Chris' Survival Horror Quest http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/ A database of every console survival horror game ever created, complete with design commentary, screenshots, and reviews. My goal is to play all the titles in this genre to learn what makes the good games good and the bad games oh so bad. en-us Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:47:33 MST Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:47:33 MST http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Chris' Amazing RSS Generator chris@dreamdawn.com chris@dreamdawn.com The Rise of Casual Horror http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8302 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...

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. ]]> Sun, 29 Jan 2012 01:47:32 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8302 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8302#comments Internet Chestnut #268: Survival Horror vs Action Horror http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8248 Here's a big version.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 h...


Here's a big version.
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.]]> Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:31:17 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8248 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8248#comments Day of Scouring, Night of Sacrifice http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8240 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 i... 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!]]> Mon, 09 Jan 2012 02:36:22 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8240 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8240#comments From Russia With Love http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8219 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, ...
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. ]]> Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:17:02 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8219 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8219#comments This Time it's Personal http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8208 This image turned out to be a hoax, but the fear was realIn 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 th...


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. ]]> Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:41:05 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8208 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8208#comments Wind-up Knight on iOS http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8189 Please bear with me for a moment as I take a moment to mention Wind-up Knight again. We've just released a version for iOS, which you can find at the App Store. There's also a new update for Android out today as well. This game is the r... Wind-up Knight again. We've just released a version for iOS, which you can find at the App Store. There's also a new update for Android out today as well.



This game is the reason that I haven't blogged about horror games much this year. Please check it out and let me know what you think! ]]> Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:53:56 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8189 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8189#comments Dead Space 2 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8185 I have finally finished another horror game and written a review. This time it's Dead Space 2, which I quite enjoyed. You can read the review, which turned out a bit longer than I had anticipated. I've been itching to write about horror games for mo...
I have finally finished another horror game and written a review. This time it's Dead Space 2, which I quite enjoyed. You can read the review, which turned out a bit longer than I had anticipated. I've been itching to write about horror games for months (not to mention the horror conference I attended back in November, but that'll have to wait for a future post), and it feels nice to get this one out the door.

Part of the reason for the length of the Dead Space 2 article is that I took the opportunity to discuss the concept of negative space. We've talked about negative space on this blog for years, but I haven't had a convenient term for it; the aforementioned Dakota State horror conference gave me this nifty term for the concept. Negative space is the area in which the game (or film, or any sort of narrative) provides clues to some vague, larger structure, but never fills in the details. It is Akira Yamaoka's "imagination space," surrounded by clues and incongruent information carefully planted for the player to discover. Negative space is all of the parts of the story that go unaddressed, the bits that must exist and yet are never given actual form. In horror, negative space is of prime importance because it is often home to the scariest of creatures: the ones that we create for ourselves to satisfy the unanswered questions in the story.

At any rate, there's much more to be said about negative space, but I was happy to have the opportunity to use this useful term in my Dead Space 2 review. Dead Space 2, it turns out, doesn't have enough negative space, though that's about its only shortcoming. ]]> Mon, 12 Dec 2011 02:08:19 MST http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8185 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8185#comments Happy Halloween http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8175 Happy Halloween, folks! I mentioned in my previous post that I would soon return to a regular posting schedule. I know, it's a promise I've made before, and one that is increasingly difficult to keep. For this post, let me tell you about what I'v...
I mentioned in my previous post that I would soon return to a regular posting schedule. I know, it's a promise I've made before, and one that is increasingly difficult to keep. For this post, let me tell you about what I've been up to for the past six month that has prevented me from really tearing into the flesh of the stack of horror games sitting on my shelf.

As I mentioned a few months back, I left my job at Google this year to found an indie game studio called Robot Invader. Over the last five months we've worked our butts off to get our first game finished. It's a title called Wind-up Knight, and we launched it on Android last week (check it out on Android Market). An iOS version is coming soon. Wind-up Knight has eaten 110% of my time--my sleep schedule (and that of my other cohorts at Robot Invader) dipped into the "less than five hours per night" range for a while there. Now that the Android version is out the pressure is starting to ease, and I've managed to put a few hours into Dead Space 2 this week.

But my schedule is one that drinks a lot of coffee and doesn't like taking breaks. Tonight I fly to Montreal to speak at the Montreal International Games Summit, both about Android games and a little bit about horror as well. On Wednesday I leave Montreal and fly to South Dakota for Dakota State's conference on horror games, where I'm giving a keynote. Saturday evening I return to the San Francisco Bay Area, where hopefully I can relax for a day or two before stuff gets crazy again.

All of this is a long excuse for not writing more about horror games. I shall soon write something about the content of my horror mini-talk at MIGS, and my keynote at Dakota State. Then maybe I can play some horror games again. That'd be nice.]]> Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:38:16 MDT http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8175 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8175#comments Sweet Home on Destructoid http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8171 Destructoid has an extremely through write-up of Sweet Home, the best I've seen. It's also the most information you can find about this game in English, as far as I can tell. If you are interested in the history of the Resident Evil series, or want t...
Destructoid has an extremely through write-up of Sweet Home, the best I've seen. It's also the most information you can find about this game in English, as far as I can tell. If you are interested in the history of the Resident Evil series, or want to see how horror games on the NES work, check it out.


PS: I am not dead, only sleeping. Actually, I'm not sleeping at all, and that's the problem. Updates to resume soon, I promise.]]> Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:07:46 MDT http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8171 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8171#comments Biometric Analysis of Horror Games http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8160 Gamasutra is running the most complete biometrics study of horror games that I've seen. It's fascinating research, and the end page of conclusions is particularly useful for the horror game designer. Most interestingly to me, the study finds key diffe... the most complete biometrics study of horror games that I've seen. It's fascinating research, and the end page of conclusions is particularly useful for the horror game designer. Most interestingly to me, the study finds key differences between how "core" gamers and "casual" gamers are scared. Core games see through scripted sequences and are less scared by them; casual gamers are not as familiar with the language of games and are thus more affected by scripted sequences and cutscenes. Alan Wake and Dead Space 2 were effective with both groups, but Condemned was more effective with core players than casual. This is great stuff, check it out.]]> Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:57:15 MDT http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8160 http://www.dreamdawn.com/sh/post_view.php?index=8160#comments