a [game], but also from a common cultural consensus" (Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film, 1974). So the genres that stick around are those that people agree upon. At this point Arsenault had an awesome graph. He plotted the number of usenet posts per month containing the phrase "doom clone" against posts containing the phrase "first person shooter" from about 1990 through 2008. The term "Doom clone" appeared like a bell curve; it starts around 1992 and peaks in 1996, then dies off by 2000. Individual spikes in the usage of the term correlated with releases of games like Duke Nukem. "First person shooter" appearers in 1996 and rockets upwards, surpassing "doom clone" in usage by 1998 and then subsequently rising to much larger usage than "doom clone" ever achieved. By the time that Unreal is released, nobody is calling first person shooters "doom clones." So, the conclusion is that game genres are not defined by logic, or by a central authority, but by "what we collectively believe it to be." Aresnault went on to talk about the separation of thematic and gameplay genres, which an especially important topic for survival horror games. He mentions that "survival horror" seems to be about gameplay (survival) + theme (horror), and is therefore a hybrid of both a thematic and gameplay genre. Survival is pretty easy to define in terms of game terms, but horror is more difficult. It turns out that people have been trying to properly define the horror genre for years, with a number of interesting results. Bruce F. Kawin, for example, separates horror from science fiction by suggesting that the end of the narrative is a genre signifier: horror games end with a "re-establishment of the status quo," as the world goes back to the way it was before the narrative began, while sci-fi ends in a progression of understanding of the universe rather than a concrete resolution. But that sort of dichotomy does not help us categorize hybrids like Dead Space. Perhaps, then, we should separate the hybrid into its gameplay and thematic genres. They seem to grow and change in different ways. "Gameplay genres are born from reiterations and successive imitations that aim to better the model, while thematic genres feed on transmedia borrowings with an aesthetic aim." Aresnault references Fowler (1982) who points out that genre is not just a classification tool, but also a communication tool: it manages expectations. Hans R. Jauss (1978) points out that the "horizon of expectations is made up of first, the player's knowledge and cognitive schemata, and second, the generic markers that puts the work in place." (Or something like that; my notes are unclear if this is a direct quote). Therrien (who referenced this site--thanks!) makes a similar point. Per T. Apperley, the problem with genre is that it doesn't describe a particular game but rather tries to link it to earlier forms of media. Almost any game play classification we can come up with will have exceptions: rather than a strict definition the concepts involved in game genres are constantly evolving. "Evolution operates with an altogether different rhythm: every work modifies the sum of possible works, each new example alters the species." (T. Todorov). Since we've had so many discussions on how best to parse the collection of horror games that are cataloged on this site, I found these talks particularly interesting and pertinent. I am still going through my notes but in the next few days I will post about subsequent topics that were covered at the conference. There's also some pictures online now if you are interested.

Montreal is a beautiful city. I have logged a lot of time in the air this month. I flew from Japan to the Bay Area in early April, then flew up to Oregon to see my family, and now I am sitting in a hotel room in Montreal. On Sunday I return to the Bay Area and on Tuesday I will get back in the plane and fly back to Japan. Hello frequent flyer miles! I am in Montreal, which is a fantastic (but very cold) city, for the first time in about eight years, to attend the Thinking After Dark conference, which is all about horror video games. Today was the first day of the conference, which runs for three days. On Saturday I am giving a (very short) talk about using horror games to study Japanese culture, a topic that I think is a pretty predictable selection for me. The conference is located in a neat old building that was selected because "it looks like something out of Resident Evil." I can tell that I am in the company of friends, though I have to admit that some of the lingo is so academic that I have trouble understanding it. Today's talks were all interesting, and I took a ton of notes. In fact, I have so many notes that rather than trying to describe each individual talk, I am going to just record some of the key interesting points that I heard today. I'm going to break the notes up into separate posts because there's just too much information. Also, even though there's a lot of content here you should understand that I am applying a pretty strict filter; these talks have way more info in them than I can possible transcribe here. The first keynote, by Barry K. Grant of Brock University, was about horror cinema. Grant is the author of numerous books on cinema and had a whole lot to say about horror films. Some points: Grant believes that "video games constitute the future of cinema." He sees them as "the eighth art," after cinema. Cinema is spatial arts + temporal arts, and games add interactivity to that formula. Horror has the most extensive network of extra-cinematic institutions (next to Sci-Fi): magazines, web sites, zombie flash mobs, etc. Like comedy and porn, "horror is defined in terms of its intended affect," making it a "body genre." Contrast that with crime or mystery films which are about the narrative. Consequently, a "good" horror movie is one that is scary, even if it's not a particularly well-made film. Grant shows how German expressionism, for example the painted-on shadows, artificial lighting, and hard, distorted angles in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) jumped to Hollywood when German filmmakers fled to the US in the early 1930s to avoid the Nazis. "Horror movies are more about the time and place that they are made in rather than the time that they are set." Classic monsters are no longer scary because in the 1950s onward they were The venue. Not shown: entrance to underground laboratory. "juvenilized": put on cereal boxes, made into toys, etc. Psycho changed genre films by suggesting that monsters didn't have to be aliens or monsters. The horror still descends from the gothic mansion on the hill to arrive at the regular Bates Motel though. New vocabulary word: "splat-stick." Interesting idea that William Castle films (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, etc) are early experiments in interactive cinema. Second was a talk by Tanya Krzywinska of Brunel University. She has also written extensively about games and film. Her talk covered tons of bases and is difficult to summarize, so I'll just list a few interesting points: "Orchestrated" (= linear, pre-scripted, pre-determined) game play sequences vs organic, open-ended sequences. Phantasmagoria is extremely orchestrated, even down to the points in space that you can visit (as the motion is all based on live film), and borrows much from cinema. 3D free-roaming games, on the other hand, are harder to orchestrate and thus were unable to directly apply shock and tension lessons from cinema and had to invent their own. Krzwinska calls gamers "close readers," that is, games require attention to detail and pattern recognition. Compare that to TV or film which can "take you places" without effort. In games, your life depends on your ability to "read" the details of the game. She makes a distinction between game "grammars" for mechanics and for the genre. This is a similar idea to my idea about 'mechanical challenges' and 'cognitive challenges', but she's framed it very well. The game grammar is "how you play" and the genre grammar is "what is happening in the game." It occurs to me that game grammars must be as readable as possible (to avoid the frustration of not knowing how to control the game) while genre grammars may be intentionally misleading or obscured (in order to misdirect the player's understanding of the environment or story). She has a point about sound provoking action in games, as opposed to in films where it causes you to imagine an action. The radio in Silent Hill foretells of an approaching enemy which you can then encounter, etc. She's a big fan of Lovecraft and of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. But she points out that the game grammar and genre grammar are somewhat at odds (e.g. you must investigate things to learn about them, but looking upon horrors causes you to lose sanity points). Lovecraft doesn't fit well with game grammar norms. I'll save the rest of today's talks for a future post. In fact, at this rate I might just have to move everything to an article or present a less informative but more concise summary of the day's events. Which would you prefer?

So I missed April Fools this year. Sorry. My excuse is that I was on a plane over the Pacific, which is true. Next year I'll have some totally mind blowing joke prepared for you all (I considered posting that Alan Wake had been announced as an iPhone exclusive, but I figured that probably won't have gone over well).

I have a post in the wings about The Path. The short version is that you should go buy it. While it is in many ways a classic adventure game, it's been filtered and twisted and it's like nothing that you've seen before. It's a different kind of horror game, one that will require you to think. I've only spent a few minutes with it but that's more than enough to recommend it to you here. I'll have a much more in-depth post about this game when I get to spend a little more time with it.

Last week was also GDC, and there's been some horror-related news to talk about. Here's some screenshots from the new Silent Hill remake, which looks, uh, odd. I'll play it, and I'm very happy to see that somebody is finally using the Wiimote as a flashlight (ok, Fragile did this first), but I can't tell much about it yet by just looking at the screenshots. Also, I was surprised to learn that the Saw game is still in development (apparently Konami is the new publisher), and even more surprised that there are screenshots available. The database is quickly falling out of date!

At the end of the month I will be speaking at the Thinking After Dark conference. The list of speakers is impressive, and the topics are all things I am interested in, so I am quite excited about attending. Any of you in upstate New York or Montreal should come attend!

There's a pretty great article over at GameTopius called The Survival of Survival Horror about the way that modern survival horror games resemble their predecessors. The author, Thomas Cross, draws a line in the sand between games like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5, and Siren: New Translation and Silent Hill 5. His point--which is one I've attempted to make here before as well--is that the difference between these two types of games has less to do with the way that they are controlled or the amount of action they contain than the pacing and moment-to-moment game strategy that these games encourage. Cross also expertly points out that while both RE5 and Dead Space are action-oriented, Dead Space is very clearly designed to scare the player (though it's success in that respect is sometimes damaged by its approach to combat pacing).

This is a very important distinction, and I like how Cross has called RE5 and Dead Space a new "quadrant" of survival horror. As we discuss the evolution of the modern survival horror game (which has been a hot topic here lately), I think that noting that these new games differ dramatically from each other (and from those of the past) is key to understanding how the genre is changing.

Give Cross' article a read. It's well-thought-out and quite timely.

When I was a kid some developer realized that with the advent of the 2x CD-ROM drive you could stream really tiny, really crappy video off the CD onto a PC. This lead to an explosion of universally-terrible "interactive movie" games like The Journeyman Project and Spaceship Warlock. Though the genre probably contributed to the advent of good games like The 7th Guest, Phantasmagoria, and Myst, there were a couple of years where the genre was entirely crap. One of these games was called The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum, and it was yet another click-randomly-until-you-win type of game. I saw an awesome, one line review for The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum at the time that simply read, "Great graphics, but where's the game?" Dead Space isn't that bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it reminds me of The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum. The production value for Dead Space is off the charts, the game play is fun, and there are some neat innovations to be found in the game. It's just that the whole thing is so slick that you can pretty much zone out and play it through without the need to think anything through. It makes sense to me that the next Dead Space game will be an on-rails shooter; the first sort of felt like that to me as well. Dead Space is a good game, but it's not a fantastic game. At least, I don't think so. You can read about it in my full review.

I can't stand 'em. I have no problem with mini-games per se; it is specifically optional mini-games that get my goat. You know what I mean, the kind that you can skip without hurting the game but if you play all the way through are guaranteed some sort of reward. Like the shooting gallery game in Resident Evil 4. Or the, uh, shooting gallery game in Dead Space. The Shenmue series is one of my favorites of all time, but it is a serious offender in this category; though the games include required mini-games (which I have no quarrel with), they are also chalk full of optional challenges that don't need to be completed to finish the game.

These mini-games follow a pattern. The challenge must carry some sort of reward, otherwise it's just a way to waste time. You know that when Isaac in Dead Space interrupts his attempts to get off the alien-infested ship so he can partake in a little zero-G air ball, it's because he wants to get some big reward at the end. Even worse are the games that rate you behind the scenes; it's like, you finish the game, and the screen says "Congratulations on finishing the game. However, you failed to find all of the furry bunnies. Your rank is E-." I hate that. It's bullshit. If they wanted me to find all the bunnies then then should have made that part of the required conditions for winning. Look, I am sorry that I failed to carry out all of the books in the goddamned library without dropping any of them three days in a row, Master, but could you please give me your special advice that you promised anyway so I can get on with the freaking story?

Here's the problem with optional challenges: they are very rarely ever the same level of quality as the rest of the game. When development teams responsible for these games see their deadline approaching, the optional mini-games always take a back-seat to the rest of the content because, hey, it's optional. Required games, on the other hand, get played by the team a lot more because they are required for progression, and as a natural consequence they end up being a lot more fun. Carrying books out of a library? LAME. Catching leaves from the tree outside the library between your fingers. AWESOME. That's how it always works--optional content always loses out to the required content when time is short and push comes to shove.

Now the real deal-breaker, at least for me, is that optional challenges are not really optional. I want to beat the game, and that means BEATING THE GAME. I mean all of it! I got stuck for about three months on the original Shenmue because I refused to progress in the game until I had achieved first place in the forklift race mini-game. You know what, that mini-game sucks! If you so much as brush a wall with your forklift your velocity instantly goes to zero and you have immediately lost. I played that stupid thing about one hundred times, to the point at which I was able to get second place every single time, and yet I never, not even once, came in first. Finally a friend beat it and discovered that the great reward for such a difficult challenge is a miniature forklift item that says "first place," at which point I gave up and just played the rest of the game out. The shooting game in Dead Space was probably intended to be a fun diversion, maybe a way to give out an achievement or something, but I spent an entire hour beating that stupid thing. It wasn't fun, it wasn't ultimately rewarding, and it didn't "break up the game play" in a good way. It was a challenge that I decided to complete, and when it was done I swore one last time and moved on with nothing to show for it but a new power node.

So, to bring this rant to a close. Developers: make your goddamn mini games required for progression. If you do that and your game is no longer fun, it means the mini games suck. Fix them or cut them. Just, whatever you do, don't make them optional.

I'm playing through Dead Space at the moment. Well, more precisely, I've been playing through Dead Space for close to three months. I am having a lot of trouble staying interested in it. This is kind of surprising to me because there's really nothing wrong with the game at all. It's a model of modern game design, the technical execution is fantastic, and there's even been significant thought put into the systems that are responsible for most of the horror content (the sound system is great). But for some reason I just can't be bothered. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the game, and playing it is fun and all, it's just sort of uninspiring for some reason. Sometimes, a game comes along that is fatally flawed in a certain way but also has a spark of brilliance. Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) was like that for me. The game had a vision, and it was pretty well executed, but at the end it totally fell apart. But the vision alone carried the entire experience; even though the last third or so was pretty shoddy compared to the initial experience, I ended up really liking the game. Hellnight is a similar story: the graphics are bad, the controls are dated, the collision detection is wonky, and yet the whole thing is held together by a few genius design choices. Dead Space feels like the exact opposite of that phenomenon. There's nothing wrong with it--nothing at all. And yet, there's no spark of brilliance either; it's very, very well executed, but ultimately fairly routine. It's even pretty innovative for this kind of game, and yet the innovations, while good, are all minor improvements over a well-defined formula. There has yet to be a moment where I see the hand of a designer with a complete vision of the experience moving behind the scenes. Dead Space is really slick, but it feels like it was built by robots who were programmed to know the core features of all horror games. There's just no character to the game. I'm not finished with Dead Space, so the game may yet prove me wrong (that's certainly happened a few times before). I will hopefully finish it off in the next week or two, at which point I will have to figure out a way to write a review for a game that is perfectly executed and yet somehow lifeless.

It goes downhill from here. Lately Nanashi no Geemu has got me thinking about how horror operates at a fundamental level. One of the keys, it seems to me, is connection with familiarity. Silent Hill uses normal, every day locales (an elementary school, a mall, an apartment complex) and then taints them with monsters, death, and eventually decrepitness. Nanashi No Geemu's cursed RPG works the same way: it evokes a feeling of familiarity in the user--an involuntary feeling of comfort--and then twists that feeling into something much more sinister than it really has any right to muster. I ran across another game this evening that strikes me as an excellent example of this theory. Eversion is a light, Mario-esque platformer. It has happy music, 8-bit graphics, and a unique game mechanic. It's unfortunately only available for Windows (though it ran without error on my Mac via Crossover). At first, it seems like somebody's cute attempt at 1980's era platforming game play. But very quickly it becomes clear that the game has an agenda and it's not all blue skies and happy flowers. I won't ruin it for you, but give the game a shot. It gets pretty hard but I advise you to stick with it. Be sure to ignore the comments on the main download page, as they will spoil it for you. Eversion works very much like Nanashi No Geemu in that it lulls you into a comfortable zone with a familiar style. It also twists its particular knife pretty slowly; it's not until the fifth or sixth level that you really realize how carefully the entire thing has been planned. But the result is pretty neat, once again proving that horror does not require high-end graphics tech to be effective. (Interestingly, the game also adds more weight to the idea that sound plays a much more important role in the creation of tension.) So, another ingredient of successful horror games: familiarity as a way to surprise the player. Not every title does this, but I think that a number of the really good ones do.