I'm writing this post from a hotel room in central London. I'm visiting the UK in order to attend the Develop Conference, a Europe-centric conference for game developers. Yesterday I took the train south to Brighton for the first day of the conference, a special day focused on mobile developers, and gave a talk to a sparse audience about my Android game, Replica Island. This is the third big conference I've spoken at this year; last year I did about twelve different events, which, thinking back on it now is fairly crazy. My talk yesterday differed a bit from my normal pitch. I usually spend a lot of time telling game developers how to get the most out of Android phones. While there was a little bit of that in this talk, I decided to spend most of my time talking about my particular game development experience. What went right, what went wrong, what I intended to do and what I learned in the process, that kind of thing. Something weird happened while I was designing the slides for this talk: though my intention to was speak about how side-scrollers might be successful on a phone, I kept coming back to design ideas that originally clawed their way into my consciousness via horror games. I often reference Jonathan Blow's point about 'interestingness' in my talks; this is the idea that a good game design is one that keeps the player interested any way that it can, be that via interesting game mechanics or art style or narrative or music or whatever. Blow warns that pursuing innovation for the sake of innovation is "misguided" because innovation isn't always interesting. That idea was certainly instructive in my design of Replica Island: I explicitly chose to base my design on tried-and-true mechanics and then increase the "interestingness" of the game through other means. But it occurred to me while preparing for this talk that the real proof of Blow's point can be readily found in horror games, and that my approach to making my cute retro side scroller more fun was clearly influenced by common horror game patterns. For example, take a game like Rule of Rose. I feel pretty much the same way about Rule of Rose now as I did back in 2007: it's terrible. It's got fantastic art and an interesting story line, and I dug the music at first, but the game itself is basically unplayable: the collision detection doesn't work, combat doesn't work, the dog mechanic doesn't work; I finally quit playing it because I got stuck in a section where I cannot progress and yet I cannot go back. The game is broken. And yet, and yet, Rule of Rose has a pretty major following. It has its own high-quality fan site that, by the way, is still being updated here in 2010. Every time I post an angry rant about this game, a couple of hardcore fans come out of the woodwork to tell me to give it another chance (I expect the same result from this post, and it's not even really about Rule of Rose). Clearly some people didn't just complete this game, they really enjoyed it. Rule of Rose is, I think, an excellent proof of Blow's interestingness idea: though I didn't get hooked myself, a lot of folks were so in love with the art, the style, the characters, and especially the narrative that they were willing to forgive and ignore absolutely egregious design and implementation failures. There are lots of other mediocre games that have better mechanics but duller story lines (like, say, Cold Fear or Carrier, just to name two), but nobody makes fan sites for those games. It's not just that those titles are mediocre, it's that they simply aren't interesting enough. When I went about designing Replica Island, I did it the way I expect horror games do it: narrative first. I wrote an outline to the story, decided it wasn't interesting enough, and then reassembled it as an out-of-order mixture of past events ("memories" in the game) and present day. This narrative structure ended up defining the level progression and pacing for the game. I added a lot of dialog, and I tried to make my characters have a little more depth than the average side-scroller. Taking a page out of the book of traditional horror design, I added snippets of an old diary to each level, each revealing slightly more about the author than the last. I tried to make the narrative interesting first and foremost, though at the same time I worked to ensure that the narrative could be entirely skipped by players who just want to crush enemies. Once that foundation was in place, I spent the rest of my time actually making the game--getting the mechanics right and tuning the levels and doing all the super-important mechanical stuff that makes up most of the moment-to-moment gameplay experience. Ideally, my game should be rock solid without any narrative; just in case it isn't, or to keep players who aren't really partial to side-scrollers playing, I tried to use narrative as a way to increase the interestingness of my game. This is, thinking about it now, a throughly Survival Horror approach to game design. It's hard to tell how effective I was at actually making a fun game, or if the focus on narrative helped. The user reviews have been pretty good, but there's no obvious preference exhibited by commenters on Android Market (comments about the narrative seem to fall into "great story" and "tl;dr" categories with equal frequency). I'm certain that the art quality and style (courtesy of my good friend Genki) had at least as much to do with positive reviews as the narrative. And though I messed up the mechanics in a couple of places, the game seems to be generally fun for people to play. I'm quite proud that it's one of the most-played games I've ever worked on. Standing up on the stage in Brighton yesterday, I struggled a bit to convey this line of thinking to the audience. I mentioned the focus on narrative being a side-effect of my horror research, but I don't think this was a particularly salient part of the lecture (though I did notice a few raised eyebrows). But thinking about it later, it occurred to me that I probably couldn't have made a cute retro side scroller for a mobile phone if I hadn't had horror games in my back pocket as a reference. That's evidence that the thesis of this site--that the traits of horror games might be applicable to other genres--might be true. That's pretty cool.

You might recall that about a year ago, I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Thinking After Dark conference (my notes: one, two, and three). Now, several of the papers presented at that conference (including, I'm honored to report, my own) are available in the latest issue. Half of the issue is in French, but for those of you who (like me) don't speak that beautiful language, there's still a lot of quality to digest here. I particularly enjoyed William Huber's Catch and Release: Ludological Dynamics in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, and Clara Fernàndez-Vara's Dracula Defanged: Empowering the Player in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which, as she clearly points out, is not a horror game). My own paper is about Japanese culture as viewed through the lens of horror games. I've gone ahead and posted the slides (2.4mb pdf) from the talk (though they might make more sense if you read the paper first). My idea is that Japanese horror games, even when trying to appear western, are throughly rooted in their home culture, and by studying Japanese horror game tropes we can actually find clues to the way that Japan works as a whole. I'm also really interested in the idea that culture shock--this unbalanced feeling that we get by seeing works that were developed with motives we do not understand--is a huge affordance to horror because it is so unbalancing. As I've written here before, I'm sure a big part of the draw of Asian horror movies is that they do not follow American cliches, and without the bedrock of comfortable patterns to assist us, we feel out of control and, consequently very scared. Anyway, check out the issue! It's pretty awesome to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, especially alongside such other interesting research.

I'm several hours into Heavy Rain now, and I'm throughly enjoying it. There are some flaws here and there but generally the whole thing is amazingly well done, and unlike 99% of other games on the market today. I'll post a lot more about it when I finish.

Playing Heavy Rain got me thinking about the Inversely Suspicious Character Problem. I just made that phrase up; maybe there's a formal way to describe this literary problem. The Inversely Suspicious Character Problem is an issue that plagues all types of mysteries, but is particularly damaging to whodunits. I define the problem as follows: Regardless of how dramatically suspicion is cast on a particular character, an astute reader will tend to suspect the most innocent character. Another way to say that is: mysteries authors that design their stories to surprise the reader by revealing the evil-doer at the very end must take steps to ensure that the criminal is beyond suspicion up until the last moment. If the reader already suspects a character and their suspicion turns out to be correct, the surprise is lost, so the author must work to mislead the reader. But a reader who is familiar with this sort of mystery avoids jumping to the obvious conclusion and instead simply looks for a character who seems to be entirely free of taint; this character is most probable to be the real criminal at the end. This doesn't really take any brain power, and so it's not as rewarding as deciphering the mystery given the clues that the author provides, and the result is that the surprise ending loses much of its punch.

Different authors deal with this problem in different ways. One way is simply to introduce so many characters that many end up being incidental, hopefully making inductive selection of the real culprit difficult. But even then, the author runs the risk of annoying the reader when a character who has absolutely no bearing on the story takes the blame. Criminals who turn out to be characters who were introduced early in the work and then quickly discarded (see: any given Scooby-Doo episode), or even worse, characters who enter the story only at the very end, are infuriating to readers because the clues that they've been mentally tracking over the course of the story turn out to be worthless.

Another approach is to avoid the problem entirely by revealing the criminal early in the drama and then making the story focus on the detective who figures it all out. Columbo works this way, and it's quite satisfying. Other authors reveal the criminal but then provide the reader with a different problem, such as how the crime itself was committed (and indeed, in many locked-room murder mysteries the actual murderer is much less important than how they did it). In The Hound of the Baskervilles, as in many other Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle casts doubt over everybody by using an obviously unreliable narrator (Dr. Watson) and integrating the secret movements of the Holmes into the set of clues presented to the reader. This is genius because when it is revealed that Holmes has been working on the case in secret, many of the unresolved loose ends suddenly resolve themselves and the reader has a chance to make the mental leap to the real killer just as the story is about to reveal him itself, thus magnifying the surprise and satisfaction felt by the reader. Many Golden Age detective novels rely on a secondary character who jumps to all of the obvious conclusions before the reader has a chance to, thus focusing (sometimes deceivingly) the readers attention on a subset of clues. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot has Captain Hastings, Sherlock Holmes has Dr. Watson, and there are many others. Sometimes the side-kick is just there to give the detective a reason to talk about the case.

Whatever the method, mystery authors who seek to surprise the reader have to do something to conceal their criminal without lying to the reader or holding back clues. But this very act of attempted misdirection is a way for the reader to identify the real enemy; whomever the spotlight of suspicion shines on the least is quite likely to be guilty. So there needs to be some extra step, some other sort of twist, to keep the story relevant.

My one complaint with Heavy Rain is that I've deciphered the killer after only a few hours of play. I had a pretty good idea who to suspect even before all of the principal characters had been introduced. You can see the game going out of its way to cast suspicion in certain directions, but I'm pretty confident that in doing so its creators have instead highlighted the real criminal. It's not that the story or characters are poor, it's just that this is a form with which I'm familiar and the regular tropes are all accounted for. Now, I could be wrong, or the game could get real tricky and feature multiple endings with different characters named as the antagonist, but probably the end will reveal the character whom I've suspected since the second hour of play. There are quite a few other loose ends to tie up that I have no idea about, so I'm hoping the end isn't completely predictable, but now that I've fixed the killer in my mind there's much less brain power needed to play the game. Hopefully I'm wrong, and the Inversely Suspicious Character will turn out to be just another red herring.

Final note: DON'T YOU DARE discuss the real killer in Heavy Rain in the comments. Not even with spoiler tags. As confident as I am in my selection, having the game spoiled for me would ruin all of the anticipation of finding out if my theory is right.

Seriously, this is important. The recently released Wii horror game, Ju-on: The Grudge, is not a fantastic game. It's plagued by a game design that values one-hit kills and requires levels to be replayed over and over, and yet it's so simple that no amount of replaying can really make you a better player. The level designs themselves are schizophrenic; you are required to explore each level in order to find batteries, but the battery mechanic also acts as a time limit, which encourages you to b-line for the end of the level with minimal exploration. The art is good and the scares, while repetitive, are effective; the controls are interesting and the sound is pretty great. But while there are a few glimmers of brilliance, the level design relegates the game to mediocrity. And yet, I think that Juon is an extremely important game. It's the best example I've seen, in any genre, of a game made to target a specific audience the way that movies are. Juon is the exact equivalent of a teen horror movie; it's simple and designed to be enjoyed with friends. And as far as I can tell, the target audience for this game is teen girls. What Hollywood (and its equivalents here in Japan) understand is that generation after generation of teen movie-goers will spend their $10 to see whatever shlock the gets thrown on the screen as long as a few basic tropes are maintained. Pop-out scares, sex and gore, ominous or vaguely unhappy endings, and improbable twists are common traits, but there are many others. See also: Nightmare on Elm Street/Friday the 13th/Scream/I Know What You Did Last Summer/etc etc etc. It's not that all of the films in the teen horror genre are bad--the key observation that Hollywood has made is that their income is fairly reliable regardless of the film quality. Anyway, one of the reasons that these films are successful is that they encourage kids to watch in groups. The fun part about horror movies when you're a teenager is seeing them with friends, even when the scares are cheap. Even really, truly bad movies can be fun when you've got somebody to wisecrack with, and a lot of folks will sit through films with friends that they wouldn't have the nerve for alone. I think it's this social aspect that makes horror films--particularly those aimed at teens--so successful. The creators of the Juon game get this idea at a fundamental level. The game is aggressively casual--the control scheme is simple, the difficulty never spikes, and there's no real rules to learn before jumping in. And, most importantly, it supports a second player: using the second Wiimote, a friend can cause scary pop-out events to take place whenever they want. It is this feature that is key to understanding why Juon matters: the game is not intended to be played alone. With friends around, the snail-like movement system and cheap one-hit kills are more forgivable. I think that this game is targeted squarely at young, casual gamers who enjoy horror with friend but are not about to go buy Resident Evil 5. A large segment of that group, I think, is young women, a large audience that rarely receives recognition. Juon is exactly the game version of a teen horror flick. Yeah, it's shallow, the scares are cheap, the story goes nowhere, and the gameplay is kind of annoying. But it was designed, I think, with a specific audience in mind, one that is a huge segment for horror films but rarely a target for horror games. And in that respect, it's extremely well done. Perhaps this is the result of Juon director Takashi Shimizu's participation in the project, or maybe it's just the work of a smart developer. Either way, I'm impressed that the model was so effectively translated. It will be interesting to see if this experiment results in financial success. It should also be interesting to compare and contrast Juon with Calling, which came out in Japan this week. Like Juon, it's a first-person flashlight-wielding horror game for Wii involving Japanese horror film tropes. I'm interested to see if it will feel the same as Juon, or if it follows a more traditional horror gamer-focused route.

As good as it gets? Problem: Balancing game difficulty across ten or twenty hours of play in a way that enables all types of gamers to enjoy your game is hard. Games that get too hard will be frustrating, but games that are too easy are boring. There's a sweet spot between those two that makes a perfect game, but the trick is that the entire scale changes from player to player. If you're a game designer, one of your primary challenges is to ensure that your players don't get bored and don't run into difficulty cliffs. Solution: Let the player buy their way out of difficult situations. Rather than just relying on maximum gaming prowess, you can let the player who is bored or the player that isn't quite good enough to side-step a particular challenge by putting in effort somewhere else. Very often in horror games lately, this system takes the form of an in-game store. For example, consider Devil May Cry. That game very quickly sizes you up as a player; you're either hardcore or casual, and by the end of the first chapter the game knows which and can taylor the rest of the experience accordingly. It does this by throwing a huge difficulty spike at you in the form of the very first boss. The path from start to that first boss, which is a sort of giant lava spider thing, is pretty smooth and easy; there's only two different types of enemies to dispatch and Dante is such a badass that just about any player should be able to make it. The boss, however, is incredibly difficult for a first-time player. Everybody I know who played Devil May Cry had the experience of hitting a brick wall when they faced the first boss. The genius of this system is that there are basically three ways to get passed the boss, and depending on which you choose the game can safely label you as hardcore or casual. The first way is just to be a badass player from the first level--this clearly marks you as hardcore. The second way is to enable the easy mode when prompted; after you beat the first couple of rooms the game lets you know that you can tone the difficulty down if you choose. Players who do this are not in it for the challenge (and aren't putting their prides on the line), so it's safe to assume that they want a more casual experience. The third way is to power up Dante before facing the boss by beating an inordinate number of enemies. It's this third method which is key to identifying the type of player who is in it for the challenge but isn't necessarily interested in having to do every single challenge flawlessly. By killing enemies you can collect orbs, which you can use to purchase power-ups at an in-game store (you also have the chance to power-up Dante between levels). For the first boss, a particular powerup--"Air Raid"--is extremely handy. But to buy Air Raid you need to fight a lot more bad guys than you would normally face if just progressing through the game normally. A player that does this is intentionally grinding; he leaves rooms and then re-enters them so that the enemies will respawn and he can fight them again. This kind of player is also encouraged to graduate into the flawless hardcore player by rewarding him when he uses variety in his combo strings (which Devil May Cry links to "style points"). The happy-to-grind player is also hardcore; they don't want any hand holding but are willing to work around a particularly hard section by putting in extra play in other sections. The game store is key to capturing this type of game. This system actually works very well, which is why tons of games use it now. God of War, Ninja Gaiden and other brawlers have similar systems, but so does Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5, and Dead Space. The implementation in each of these last three examples varies, but the intent is the same: to give players a way to explicitly control the difficulty of the game without making them feel like they are being given a handicap. It also gives these games a way to reward exploration. The problem with the in-game store is that, when it comes to horror games, the game mechanic can come into conflict with the game narrative. Demons leaving glowing orbs in the world when they die is pretty easy to accept, but snakes dropping gold coins? Or hulking flesh monsters keeping valuable weapons schematics in their back pockets as they lumber around their derelict space craft? Sometimes it just doesn't make any sense. In Resident Evil 4, the store is an actual in-game guy. Though campy, I think that this implementation is the best; it makes narrative sense that different store owners, despite all looking like clones of each other, might have different stock. In Resident Evil 5, the store guy has been dispensed with and now you can only make purchases and level up before entering a level. For no particular reason (well, actually, to prevent the player from powering up too quickly), certain upgrades for weapons are not immediately available. As a in-game guy, this might make sense; the clerk can just be out of stock. As a sterile UI screen, it makes a lot less sense. Dead Space's implementation also bothers me. If we're to believe that Isaac is this awesome engineer, shouldn't he be able to like, I don't know, hack the store software and get the items he needs rather than having to loot the corpses of fallen scissor hand monsters? Maybe that was too Bioshock. Another issue with this kind of upgrade system is that it can't be relied upon for normal game play. The game designer must assume that the player will not upgrade his weapons, or that he will upgrade them in an inefficient way. The goal is to provide a workaround for difficulty cliffs, not a new minmax problem. Games like Fatal Frame 2, the upgrade system was intended to reward players who are good at difficult "zero shots," but the end boss was balanced such that players who didn't upgrade their camera in the right way could get to the end of the game with a bunch of useless skills. To fix that problem they had to move the last save point far away from the end boss and put a bunch of easy enemies in between the two so that players could get some extra level-up points after they had saved their game. I complained about this at the time--it was a hack necessitated by the way that their upgrade system works and by the design of the end boss, and it made the end of the game very frustrating. But the worst offender has to be the Resident Evil 5 money system. Other than the upgrade gating, there's no problem with the actual implementation: pick up funds by killing enemies or by finding them hidden around, and use those to buy weapons and upgrades. The problem is that, in the context of the game, this turns Chris and Sheva into grave robbers. Never mind the ever-present colonialism overtones that have sparked debate in the past (which I still maintain are unintentional--the game strives to avoid this linkage, but it often fails)--it doesn't feel good to go into the ancient ruins of a lost civilization and steal golden statuettes in order to buy bigger guns. I'm not just trying to be politically correct here: for the protagonists, who are ostensibly working for an African aid organization, this sort of behavior is in direct opposition to their character. In fact, the narrative and the believability of the game's world and story are hurt by this system. So I'm beginning to think that the in-game store system isn't a very good fit for horror games. It works well in games like Devil May Cry, where there's not much need to get the player to suspend their disbelief and keep it there. But in horror games, working the store into the narrative in a way that makes sense seems pretty tough. I've yet to see it work smoothly; Resident Evil 4 is probably the best example, and even then the system adds to the game's overall ridiculousness. Usually these games take place in extreme situations, so it's reasonable to expect the characters to act in extreme ways. When they instead steal lost relics out of burial grounds or take a break from rescuing the president's daughter to shoot a diamond out a rock, we are reminded that this is a game system and encouraged to think of it only as a collection and minmax challenge.

I'm close to ten hours into Resident Evil 5. So far, I'm throughly enjoying it; it's not some great masterwork but it's an extremely well-made game and I haven't run into any major frustration points. Unlike the technically similar Dead Space, the moment-to-moment game play is deep enough that simple pattern alterations (new enemy, new weapon, new location) are enough to keep the whole thing from feeling repetitive.

Still, it is quite repetitive. The formula is very well defined at this point: traverse through an area that establishes the current location, spend some time shooting zombies, move on to a simple puzzle or QTE event, uncover some story details, fight something new, fight the boss monster. The boss monsters are, as in every Resident Evil game, people that transform into giant tentacle monsters who have conveniently-colored bulbous weak spots. After shooting the red or orange swollen spots and then doing a particularly strong attack when the monster is down, we are treated to a cutscene about the story and the end of a chapter. At the beginning of the next chapter we get the chance to buy items and organize our inventory before continuing. The reverse influence from Devil May Cry is very clear.

But despite the rather systematic precision with which this formula is iterated, it actually works pretty well. I am particularly interested in the segments that aren't about fighting, the location-establishment and story-building sections. These are the areas where Resident Evil 5 is strongest as a horror game. As in every previous Resident Evil game, there are files to find that fill out the back story and ancillary characters though diaries and reports. Along with the cutscenes, these documents are the player's primary source of information about the context within which they are operating, and though they can be skipped, the game is much more interesting with them.

The locales that the players visit are the other major storytelling vector in the game. When in exploration mode, Chris and Sheva move through areas that bear the mark of past events. Sometimes this is simple foreshadowing; an empty, quiet, blood-spattered hall is always a good place to heal and reload, as some new threat is surely around the next corner. But other times, the locales themselves suggest a much larger story world. For example, the goal for the first couple of chapters is to track down a slimeball arms dealer named Irving. Irving only has about five lines in the entire game, and they are all conveyed through cutscenes, so he's not a deep character by any means. But if you are paying attention, you eventually realize that he ran an oil field in Africa that served as both cover and a source of funding for biological weapons research. His work is recent, but later evidence that you uncover links it to the operations of the Umbrella corporation and provides backstory for the company's movements long before the first Resident Evil events occur. The oil field and subsequent processing plant are just set pieces along the way for players who are not paying attention to the story; a new backdrop against which to shoot zombies in the head. But to people who care about the narrative, the locales provide very specific story context.

The other narrative method that Resident Evil 5 uses is dialog between Chris and Sheva. Since Resident Evil 4 the background environments in Resident Evil games have become much more visual and static; it used to be that every interesting corner of every room would have a line of text associated with it, and by throughly investigating everything the player could learn, often through simple suggestion, about their environment and their character. But the increase in pace and streamlined approach to the series defined by Resident Evil 4 doesn't really allow for (or encourage) ransacking and investigation of everything. So instead, the characters talk to each other about what is going on and what they see. It's a method that is used sparingly but to great effect; Chris and Sheva's observations on their environment do a lot to tell us about how they feel about it.

I don't mean to suggest that Resident Evil 5 has some fantastic story. It's just the standard evil-corporation-bio chemical-underground laboratory-conspiracy schlock that they repeat every iteration. It's fairly predictable and, unless they pull off some crazy Bioshock twist in the next few hours, I think it will end the way most Resident Evil games end: with a giant base explosion enveloping the otherwise-indestructible final boss and the fate of key antagonists left ambiguous. But the story that is there, however trite, is well-told. For players interested in more than just exploding heads, there's more here to find.

This is my primary complaint with games like Gears of War, which an extremely similar type of game system. In Gears, there's absolutely no time spent on exposition. The cut scenes exist only to progress the active plot, and while there are some clues about the background of the characters and the events that lead up to the story, it's so out of focus that it really doesn't matter at all. The locales really are just set-pieces; despite being beautifully rendered they have no particular meaning or relevance. Nothing can be investigated, and the characters never talk about their surroundings. Even when the protagonist visits his home after spending years in prison, he doesn't have a single comment to say about it. He's too busy shooting aliens in the face to notice.

But as a player, I want my characters to notice. I want more information than what is immediately available on the surface. That's what keeps the game interesting when the game play itself starts to wear thin. In extreme situations, a compelling narrative can keep people playing an otherwise terrible game. Resident Evil 5's story is nothing to write home about but I'm very happy that it's there. While the game play is deep enough to last for a while, the addition of story and narrative, especially when communicated a variety of ways, makes Resident Evil 5 a much more interesting game than some of its contemporaries.

Trunks in a storage room About four years ago I was working in the game industry making video games. At the time I was getting ready to start on a PSP game (this was before the PSP had shipped, but game development was already in full swing), and I wanted to get up to speed with my company's 3D graphics engine. So I decided to make a couple of simple game demos to improve my understanding of the tech. First I made a 3D knock-off of an old NES puzzle game called Lot Lot, which worked out well but wasn't very sexy. At the same time I was trying to pitch the idea that my company embark on a 3D adventure game (horror or not), so to back up that proposal I decided to build a 3D horror game demo using the company tech. My good friend (and fellow hardcore horror game fan) Casey Richardson agreed to make the art, and our goal was to spend a month or two and make something that was playable on PS2 and showed that this style of game could be accomplished without huge changes to our existing codebase. Since we were only working in our free time, the total duration of the project ended up being closer to three months (though we could have easily pulled it off in a month if we worked full time on it), but the result was pretty cool. What we ended up was an engine that supported fixed and tracking cameras, the Devil May Cry control scheme, dynamic lights and shadows, Silent Hill-esque film grain effects, and a pretty neat system for dynamically blending movement and animation to produce believable analog motion. We had a single test character named Trunks, which Casey hilariously made look like a pair of disconnected legs with a little bit of spine coming out of the severed hips, and a map containing a bunch of rooms that you could walk around and explore. Though we were just using test art (which turned out to be The Way To Go with this kind of game--see the next section), the game ran at 60fps and the game mechanics were immediately obvious to anybody who picked up the controller. Casey came up for the name: Terminal Station, taken from a 1954 film by Vittorio De Sica. This exercise taught me tons of stuff about how survival horror games are made. One of the first things we learned was that placing regions in space that cause certain cameras to activate is way harder than it looks. You know how in Resident Evil you can run around and eventually see every corner of a given room because the various cameras in that room are set up to show different angles without overlapping? Yeah, setting that up is really hard. Casey did it by hand in the 3D modeling tool, but we quickly realized that a real game in this style would require a special tool to make camera regions. Otherwise it was too easy to make a room in which the player could walk off the screen, or simply be unable to explore a section of the space. Moving cameras make this a little bit easier, but it's a much harder problem than I expected it would be. Another thing we learned was that fixed camera games make so many real time 3D graphics problems easier. For example, our PS2 engine only allowed the character to be lit by 4 dynamic light sources at any given time, but we wanted to have rooms with a lot of localized lights (see the shot of the open refrigerator for an example). We realized that you can secretly turn lights on and off when the camera cuts and the player will never notice. This is a super simple solution and it worked great--we were able to make rooms with tons of lights and just link sets of four to specific camera angles. When playing the game, the player would appear to walk through the environment and be lit by all the lights in the room. We did the same thing with the shadow: the shadow can only be cast from one light (we only supported a single shadow), but depending on the angle of the camera we allowed which light was responsible for the shadow to change. That made it pretty easy to set up really dramatic shots without compromising the design of each room. (As an aside for the graphics programmers out there, this method also let us separate "shadow-receivable" geometry from "shadow-immune" geometry so our projective texture shadow only had to render a subset of the level art twice). Though my company didn't end up pursuing this style of game, I am extremely glad to have done this project because I learned tons about how many of the games listed on this site work. A lot of the code (or, more often, the general approach rather than the actual code) got reused in other projects (the blending motion and animation system survived for another year, only to be killed when the real game it was in got cancelled), and Casey and I learned a boatload. I'll post some screenshots from our demo below. This isn't a real game, and will never be a real game, it was just a learning exercise. But it was a lot of fun and it played pretty well! Screenshots: In the kitchen Dorm hallway Dorm room A secret passage The storage closet

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.

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.

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.

Atmosphere? Check. Difficulty? Not so much. My goal in running this site, as I originally wrote back in 2003, is to identify the characteristics common to all good horror games. Five years later I'm going to revise that statement a little, because for every rule that I can come up with there is at least one major exception. So I am going to omit the "all" portion of my goal statement and focus on the major characteristics that good horror games tend to employ. In this first post on this topic, I want to talk about the role of atmosphere and difficulty. Now, atmosphere is probably a characteristic worthy of its own post, but for now I'd like to discuss the atmosphere as it directly relates to difficulty in horror games. Above-average difficulty is a common trait in popular horror games. The original Resident Evil is a hard game; on top of difficult controls the designers go out of their way to force the player to aggressively ration their resources. Other than Capcom's Maximo, I can't think of any games outside of the horror genre that effectively punish the player for saving their progress. Resident Evil 4, a much newer game, has been streamlined and simplified, but it's still a pretty challenging game. And generally, I think horror games are a lot less forgiving about the degree of challenge that they apply to the player; there's often no option to continue, save points are few and far between, and most protagonists can only withstand a few enemy attacks before they are killed. At first I thought that difficulty was there just to increase the amount of stress that the player experiences while playing the game. Making death an all-to-easy outcome of any given encounter heightens the player's need to move carefully and make few mistakes, which I figured helped the game feel scary. While that assessment is true, it doesn't go deep enough. I now think that difficulty is directly tied to the feelings of fear that good horror games are able to create, and not just because the threat of death is stressful. A couple of years ago game designer and author of a fascinating blog Dan Cook authored an article about generating artificial emotions (link probably requires Gamasutra.com registration). In it he discusses a cognitive science theory called the Two Factor Theory of Emotion. Dan says, The theory states that in order for an emotion to be felt, two factors must be present: Physiological change: The person feels elevated heart rate, sweaty skin and other elements of physiological arousal. Cognitive label of the physiological change: Based off the context of the situation, the person assigns a label to the physiological change. Simply put, when your body reacts physically to some stimuli and you mind assigns meaning to your physical state, you synthesize an emotional response. This theory has lead to some really interesting experiments where researchers have been able to convince test subjects that they felt a specific emotion by causing physiological changes to occur for some unrelated reason. The idea is that if your body is in an elevated state and you are suddenly introduced to some unrelated context, your mind can misread the physical reaction you are experiencing and synthesize some emotion that you would have not otherwise felt. I think that this has obvious implications for horror games. If we assume that difficult, unforgiving game play causes the player physical stress, we can assume that playing these games causes a "physiological change" to occur. Did you jump in your seat a little the first time those zombie dogs came crashing through the window? Your heart rate was probably up, the adrenaline was pumping; your body reacted physically to the game. At the same time, the game is piping horrific images, characters, and sounds into your brain at sixty frames per second. The atmosphere of a good horror game is one designed to be scary, and based on our (admittedly rudimentary) understanding of the Two Factor Theory, this may be enough for your mind to label the physical stress you are experiencing as fear. The physical effects of the difficult game play and the scary context provided by the game click and suddenly you are ready to turn all the lights in your house on. One way we can lend some credibility to this theory is to look at the games that fail to cause this perfect juxtaposition to occur. Of those types of games we have an almost endless supply. Some games don't get the atmosphere right and the difficulty feels unnecessary and boring. Many more games nail the atmosphere but, probably in the interests of being main stream, are not actually all that hard. A lot of games are difficult in ways that causes frustration rather than stress. I read a review of Dead Space in which the reviewer noted that the game was considerably more frightening on the Hard difficulty than it was on Normal. I also stand by my declaration that Siren is the scariest game I've ever played--it's also one of the hardest. I think that it's pretty safe to assume that horror and game play difficulty are closely related, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to believe that the Two Factory Theory is a way to describe that relationship. But, as I said in the introductory paragraph, difficulty isn't the only way to make a game scary; some games, like Silent Hill 2 (my #2 scariest game after Siren) and Hell Night (probably #3) are able to be extremely scary without relying on difficult game play. There are other traits, other variables that horror games leverage to assert their power over us. I'll discuss more of those in a future post.

Jim Sterling has an interesting article over at Destructoid called How Survival Horror Evolved Itself Into Extinction. In it he argues that as games have become more technically advanced, the key features that made PS1- and PS2-era horror games scary have been, well, fixed. Sterling talks about the difficulty of having to deal with awkward controls and fixed camera angles as key elements of the survival horror formula, and in his estimation, the post-Resident Evil 4 world won't abide by those types of mechanics. Though the piece is well written and well thought-out, I don't agree with Sterling's conclusions because I don't think that awkward controls and fixed camera angles are the key design elements of good horror games. Shot composition is definitely extremely important, but we've had well-composited moving cameras since the original Silent Hill. Control problems are something I've discussed here at some length, but fundamentally I don't think there's any reason that an easy-to-control game can't be scary (see also: games like Siren, Clock Tower: The First Fear, etc). Sterling does have a point when it comes to the lack of horror games this generation (I mean, excepting Alone in the Dark 5, Dead Space, Resident Evil 5, Silent Hill 5, Siren: New Translation, F.E.A.R., Condemned 1 and 2, and Fatal Frame 4, though to be fair I think that Jim would discount all of those games except Fatal Frame and Siren as being too action-oriented to be considered classic survival horror). And I even think he's not too far off in his estimation that the mainstream-ification of games has something to do with the dearth of horror games currently available. But I don't think it's quite as simple as "players are used to Halo and Resident Evil 4 and won't accept anything else." I think a better answer is "publishers don't believe that anything other than Halo and Rock Band will sell, and it costs so much to make games nowadays that there's no way they are going to take a risk on a niche genre." This is another well covered topic on this site, and while I hate to be the guy who beats the stuffing out of this particular dead horse, it's true: the market climate that next-gen consoles create is one of conservatism and risk-aversion. You can't double and triple development costs while erasing the installed base without some creative casualties, and genres like survival horror sound like risky bets to most publishers. Resident Evil is not like Halo, and it's not like GTA, and it's not like Metal Gear Solid or Gran Turismo or Madden or any of the other top-tier games from the last few years (publishers have a pretty short memory), and therefore it's weird. So, their reaction is pretty logical: change the format to something more like other things that have sold well recently. This doesn't mean that gamers themselves are tired of the format, or that they are unwilling to accept last-gen controls or game systems. In fact, most other genres haven't changed one bit from the previous generation when it comes to control; it's still just as hard to shoot people in GTA as it was last time around. But publishers see too much risk because next gen costs are so high, so they take the safe position of believing in whatever is currently the rage. The result, unfortunately, is a contraction of available genres. The way to solve this problem is to lower development costs and expand the audience. However, Microsoft and Sony are both failing to do that; their machines cost too much at retail and making a competitive next-gen game is an increasingly expensive proposition. Nintendo has the right idea, which is probably why we've seen a number of horror games announced for that platform (Fatal Frame 4 is out, there's also Cursed Mountain, Sadness, and a couple of others). It's not that gamers' tastes have changed with the times or that advancing technology has left survival horror games behind, it's that the genre itself is too niche to warrant developing for at the moment. Those games that do make it to market will be the ones that publishers feel comfortable with, which is to say that they will resemble last year's hits. This isn't an extinction, it's a pause while we wait for the installed base of next-gen consoles to grow to such a size that niche genres like survival horror are not viewed as risky.

Pow! Take that, traditional horror games! Site regular and forums member death2all recently e-mailed me with a simple question: do I think that the proliferation of "action-horror" games is the death knell for the survival horror genre? Will games that put an emphasis on action, such as Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, replace the traditional survival horror recipe of item puzzles, slow paced traversal, and vulnerable protagonists? This is a legitimate question and I've spent some time thinking about my response, but it is also dangerously close to asinine arguments about the appropriate categorization of specific games. So please, in responding to this post, try to keep the topic focused on what the recent rise in action-oriented horror games means for the genre rather than which games merit labels like "action-horror" or "survival horror." The short answer to death2all's question is no, I don't think that the recent rise of action-oriented horror games means that the survival horror genre is in decline. I don't think that horror and action are incompatible, and I believe that there are many legitimate formats for horror that can peacefully coexist. In games that star a powerful protagonist, traditional-style fear can still be invoked by making the player responsible for less-capable non-player characters. I think that game reviewers will normally prefer games that they perceive to be "new" and "innovative," and are more likely reward new formats with higher scores, but that doesn't mean that "traditional" games are any less fun. The economic environment that new consoles cause is not conducive to niche genres like survival horror, and in less risky environments (like the DS) we see a huge number of "traditional" adventure games, many of which are horror-themed. So no, I think it's a phase, I think it's diversification, I don't think it's a bad Did not destroy horror games. thing and I don't think the genre is going away. But to really provide a more nuanced answer, I think that it's worth exploring the assumptions that the question itself is loaded with. The implicit assumption here is that games that focus on action are a recent development, and that they are an indication that the previous format has been left behind. First of all, I don't think action-oriented horror games began with Resident Evil 4. Of course there are games like The Suffering that merged horror themes with gunplay much earlier than the most recent Resident Evil. But if we go even further back in time, we find games like Zombie Revenge (2000), Nightmare Creatures (1997), and the Splatterhouse series (1990). The advent of this type of game, not to mention hoards of similar titles that employ horror as a visual theme rather than a core design mechanic, did not diminish the quality or popularity of the "traditional" survival horror genre. No, action-oriented horror games are nothing new, and I don't think there is any reason to believe that this latest round will become the only viable horror format. What is different about more recent action-horror games is that they are actually focused on scaring the player rather than just hijacking familiar horror themes. Consider Condemned. This is a very action-heavy game that is quite an effective horror game despite its emphasis on fisticuffs. Scary content and action are not mutually exclusive, and I think that we're going to see genre blending to good effect in the future. What is happening here is not the replacement of one genre with another. Resident Evil 4, and to a lesser extent The Suffering before it, represents a unification of two traditionally opposed styles of game play: PC games vs console games. In fact, this is the second time the Resident Evil series has been the catalyst for Bicultural kids are always hot. such a unification. When the original Resident Evil shipped in 1995, it represented a merger of the PC-exclusive Adventure genre with more action-oriented console games. It was one of the first adventure games to support direct control over the protagonist (a norm for console games but much rarer in the point-and-click PC world), and it injected a huge amount of zombie combat into a traditionally puzzle-oriented design. The hybrid format that Resident Evil provided proved popular with gamers from both sides of the aisle, and it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the series created the horror genre as we know it today. But since then, PC games have shifted away from slow-paced adventure games and towards frantic, action-heavy first person shooters. Resident Evil 4 is the result of the merger of console-style horror games (that is, a genre originally based on PC games) with contemporary PC action games. As with the first game in the series, Resident Evil 4 retains aspects from both of its genetic parents, and is appealing to a very wide audience. In that way it is more similar to the original Resident Evil than any other game in the series. Games are not created in a vacuum; game design is like DNA, combining and mutating with each generation. What we're seeing now is the result of experimental couplings of different types of genres, and I am encouraged that the results seem to be pretty successful. But like DNA, only strong traits of game designs survive, and I think that the aspects of "traditional" survival horror games will continue to be compelling even if they are paired with unfamiliar game mechanics. This isn't the end of the genre, it's a step in the evolutionary cycle, one that we've taken several times before. I think that the result will be diversification and improvement: not every experiment will result in success, and some games will appear to have hardly changed, but in the end we'll have more types of horror games and a wider audience gamers to enjoy them. I can't see how that's a bad thing.

A return to survival horror's roots? Leigh Alexander has an excellent article on the way survival horror games have changed up on Kotaku this morning. If you've never read Alexander's stuff before, she's one of the few game journalists that really gets genres like survival horror (I've linked to her writing before). Her latest article, Does Survival Horror Really Still Exist? is, as usual, in-depth, well written, and thought provoking. In it, Alexander considers the way that lousy combat, a hallmark of traditional survival horror games, has evolved into something very different in recent games like Resident Evil 4. The article describes how the era of Japanese-influenced games, which prioritized psychological fear and slower paced game play, has given way to an era in which Western action-oriented game mechanics are popular. This is certainly a hot topic in the survival horror community. Alexander ends the article on a promising note--apparently after playing through Silent Hill 5 she feels that it is a return to form. It's not often that the mainstream gaming press is able to capture this genre as a whole and discuss it intelligently, and so when a gem like this comes along I feel almost obligated to direct you towards it. She was also nice enough to link to me.

MTV's Multiplayer blog has an excellent series of articles about black professionals in the game industry. The entire series is a really interesting, and I recommend that you read the whole thing. I decided to post about the series because one of the topics that is discussed is the Resident Evil 5 trailer, which, as we've discussed before, ended up offending a lot of people. What's so fantastic about the series is that the diverse opinions that are expressed are coming from people who are authorities on video games. Unlike many other discussions about this topic that popped up on the net, there's no confusion about what games are about or who they are for; the topic is not diluted by general misinformation about video games as a medium. Also, all of the people interviewed for the series explain their perspectives with extreme clarity and articulacy.

I wanted to post a couple of quotes about Resident Evil 5, but if I did that people would probably take them out of context and respond without reading the article as a whole. So instead, I'll just leave you with this quote by Newsweeks' N'Gai Croal that I found really insightful and well-stated:


Go. Read the whole series.

39 seconds to the next checkpoint. Most racing games have checkpoints. The typical implementation gives the player a time limit to reach the next checkpoint, and adds time to the clock when the checkpoint is passed. If time runs out, the race ends prematurely and the game is over. Ever stop to wonder why racing games have this checkpoint system? I mean, the game is usually about racing; there's already a well-understood way to win (come in first) and way to fail (come in forth or worse). Even more perplexing is that the checkpoints in a racing game very quickly become irrelevant; as soon as the player gets good enough to hit checkpoints consistently, he can accumulate enough seconds on the clock that there's very little chance he'll run out of time. Real car races don't feature checkpoints or time limits, so where did the idea for checkpoints come from and why are they so prevalent? A historian will probably tell you that the checkpoint mechanic is a hold-over from arcade game design, which was often focused around getting the player to lose so that they would insert more quarters into the machine. And while that may be true, I think there's a better reason that checkpoints in racing games have survived this long: they provide a short-term goal mechanism. Consider an absolute beginner who plays a racer for the first time. He doesn't know how to drift yet, so the turns are too hard. He keeps running into the walls or driving off the track. Anybody who has played pretty much any racing game has had this experience; at first the mechanics are unwieldy and it takes several races to begin to get into the groove. For this kind of player, coming in first is initially impossible. Unless the AI really significantly cheat to help the player, one crash into a wall is probably enough to ensure that the player is going to finish last in the race. But it's going to take an hour or two for the player to get better, and finishing last over and over again can really be a blow to a new player's ego. So instead, the racer gives the newbie player a short-term goal: don't worry about finishing the race, just try to get to the next checkpoint before time runs out. This mechanism has several benefits: it makes the other cars on the track irrelevant, and pits the player against a fixed and predictable challenge. It also provides a way for the game to end early if the player is really sucking; prolonging failure is never a good idea, and if the player has no chance of winning it's best just to end the game early. Finally, it gives the designers more control over the difficulty of a single track. Once the player can hit checkpoints consistently, he then has to deal with the other cars; checkpoints are a prerequisite to actually participating in the race. That means you can get a lot of play value out of a single track, even if the other cars always drive the same way. The genius of the checkpoint system in racing games is that it is self-deprecating. I don't mean that it makes jokes about how fat it is, I mean that it's a mechanic that automatically becomes irrelevant with time. As the player gets better and is able to hit each checkpoint consistently, he accumulates time so that future checkpoints are easier. Eventually the checkpoints themselves have no effect on the game; the player hits every one of them, and they cease to be an important game mechanic. But by that point, they've already done their job: they've taught the player how to play well enough that he doesn't need them any more. So what's the lesson here? The lesson is that games have to provide a level of difficulty that is appropriate to a wide range of player skills. The racing approach accommodates both newbie players and veterans by providing two separate challenges within the same game space. Players who know what they are doing can jump right in, but players who are new to the game still have a way to get enjoyment out of it. So if you've read this whole thing and have been patiently waiting for me to tie this back in to horror games, this paragraph is for you. Horror games often (but not always) produce a similar effect by combining game play challenge with interesting content. The story, art, and characters in horror games are often the reason that the newbie player is willing to die over and over again without giving up on the game; instead of providing a type of challenge that is specifically geared towards inexperienced players, horror games seek to avoid frustration by being thematically interesting. Sometimes this works; Resident Evil has a very steep difficulty curve and obtuse controls, and yet the game is loved by all sorts of gamers because the story succeeds in hooking the player long enough for them to get good at the game mechanics. And that's the ultimate goal: to keep the player from giving up on the game before he's had a chance to really understand how to play.

The camera system in Fatal Frame 2 is fantastic. This is the last part of a three-part series of posts about how camera systems and character movement have evolved over the last ten years. In part 1 I discussed the problems that horror game developers faced when transitioning from 2D games to 3D games, and in part 2 I talked about the ways improvements that were made to camera and control systems in the second wave of horror games. In this post I'd like to touch on how these camera and control schemes fair today, and mention a few games that have diverged from the norm. The primary problem developers face nowadays is how to mix different types of camera systems (fixed cameras, cameras that follow the player, cameras that are tethered to a pre-defined path) in a way that doesn't make the control scheme impossible to deal with. As I mentioned last time, the Parasite Eve model was popularized by Devil May Cry and remains the approach of choice for most fixed (or mostly-fixed) camera games (think Ninja Gaiden and God of War). Many games have abandoned the fixed camera approach all together and instead focused on smart follow-cams, which usually don't cut and therefore do not suffer from the problem of "forward" changing definition. The games that do mix follow and fixed cameras need to be careful: you can see the system break down in games like Siren where one mode makes perfect sense and the other is jarring whenever it occurs. One game that deserves special mention for its intelligent mixing of cameras and controls is Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly. The camera system in Fatal Frame 2 is phenomenal; it includes fixed cameras, cameras that follow a path, and free-roaming follow cameras. In addition, its control system is robust enough to deal with all of these different permutations. In the intro sequence to this game where the protagonist approaches the cursed village, we are treated to some extremely complicated (from a control point of view) camera shots (cameras following a curve, shot from above, and cutting in 180 degrees), and the system is so smooth that most players probably didn't even notice it. Though Fatal Frame 2 relies on a fairly standard RE-style character-centric system (though it's perhaps a little more sensitive than most other games), on of the keys to its success is that the run button can be held down to move the character forward without any stick input. This allows the player to move forward in a camera-independent way without relying on difficult character-centric movement. Though the Parasite Eve "sticky" camera-centric control scheme would probably have been a better choice for new players, the addition of the run button-based movement removes much of the pain caused by the tank control model. Once the player realizes that this is possible, movement in Fatal Frame 2 becomes a breeze: the player needs only to hold the run button down and make minor adjustments to the left or right in order to drive the character through the environment. Coupled with the vast array of camera behavior that Fatal Frame exhibits, I think that this is an extremely successful example of how to do controls in a cinematic game. Fatal Frame 2 isn't the only game to use a button to move the player forward. The Resident Evil Remake contains one of the best tank control models ever in its "Type C" control scheme. The excellent Resident Evil Remake offers the player a couple of alternate control schemes to choose from, and one of them, "Type C", is by far the best. Under the Type C control scheme, the right trigger button is used to move the player forward, and the analog stick is only necessary for turning left and right. This is fundamentally the same as Fatal Frame 2's run button movement, but it works even better in this context because the GameCube controller's trigger buttons are big and analog. Push the button down part way and the character walks forward, but clicking it down completely will cause him to run. The depth of the button on the GameCube controller gives the player far more control over their movement than analog-stick based systems, and since Resident Evil players are used to holding a button down to run anyway, it's not any more work than normal. In fact, the system works so well that I wish that it were available in every Resident Evil game; the ability to run forward without using the stick and without relying on the direction the camera is looking makes the dreaded tank controls a walk in the park. Unfortunately this control mode didn't make it into the subsequent Resident Evil game on GameCube, Resident Evil 0, probably because that game required the player to use the analog stick and the C-Stick to move two characters around. The last game I'll mention here is Resident Evil 4, which is noteworthy because it effectively merged character- and camera-centric controls. In Resident Evil 4 "forward" is always defined by the direction that the camera is facing, but at the same time "forward" is always the direction that Leon is facing because the camera and Leon are almost always focused on exactly the same point. Unlike many other camera-centric first person games which feature slightly divergent camera and player facing directions (so required because you usually can't see through your character's back), Resident Evil 4 is able to align the two by bringing the camera in very close to the character, and leaving it there for most of the game. This makes Resident Evil 4's control and camera scheme more like a first-person shooter than like traditional third-person games, but it works very well. The camera is able to move in and out of its normal position to show the floor around Leon, or to convey a sense of claustrophobia, but generally it remains looking along a vector that intersects Leon's eye direction right in the middle of the screen. This is a very interesting approach, and is clearly the result of a lot of research and development by Capcom. I'm very interested to see how camera and controls continue to evolve in the future. Games like Gears of War have already appropriated horror game mechanics for other types of games, and I think we'll see horror games adjusting themselves in the future as well. The recent Silent Hill 5 footage, for example, suggests that the most recent game in that series may use a significantly different approach to cameras and movement than previous games in the series. These two systems, control and camera, are central to the way horror games look and feel, and I think that there is still a lot of ways that existing systems can be improved.

Most 3D games at the time avoided shots like this and kept the camera behind the player. In part 1 of this series* I discussed how horror games differed in approach compared to most other third person genres in the transition from 2D to 3D graphics. When we left off, I was describing how the scheme used by games like Resident Evil allowed developers to use dramatically composed shots by making movement relative to the protagonist's facing direction rather than relative to the camera's view. After Resident Evil shipped a huge number of copycat games flooded the market, and most of them simply copied the control scheme and camera system from the seminal horror game verbatim. Even with the release of the DualShock in 1997 in Japan and 1998 in the US, the in-game controls for 3rd person horror games stayed constant for a number of years (with one notable exception). However, two games in particular bucked this trend and showed that the concepts proven by Resident Evil could be applied to other game formats. In 1999 the release of Silent Hill ushered in change on many game design fronts. In addition to being one of the first console games to use complex streaming and lighting systems, Silent Hill also showed that character-centric controls could be used with moving cameras in fully 3D worlds. Like Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark, the protagonist in Silent Hill moves independently of the camera: left and right rotate the character in place, while up causes him to run in the direction that he is currently facing. Unlike Resident Evil, however, Silent Hill uses a combination of fixed and moving cameras: the camera is able to cut to dramatic angles as well as follow the player through the foggy streets of the deserted resort town for which the game is named. In fact, the decoupling of movement and camera position made Silent Hill's camera model considerably more complex than other fully 3D third person games at the time; games like Tomb Raider kept the camera locked behind the player, while Silent Hill was able to move the view in far more interesting ways. Silent Hill showed that the power of shot composition and dramatic lighting proven by Resident Evil could be applied to games without pre-rendered backgrounds. The game was a technological showcase at the time, but it also proved an important point: that camera movement, not just camera placement, is one of the key elements to building tension in games. Silent Hill also showed that the Resident Evil control scheme could work in true 3D, though it was no easier to learn for new users than before. In fact, the "tank controls" system would remain a popular choice for developers for a few more years, even though a better alternative had been invented a year before Silent Hill's release. The first major game that I am aware of to make significant improvements to the Resident Evil / Alone in the Dark Parasite Eve had dramatic camera shots while maintaining camera-centric character controls. control scheme is Parasite Eve, released in 1998. Parasite Eve used the same basic control setup as Resident Evil: fixed cameras that may cut at any time without interrupting the player's movement. But despite the similar camera design, the developers at Square USA came up with a key innovation that allowed them to employ a much more user-friendly control system. Though this change would go unnoticed for several years, it eventually became the standard way to make third person controls with camera cuts work, and remains a standard to this day. Unlike Resident Evil, Parasite Eve uses camera-centric controls. That means that it works similarly to Tomb Raider and Mario 64 in that the definition of "forward" is defined by the camera rather than by the character. But wait, you exclaim, in the last post you said that camera-centric controls are incompatible with fixed camera systems and never the twain shall meet! I'm glad you've been paying attention, but what Square USA did with Parasite Eve effectively solved the quandary of mixing camera-based controls into a system where the camera moves unpredictably. The key change that Square made is simply to only allow the definition of "forward" to change when the player is not pressing a button on the controller. That is, if the player runs to the edge of an area and causes a camera cut, the direction they are currently holding will still move them forward as long as they hold it down. When they let go of the D-Pad or analog stick, the definition of forward is reset to match the current camera view. This way the player can continue to run forward through any number of camera cuts without having to suffer through the brain damage caused by character-centric controls. Though it may have gone mostly unnoticed at first, the Parasite Eve solution to 3D controls with fixed cameras would eventually become the absolute standard. The system was duplicated and perfected by Capcom's Devil May Cry in 2001, and has since been used in almost every subsequent horror game utilizing fixed cameras to date. In fact, the only recent games that preserved the pre-Parasite Eve control system are those from the Resident Evil series, notably Resident Evil 0 and the Resident Evil remake. It's not as if these games have been stuck in the past, however: almost all of the good horror games for the PS2 generation have had something interesting to add to the mix. In the final post in this series, I'll take a look at how recent games have tried to further improve upon Silent Hill's camera system and the Parasite Eve control scheme. *Incidentally, the post ID for part 1 is also the name of an early but highly influential CPU. How apt for a post about technical evolution!

The Secret of Monkey Island and most other adventure games relied on this kind of landscape shot. One of the key elements in modern horror games is visual storytelling. I'm not talking about cut scenes or character design, I mean the nitty-gritty details of shot composition: lighting, camera placement, and camera motion. Today I want to talk a little bit about how the horror genre developed the idea of a cinematic camera in video games almost independently of the rest of the industry, and how the need to communicate feeling though the architecture of levels and the placement of cameras had profound effects on the way that these games are actually played. I've touched on this topic before. I talked briefly about Alone in the Dark's revolutionary approach to cameras in my article about the history of the modern survival horror game, and I mentioned the relationship between fixed camera systems and character-centric control schemes in a recent provocative post. But it's such an interesting topic that I thought I'd devote a post or two to it. To understand how the horror genre was so influential in developing the visual systems now used by a wide variety of genres, it's important to understand what the state of the art before horror games came along and why change was necessary. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, adventure games ruled the PC game market. Most of them, like the seminal The Secret of Monkey Island, were built upon flat landscapes populated by sprites. This was enough to show off the game world and the people in it, but the technology wasn't sufficient to frame shots dramatically. So In games like Tomb Raider, "forward" is defined by the camera. along comes Alone in the Dark and changes two important things: the camera system and the control system. Alone in the Dark took the flat 2D perspective of the adventure genre and projected it into proper 3D space. At the same time, the game provided players with direct control; instead of point-and-clicking to move around, players could use the keyboard to drive the protagonists around. A few years later this exact format was popularized on game consoles by Resident Evil, a game that was able to take advantage of the Playstation controller rather than the awkward keyboard. But in transitioning from 2D scenes to 3D scenes, the developers of Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil faced a problem: how best to translate 2D input from the keyboard or controller into 3D space. After all, arrow keys or a D-pad can only represent two axes of movement; the software must pick a heuristic for translating that motion into 3D space. The common heuristic used by most 3D games then and now is to define a vector in 3D space that is "forward." Tomb Raider, which shipped around the same time Resident Evil was hitting the shelves, used one of the first over-the-shoulder cameras and worked by assuming that the direction the camera was pointing was the direction that Laura Croft would move if the player pressed "up" on their controller. The mapping from 2D controller input to 3D movement was thus a projection along the orientation of the camera. As long as the camera stays generally behind the player's character, "up" on the control stick will always mean "run forward towards the horizon." Interestingly, this scheme In games like Resident Evil, "forward" is defined by the character. usually causes the player character to run in circles of you hold left or right on the control stick; when the camera is locked behind the player, any motion to one side causes the camera to move as well, redefining "forward" and creating a circle if movement to the side continues. You can see this effect in most third person games even today. But Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil do not use cameras that are always behind the player. The whole point of Alone in the Dark's camera system is to provide interesting and affecting points of view for the camera; the system would be moot if the camera were required to simply look in the same direction as the player's character. So both games opted for the "tank control" model, where player input is mapped to the character's orientation rather than the camera's. In this scheme "forward" can be defined independently of the camera--up on the control stick will always cause the player to run in the direction that he is currently facing. By using this system the developers of Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil were able to mix 3D motion with dramatic cameras, and though the result was confusing and carried a high learning curve, the effect ended up being worth it to a huge number of gamers. In the next post I'll continue this discussion by talking about games in the late 1990s that made incremental improvements on the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil model. I'll also talk about how the model has changed over time, how more recent games have tried to deal with the need to move in 3D space with an unpredictable view point, and which titles now represent the state of the art.

Kuon: a terrible game. I know that I can be pretty harsh when it comes to bad games. I mean, this is a research blog and I am interested in why bad games are bad, but I'm also a gamer, and being frustrated by a bad game that I'm playing for research is just as annoying as when it's just for fun. Sometimes I really dislike a game that a lot of other people enjoyed: recent posts about Rule of Rose and Cold Fear have garnered more responses from you guys than almost any other topic in the five year history of this site. So I want to talk a little about why playing and critiquing bad games is so important. My goal is not to take the development teams to task; in my career as a game developer, I've worked on some pretty poor games myself, and I know first hand that bad games are almost always the result of factors outside of the development team's immediate control rather than incompetence. So while I may bitch about how certain games are badly balanced, or too tricky for their own good, or fatally flawed, I am blasting the game experience, not the people who made it. In fact, I think that my experience working on games that turned out to be less than stellar has a lot to do with my rationale for running this site. You can't help but wonder what the hell happened when you play something like The Ring for the first time; everything is so amazingly broken that it's almost hard to pin down which of the game's failures is the most glaring. I think that one of the big reasons that bad games get made is that people experiment with ideas but do not have time to change or refine them if they don't work out; the Ring might have sounded good on paper, but the development cycle was probably so short that even if the development team realized that they had just created the worst thing ever in the history of things, they probably didn't have any time to go back and make fixes. I've been there, and it's a sucky situation to be in. So one of the reasons for me to run this site is to find out what ideas really don't work so well so that maybe other developers can avoid them in the future. Given that game development time is limited and a lot of things have already been tried, I'd like to provide a resource for game designers (or anybody interested in design, even if they are not a professional) to examine what has been done in the past within the horror genre, and which of those ideas have failed. To that end, playing bad games is much more enlightening than playing good games. So often a game works very well because many aspects of the game design work together to produce an excellent experience. It's hard to tell, then, which of those aspects might work outside of its original context; it's hard to divine which parts of a good game are intrinsically good, and which parts are good because they've been combined with other design ideas. But by playing bad games, you can quickly and easily get a feel for ideas that do not work. If these are ideas that have been successfully employed elsewhere, that tells you that the idea isn't robust enough to stand up on its own, but it can work when combined with something else. Playing bad games also helps me appreciate the quality with which good games are developed; after playing Kuon, I have new respect for the highly superior (and somewhat thematically similar) Fatal Frame series. So I love bad games. I started this site to learn about why good horror games are good, and that means I also need to understand why bad horror games are terrible. Even though it can be a chore to play them, and any enjoyment I get may be in spite of the game rather than because of it, bad games are an invaluable resource.

I've posted a new feature with a lengthy title: The Changing Utility of the Otherworld in the Silent Hill Series. This article is about how the use and meaning of Nowhere, the Otherworld that appears in every Silent Hill game, differs from game to game. I wrote this after thinking about how Silent Hill: 0rigins' use of the Otherworld really changes its effect on the game (which I touched upon in my review). After thinking about it for a while, it seems like the effect generated by the Otherworld is actually pretty different in each of the Silent Hill games; the same basic mechanic is being used in different ways with different results. So in this article I tried to explore what some of those uses are, and how they affect their respective games as a whole.

In my review of Haunting Ground, I argued that the over-sexualization of the protagonist hurt the game's ability to be scary. My point was that the bouncing breasts and mini-mini skirt that follow Fiona around throughout the game amount to fan service, and ultimately distract from the game's primary goal of being scary. Leigh Alexander, author of the weekly column The Aberrant Gamer, thinks otherwise. In her recent column about Haunting Ground, Alexander argues that portraying Fiona as an obvious sex object serves to heighten the player's sense of fear because we understand that the game's antagonists are also thinking of her this way. The cost of failure is very high for Fiona, as her assailants seek not only to kill her, but to violate her in terrible ways as well. This, Alexander argues, puts Fiona in an even more vulnerable position than she might otherwise be in, which makes her easier to be scared for. This is not an angle that I had previously considered. If you are interested in this sort of thing, the article is a good read.

Graph 1: Difficulty over Time A couple of weeks ago I posted a message about how Cold Fear was driving me up the wall with a sudden spike in difficulty. This post proved to be somewhat inflammatory, and a lot of you came out to tell me to stick with it a little longer. I did, and you guys were right--the game fixed itself. But the episode got me thinking about how difficulty and frustration interact as a player plays a game through for the first time. Specifically, a couple of comments about simply stepping up to the challenge and becoming a better player rather than whining about the difficulty got me thinking: I don't mind hard games at all, and usually I'm more than happy to spend some time iterating over the same challenge until I've improved my skills. But occasionally, the difficulty level is high enough that I stop having fun. This is certainly what happened in to me a few hours into Cold Fear, even though that game is still easier than other games that I've completed without becoming frustrated. So I thought about it for a bit and decided to visualize my complaint with Cold Fear in the form of the all-powerful line graph. I have two graphs to show, one tracking the difficulty of several games over time and the other showing the relative frustration I felt with those same games over the same amount of time. The levels here are completely subjective: I don't expect other people to have felt exactly the same way as I did about these games, so before you get bent out of shape about how Siren is totally easy or Halo is amazingly hard and frustrating, realize that these are my impressions alone. Chill, ok? You are probably like, "wait, did he say Halo?" Yeah, it seems a little out of place in this graph, I have to admit. But I am including it here for a good reason: it's an extremely popular, extremely highly-rated game (also I just finished it the other day, so it's fresh in my mind). If you get 97% on Metacritic.com and sell over 6 million copies, you have to be doing something very, very right. So I'm using Halo as a baseline in this graph to show how other games relate in terms of difficulty progression and frustration over time. This first graph shows the level of difficulty I perceived for several games. You can see that Cold Fear started out fairly easy but then spiked really high early on. It was during this spike that I vented my frustration about the game on this blog. After that, the difficulty drops off very quickly and stays pretty shallow after that point (note that I'm not quite done with the game). Siren also started easy and then spiked dramatically. When this happened I ranted about it here. Unlike Cold Fear, Siren doesn't get a whole lot easier over the course of the game--it stays pretty damn difficult until the very end. Silent Hill 4, on the other hand, was a walk in the park for the first half of the game and then suddenly became quite difficult in the second half. Finally, you can see that Halo's difficulty curve is pretty uniform: it gets harder at a predictable rate but never spikes. It also never becomes super-difficult; even at its hardest, it is easier than Siren and Silent Hill 4. Halo has a very well-defined difficulty curve, while these other examples are less regular. The second graph shows how frustrated I was by these games at different points in my play-through. You can see that Cold Fear got super frustrating at the same point that it was super difficult, prompting my rant. Siren was also super frustrating when the difficulty spiked, which is probably why I ranted about it as well. Silent Hill 4 was not very frustrating early on, but after a while the game became difficult and frustrating and stayed that way through the end. Halo has no spikes, and though the frustration level does rise with its difficulty, it manages to stay pretty frustration-free throughout the entire experience. It seems clear that spikes in difficulty are sources of frustration for me, but what I think is interesting about this graph is what happens to Siren after the spike: even though the game remained difficult, I was less frustrated by it the more I played it. So what's going on here? Cold Fear gets super hard and super frustrating and then becomes super easy and less frustrating. Siren gets super hard and super frustrating but then becomes more fun without losing any of its difficulty. If my theory is that hard games are frustrating, or even that dramatic spikes in difficulty are cause for frustration, it should follow that Siren would remain frustrating Graph 2: Frustration over Time throughout its duration. Here is my theory: frustration isn't as much a function of difficulty as it is a function of communication with the player. In fact, unplanned spikes in difficulty are probably caused by poor player communication, which is also the source for frustration; the first graph is not the cause of the second, they are both side-effects of the same problem. As Halo demonstrates, when difficulty increases gradually, the player himself improves and no frustration is evident. Most designers probably intend for their games to become incrementally harder over time, so spikes in difficulty and frustration represent unplanned-for failures to communicate the rules of the game. Let me elaborate by looking at why Cold Fear suddenly became so hard and frustrating for me: I didn't know where to go next, and there is no map to aid me. While searching the ship for the next story event, I kept running into monsters that respawned, causing me to run out of health and ammo. It wasn't clear that the ship's sick bay only had a limited number of health packs. Until the second-to-last pack is used, it appears that the supply is infinite. This mistake led me to be less frugal about health pack use than is required. Many doors are difficult to see because they blend in with the background colors. When I finally found the next story point and saved, I was in too weak a condition to actually address the challenge immediately following the save. Thus I was required to complete that challenge with minimal life and ammo, which was significantly harder than would have otherwise been the case. Normal challenge elements (such as the rocking of the boat) were amplified by the lack of regular resources caused by the problems above. Almost all of these problems are communication issues: the game didn't tell me where to go, didn't tell me when an auto-save was coming up (or how prepared for a fight I should be after the save), didn't tell me that I was quickly using up resources on the ship, and didn't make it easy to find my way around. None of them have much to do with the normal moment-to-moment game play; they are "meta design" problems. Also, I think that these problems occurred early in the game because it takes players a while to get a hang of all the rules. As game play progresses and the player gets the hang of the rule set, these sorts of communication errors are probably less frequent. The problems plaguing Siren were similar. As I posted about later in my Siren experience (and expanded upon in my eventual review of the game), the spike in difficulty and frustration in Siren is caused by insufficient communication with the player about the mechanics of the game. The central mechanic, sneaking, isn't even clear until the player gets to the point where they cannot progress without sneaking extremely carefully. What happened to me in Siren is that I didn't understand how to play and got frustrated with it, but my frustration level dropped through the floor and I started having fun again when I eventually figured out how the developers wanted me to play. The game was still damn difficult, but once I understood the rules the difficulty seemed legitimate rather than arbitrary. In fact, when I think about it, Silent Hill 4 is a similar story. The difficulty level spiked half way through the game because I didn't understand how to take care of the apartment. In the first half of the game the apartment is a source of infinite health (you can return there to heal at any time), but if you fail to light candles this benefit is lost in the second half of the game. I missed the connection between the candles and the quality of the room, which meant I suddenly lost a way to regain health and the game's previously trivial game play suddenly became extremely difficult (this mistake also meant I wasn't able to get the best ending--damn it). So my conclusion is that games that suddenly become frustratingly difficult are probably failing to teach the player what is expected of them and how the game is to be played. If this happens early enough in the game we can just call it a "steep learning curve" (it's obvious within the first hour of Resident Evil that you must aggressively conserve ammo), but if it happens after the player has made significant progress, it makes the game feel like it is punishing the player arbitrarily--it's suddenly a matter of luck rather than one of skill. Games like Halo are probably successful on such a huge scale because they teach the player the rules early on and then gradually increase the level of challenge without ever changing the rule set.

Wired is running an interesting article by Clive Thompson (blog) about horror games being more effective than horror movies at generating scares. I think there's something significant here in Thompson's insights, but I think I need to give it a little more thought before I am sure I know what it is. While I mull the idea over, I highly recommend that you read his piece.

Today I attended a talk by Scott McCloud, author of the amazingly great Understanding Comics, a comic book about the mechanics of comic books as a medium. McCloud's work has been inspirational for me (and many others) because he so effectively dissects a pulp medium (comic books) to show its core traits and characteristics. In doing so, he exposes an amazing degree of art and skill required for the medium, and discusses techniques that are wholly applicable to all kinds of other mediums. What the public mostly views as a nerdy, disposable, and ultimately shallow form of entertainment, McCloud shows to be in-fact built on rich and purposeful techniques; by examining the very fundamentals of comic books, he shows that they are worth so much more than the main stream often gives them credit for. I've found McCloud's work fascinating, even though I don't read a lot of comics (any more; I was a pretty diehard fan when I was a kid). Comics mirror video games in many ways (including concerns over the medium's effect on children and censorship-related legal bouts back in the 1950's), and McCloud's research is extremely applicable (and is often actively applied) to video games. At the end of his lecture today he even talked about games as they relate to comics, and though there wasn't really enough time to get involved in a discussion, it was clear that games excite him greatly. Video games need to be examined and dissected the same way McCloud has examined and dissected comic books. The medium is understood by far too few people, and somebody needs to step into McClouds shoes and provide similar insights into video games. Ralph Koster's Theory of Fun isn't a bad start, but it's far too vague and broad to be as useful as McCloud's works. I've tried to use this site to study a subset of games with the same sort of focus on fundamentals that McCloud uses, but what I've found is that generalizations that are more true than not are pretty hard to come by. Anyway, the lecture reminded me that I should post about McCloud's book, (and his new one, which I can't wait to read). I also wanted to relate this great quote of his that he said today about the never-ending death march towards "photo realistic video game graphics": "I think the best way to make a goal seem utterly pointless is to achieve it. " McCloud is interested in all the other parts of video games: the fun parts, the story parts, the drama parts, the parts that matter. Here here!

Helloooooo Nurse! Let me take a moment to recommend this facinating article about symbolism in Silent Hill 2. The author picks apart the characters, the locations, and the plot of the story to show how we can interpret each as a manifestation of the protagonist's particular psychological problems. Really well throught out and worth a read. In much less excting Silent Hill news, here's some video of Silent Hill Arcade that I have mentioned before. It appears to be House of the Dead 2 + fog. Hooray.

Survival horror has its roots in the Adventure genre, and even today we can see versions most standard adventure game systems in modern survival horror games. But there is one mechanic--a staple of classic adventure games--that doesn't seem to be used for horror games: dialog trees. If you've ever played any time of adventure game, you've most likely experienced a dialog tree; a non-player character will address the protagonist and you'll be prompted to chose from a list of canned responses. Depending on your response, the non-player character's reaction can change, and often deft navigation of the conversation is required to progress. This sort of system has persisted in adventure games for years. Even modern adventure games like Indigo Prophecy, Shenmue, and Phoenix Wright make use of dialog trees to allow for interactive conversation. So ubiquitous is this system that it ranks up with item puzzles on the list of core adventure game mechanics. And yet, I can't think of a single horror game that uses dialog trees. Well, that's not really true; there are a few minor games like Kyoufu Shinbun Heiseiban and Kamaitachi No Yoru that do employ dialog trees, but these are mostly text adventure (or almost-text-adventure) games. Many horror games require the player to make choices (such as The Suffering's morality system), but these choices are usually binary (yes or no questions) and, unlike classic dialog trees, do not contain multiple levels of branching choices. So what happened? Survival horror games, for all intents and purposes, are adventure games. Item interaction has been simplified and combat typically plays a much larger role, but almost all classic adventure mechanics can be found in modern horror games. Were dialog systems left behind because they somehow work against the developer's attempts to build tension? Or perhaps they were discarded because there just are not that many people to talk to? I don't really know the answer, but I suspect that it has to do with the idea that horror try to be more "cinematic" than other types of games in order to better unsettle the player. Horror games are the only modern genre that I know of that consistently use cinematography and shot composition techniques to communicate certain feelings to the player (there are examples in other genres, of course, but they are typically the exception to the rule), and most horror games omit on-screen HUDs in order to better immerse the player. It seems safe to assume that the omission of dialog trees has something to do with the horror content in scary games; it may be the case that dialog trees give the player too much decision-making power in a genre that aims to make you feel helpless and out of control. Or it might be that decision trees are pointless unless the player's decisions appear to actually affect the situation or story, and horror games require such a high level of detailed content that branching isn't practical. The thing about dialog trees is that they usually go hand-in-hand with non-player characters. Furthermore, these characters usually give you multiple opportunities to talk to them, so if you fail to make the correct decisions in the dialog tree you have a way to start over again from the beginning. Horror games rarely have this type of NPC; those that do appear only have a few things to say, and are not used for conversation. So perhaps the issue is that providing NPCs that can be spoken to multiple times somehow degrades the overall horror impact of the game. If the player is really to believe that their character is trapped in some dire situation, does it really make sense for people to be standing around nonchalantly, waiting to be spoken to? Giving the player NPCs to talk to, especially when they are in the thick of a high-tension scene, could be very damaging to the oppressing feeling of isolation that most horror games strive to create. Or, it might be that dialog trees have no place in horror games because they break up the pacing. One classic problem with dialog trees is that they cause the action to stop cold while the player makes a decision, which actively works against the smooth, movie-like feel that many horror games strive for. Pacing wasn't much of an issue back in the 2D adventure game days because the entire game was played at the player's pace, but for a horror game good pacing has become key to building tension. Resident Evil controls its pacing by forcing the player through a funnel of locked rooms that contain keys to other locked rooms. Silent Hill, being a more linear experience, controls pacing by creating actual architecture that dictates the player's speed (consider the impossibly-long underground stairway into the prison section of Silent Hill 2). Other games use timers, cut scenes, and a variety of mechanics to make sure that the player moves through the game at a predictable pace so that the timing of horror elements can be dictated. Without that control, the game could lose much of its impact because the developers would be unable to sequence story events in such a way that tension is increased at a steady rate. Whatever the reason, it seems like horror developers have consistently chosen to discard dialog trees from their game designs. These sorts of decisions are what separate horror games from the pack; the designers of these titles are actively considering which game mechanics will allow them to better communicate emotion to the player and which will be detrimental to that goal. All decisions of a good horror game design must be in service to the horror experience; without this focus the player will never become emotionally engaged and the game will fail to rise above simple mechanics and environments. By omitting dialog trees from their game designs, I think that horror game developers are striving to remove impediments to emotional engagement.

A couple of years ago I had a frightening experience. I was getting out of the shower one evening when from behind me I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. The house was empty and I was standing there in the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, and in that instant I knew that I was about to die. Immediately I had a mental picture of my killer: a tall, stocky man with a black mustache and some sort of knife or hook in his right hand. From the location of the sound, I knew that he must be standing inside the shower that I had stepped out of moments before. For about a tenth of a second I was scared out of my wits. The next moment I heard the shampoo holder crash to the floor and realized that the sound I had heard was the holder sliding off the top of the metal shower head. I felt pretty dumb at the time, especially considering how blatantly impossible the entire scenario was, but looking back I find that moment of fear fascinating. In the time it took for my toiletries to fall six feet to the floor of the tub, my brain conjured up a detailed mental image of something scary to explain the metal scraping noise. It's like my imagination had this scary idea prepped and ready to go, and when the right variables came together (a disturbing sound combined with the vulnerable feeling of being home alone and buck naked), it sprang to life. Last week I saw a preview for 1408, a new horror movie based on Stephen King's short story of the same name. I was at the theater to see Grindhouse, which was quite enjoyable (especially Tarantino's film, Death Proof). The preview for 1408 made the film look pretty mediocre, but I found myself even more disappointed than usual by the ad. Most horror story film adaptations follow the same formula: superfluous plot and characters + contrived rationalization of mystery + special fx + special fx + special fx = profit, and it seems that 1408 is no exception. What disappointed me about the trailer for 1408 is that the filmmakers seem to have dramatically misunderstood what makes King's short story so compelling. 1408 is a short story about a writer staying in a haunted room and getting far more than he bargained for. The thing is, most of the story doesn't take place in the room; less than half of the pages are spent actually describing the room and the writer's experience there. The rest is dialog between the hotel's manager and the protagonist, annotated with the protagonist's own thoughts and memories. And even inside the room, not much really happens to the writer: the horror he experiences is comprised mostly of a nameless, implicit threat that manifests in a few key events. Despite the brevity of this part of the story, the effect on the reader (at least, on me) is intense. The reason the story is so effective is that King has masterfully created a structure for horror and then left most of the detail work up to our imagination. He's provided a locale (the haunted room), a reason to be scared (various deaths and other strange occurrences that the hotel manager spends most of the story describing), and a few key events to start the reader's mind down a path. But from there on out King becomes more of a bystander than a storyteller. The weird history of the room and the series of increasingly disturbing things that actually occur once the writer enters it are more than sufficient kindling for the reader's imagination to catch fire. And as the story ends, King shows his real skill by just letting that fire burn: he provides no rationalization or justification for the events that take place in the story, and thereby requires his readers to decide upon some personal explanation. This personalization makes the story extremely effective; as my brain demonstrated to me on my way out of the shower, we are much better at scaring ourselves than anybody else. The trailer for the film version Hooray for Hollywood of 1408 seems to suggest that most of the film will be spent in the room itself, depicting various scary things. If the filmmakers are real screwups, they'll also try to tell the audience why all these events occur and what they should mean. Doing this completely destroys the horror that the original short story is able to induce, and reduces the film to a mere catalog of CG effects. Some might argue that film as a medium requires more explicit visual narration, but I would argue that plenty of films are able operate on the same mechanic as King's story by suggesting a lot but showing very little. Another King story-turned-movie, The Shining, is an excellent example. The Shining continues to be an extremely effective horror film because it gives the audience just enough information to let their mind wander into whichever territory they find the most disturbing. The gamut of effects-based nightmare events that seem to comprise 1408 is a cop-out on the part of the filmmakers: it removes the need for the audience to think and consequently lessens the impact of the horror it is attempting to deliver. I should mention as a caveat that 1408 has not yet been released and I'm judging it based entirely on a single preview, which isn't really very fair. But though I may be picking on a trailer for an unreleased film, I think that the contrast between the content of King's short story and the events depicted in the film preview are a good basis for my point. In my notes from GDC 2005, I described Akira Yamaoka's approach to horror, which involves "stacking" of fragmented and convoluted information to "create space for the imagination." I think this approach is very similar to the mechanic employed by King in 1408, and helps explain why Yamaoka's Silent Hill series is so consistently effective.

I have posted a new feature article: The Prehistory of Survival Horror. This article examines some early horror games and how they influenced the genre that we know and love today. Here's an excerpt: Alone in the Dark in particular seems to be the direct parent of the Resident Evil game design: fixed cameras, static backgrounds, a character-centric control scheme, pivot-in-place combat mechanics, Victorian mansions, rationing of ammunition and health, and two playable characters (one male, one female), just to name a few obvious similarities. The direct line of influence on Resident Evil from Sweet Home is also clear: both Capcom games take a hard line approach to item management (though the blow was slightly softened in Resident Evil, as the player was granted more inventory space and inter-connected item boxes). Even Uninvited seems to have left its mark in the way that every area in Resident Evil must be throughly ransacked for items, clues, and notebooks. This article ended up being way more interesting to write than I expected. As I got into looking at the similarities between popular modern games and their predecessors, I realized that the relationship between these games on several game design axes is quite clear. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Here's a pretty interesting (if extremely academic) dissection of horror games from a psychoanalytic perspective. The authors tie Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 4 to a number of psychoanalytic theories with interesting results. It's slightly pedantic (I'm not really one who can lay that criticism to anybody, I guess), but pretty interesting nonetheless.

There is a debate among game industry pundits about what games as a medium are about. If you roll with the groups that like to argue academics about video game design, you've probably heard of ludology. Ludology (from the Latin ludus, meaning "game") is the study of video games (and other types, such as board games) in terms of functional mechanics. Ludologists argue that video games are fun because they provide an interface for play within a fixed set of rules. A ludologist might argue that Mario can jump a certain height and break bricks because jumping and breaking bricks are fun actions to perform. Ludology seeks to describe the entertainment provided by video games in terms of the way the player interacts with the game. In the opposite corner we have the Narratologists. This group believes that video games are most powerful as a story-telling medium, and feel that games provide entertainment because they allow the player to step directly into a fantastical role. Narratology considers games a framework for interactive stories, and in sharp contrast to the ludologists, feel that the method of interaction is secondary to the role provided by the game. Both of these awkwardly-named groups despise each other with a passion, and each have written reams and reams of arguments defending their position. They seem to flaunt each other with "more academic than thou" arguments, and many of them seem convinced that all 'good' video games conform to their perspective. For all their research and analysis, it seems to me that these groups are very easily defined: ludologists like action games and platformers, while narratoligists prefer adventure games and RPGs. Of course, if they stated their position that way they wouldn't sound so intelligent and academic, so I think they tend to stick to the silly names. I think that the distinction between interface mechanics and story telling elements is false. I do not believe that these concepts are mutually exclusive, nor do I believe that all video games conform to one method over the other. I've come to this conclusion with the help of this Quest; horror games have been my escort out of the mire of confusion that both sides in this argument suffer from. I think that where the ludologists and the narratologists go astray is in assuming that one method of game design is intrinsically superior to the other. I argue that plenty of games fall evenly in both categories: ICO, for example, is built upon mechanics that are extremely enjoyable and yet the title also manages to present one of the most powerful narratives in a game ever. Another example is the Shenmue series, especially the under-appreciated Shenmue 2. This game has a complex and well-written story that is central to the experience, but it also features a remarkably mature fighting system and more mini-games and reflex challenges than you can shake a stick at. I also assert that there are games that are neither mechanics- nor narrative-based: Electroplankton and Nintendogs are excellent examples. Rather than divide all games into "mostly about mechanics" or "mostly about story", I think it is better to define the primary form of challenge that games can provide. I've written before about cognitive challenges ("Type 1") versus mechanical challenges ("Type 2"), and it has also occurred to me more recently that there are several other, less common forms of challenge used in video games (World of Warcraft, for example, features raw player endurance as a form of challenge, as progression seems to be primarily a function of the total amount of time a player spends online). What I like about the challenge-based definition is that it's easy to describe games as a mix of challenges. Resident Evil, for example, is an almost even mix of cognitive and mechanical challenges. Earlier adventure games, such as The Secret of Monkey Island are almost entirely cognitive, while action games like Resident Evil 4 are heavily based on mechanical challenges. Electroplankton provides almost no challenge at all, proving that challenge is not a pre-requisite for fun. The other thing I like about categorizing games in terms of challenge format is that challenges have absolutely nothing to do with narrative. Whether the player is asked to make decisions about what to do next (cognitive) or challenged by actually doing the next thing (mechanical), I don't see any reason that the narrative presented by the game must be affected. Silent Hill 2, for example, has a pretty even split between mechanical and cognitive challenges (both forms are pretty easy throughout the game), but the game also hosts a strong and interesting narrative. The idea that the player only wants to mash buttons or only wants to read pages of dialog is fallacious and fairly naive. The idea that different players will enjoy different types of challenges, on the other hand, seems to me to be much more straight forward. I even think that different players will experience different forms of challenge when playing the same game! I started this Quest to improve my understanding of game design by examining horror games specifically. I feel like this research is starting to really pay off, as some of the things I've learned from horror games are starting to make sense in completely different genres. I might be totally off-base here, but it certainly feels like this project is producing the results that I am looking for. As I have more thoughts about this subject I'll post them, though I must warn you that in all likelihood I am completely wrong.

There's a pretty good article over at Next-Gen.biz about the creation of fear through media like film and games. It's all rather general and doesn't really get into any specifics with regards to games or movies, but the author makes a lot of valid points. If you are interested in the mechanics of building tension, it's a pretty good read. Thanks to forums member vajra for the link.

I followed a link from Slashdot Games to this interesting post about the difference between horror games and horror movies over at the hilariously titled GamersWithJobs.com. The author admits to being absolutely terrified by horror games despite having no trouble with horror movies. The point he makes, which is a big part of the reason I am running this site, is that the level of emotional involvement that a video game can produce can be much higher than passive media like film. Playing the roll of the main character means that we are unable to use common cliches as a defense against fear. I think that this type of involvement is possible for other types of games as well, but the horror game genre seem to be where the best of the best currently reside.

This room isn't pitch black, but it's dark enough for us to be worried. Though I didn't think it was a great film, one of the things I dug about Juon 2 was the way the director used lighting to suggest some sort of abstract malice. Unlike many traditional horror movies, Juon 2 doesn't rely on pitch-black locales to build tension; instead, it suggests that the characters in the film could be attacked anywhere where there is the slightest degree of shadow. It also seems to be necessary that the victims be alone, but the director makes it clear that well-lit rooms are no defense against the film's traveling curse. I think that director Takashi Shimizu's goal here is to keep the audience on the edge of their seat by suggesting that nowhere is safe. The antagonist of the film isn't contained by a dilapidated mansion or haunted graveyard; she can strike anywhere, even during the day or in a brightly lit room. The protagonists have nowhere to hide, and unlike many lesser horror films, the audience has no chance to relax. Once the director has communicated this idea to the audience (as he did so effectively with a particular apartment scene in the first Juon), we begin to scrutinize every shot for possible danger. The power of a small shadow or slightly dark corner is dramatically increased, as we know that it might be the source of immediate danger. Even a little bit of shadow in the corner can be suggestive. This puts Shimizu in an incredibly powerful position over the audience; if he wants to create tension, all he needs to do is put his characters in a room by themselves and include the mere suggestion of darkness. Juon 2 shows that this method can produce high-tension scenes without relying on music, tricky camera work, or any sort of special effects. Any further suggestion of malice (such as the tendency in Juon for common appliances to reveal impending danger) only increases the suggestion of danger produced by his approach to lighting. The result, I think, is a rather relentless pressure on the viewer that increases as the film slowly unveils the horror at hand. Unfortunately, Shimizu damages his own tension with a terrible script and a few completely out-of-place scenes. But there are a few moments in the film where his ability to use light suggestively makes an otherwise predictable scene pretty scary stuff. I think that there are several video games that are already taking advantage of this sort of approach. The Silent Hill series, especially Silent Hill 2, have used suggestive lighting to dramatically increase the level of tension inflicted on the player. Unlike Resident Evil, which gives the player Silent Hill switches between ambient light and the flashlight to produce different moods. easy-to-identify safe rooms, the Silent Hill series has often employed varying levels of ambient light to suggest the relative danger of its various otherworldly locales. These games also switch between areas with some ambient light and areas that are are only visible through the tight beam of the flashlight. Here the message is the same but the effect is a little more direct: nowhere is safe because danger lurks everywhere. The radio in Silent Hill serves the same purpose as the rogue appliances in Juon: to incrementally increase the tension already created by the rest of the scene. Though horror movies have traditionally relied on scenes that are pitch-black to sell the idea that danger may be lurking in the darkness, movies like Juon 2 show that the same effect can be achieved without turning out all the lights. Once the audience has been lead to believe that any shadow may harbor danger, everyday locations can easily host tension-filled scenes. Though it seems like the same sorts of techniques are applicable to video games as well, very few developers actually take advantage of this sort of iterative creation of tension. Sorry if this is all sort of a stream-of-consciousness. In the future I have some other random thoughts about techniques that games developers could learn from modern horror film, but this post is already long enough.

Jane over at GameGirl Advance is thinking about games as emotionally disturbing experiences. Her conclusion is that perhaps we need games that do not endeavor to be "fun" in the usual sense of the word.

If games are to be taken as art, the next step has to be for some game developers to abandon the concept of "fun" - or at least, to rework it and to challenge it.

An interesting thought. I am of the firm belief that video games cannot progress into the mainstream as a legitimate form of art until they can be emotionally relevant to players, but I hadn't considered the idea that emotional relevancy might come at the expense of fun. Perhaps that's a trade off we should be willing to make.

The Escapist is a pretty awesome online magazine that offers a rather high-brow look at the nature of video games and the gaming industry. This month their issue is all about horror games, and they've got a lot of cool stuff to say. Jon Schnaars's article on the use of genre in Resident Evil 4 is particularly interesting, and should sound familiar to readers of this site. Check it out.

I've written about Indigo Prophecy before, but I am bringing it up again because of this extremely interesting post-mortem of the game. Director David Cage writes about how Indigo Prophecy was planned and how it actually turned out, as well as about his reasoning behind certain design decisions. Everything he is saying is very relevant to horror games, but this particular passage caught my eye:

Most games oppose these two concepts or rather, they develop them in turn: a cut scene to advance the narration, then an action scene, then another cut scene for the narration. The structure of this narrative process is very close to that of porn movies.

What a great way to sum up the problem with video game stories! I think he's right on, and I'm glad that he's pointed out the correlation between games and a form of media that most people consider to be, ahem, lacking in narrative. As my friend put it, "if games are structure like porn, the developer had better make sure that the money shot is interactive and not just some cutscene."

Warning: long, sort of pointless rant that has very little to do with horror game follows.

If you read this site often you might have noticed a recurring theme in my rants: I'm of the opinion that the video game industry is shooting itself in the foot with its death march towards computational perfection. Every time we increase the power of video game machines, we also increase the cost to create games, but this cost increase is not accompanied by a similar increase in game players. The result is higher risk to game publishers (they need to sell more units to make the same profit as before), fewer games on the market, less overall innovation (it's too risky), and greater reliance on licenses and other tie-ins to artificially improve the size of the audience. This ground is well trodden on this web site, I think.

But I wanted to talk a little bit about the few developers who actually have the ability to try something new. Now, I'm not talking about the huge self-publishing companies like Capcom or Konami--these guys are large enough that they can absorb a lot of risk, and their products are pretty consistently innovative. No, I'm talking about second- and third-party developers like Surreal (The Suffering series), High Moon Studios (Darkwatch), Headfirst (Call of Cthulhu), and the now-defunct Computer Artworks (The Thing). These guys are in an odd spot: they are paid by some publisher to make games (and often must relinquish some degree of creative control to their publisher), but they are also small teams who can maintain an innovative vision and execute on it. At big publishers like EA, teams are shuffled around for every game, and the long term fiscal outlook of the company as a whole is the deciding factor when selecting games to produce. But these smaller studios have, to some degree at least, the ability to choose their destiny and (assuming they can secure funding) work on innovative products.

Take The Thing, for example. There is a crapload of new game design ideas in this game. It's got a fear/trust system that has never been done before, where you need to convince your team mates that you are not an alien (and thus stave off their irrational fear) by giving them weapons and ammunition. The level design is intelligent, and the way the game uses the license from John Carpenter's 1980 film is excellent. This should have been a revolutionary horror game, but instead, it fell apart because of a few design flaws.

The alien test system is broken. You are supposed to be able to administer a blood test to people you meet and see if they are aliens or not, but in practice the test tells you nothing because it might return a false result 30 seconds before they change into an alien in a cutscene. The Thing's designers had a cool idea about having team members with different roles (you can't turn on the lights unless you have an engineer with you), but this falls apart when you realize that any of your team members can be killed at any time (so it ends up being that you can't turn on lights yourself if your engineer is alive, but you can do it yourself if he's died... dumb). These are probably the result of the schedule for this game being compressed, or of a lead designer leaving in mid-development. These few flaws pretty much ruin the whole game, and they were probably the result of having too little time to finish the game.

Which brings me to my point, if I have one. Innovation is a hard thing to do. It takes a LONG time to get new things right. If you look at games that are known for their innovative content, you'll see that they invariably have extremely long development cycles. Companies like EA don't have time to waste on the sort of iteration necessary to make an innovative game, but smaller studios like Computer Artworks do not have the funds to set their own schedules. The result is that innovative games don't get made, or they get made poorly because they were crammed into insufficient development cycles. The Thing should have been an awesome game, but Computer Artworks also needs to pay its employees which means that its publisher (in this case, Vivendi-Universal) set the schedule based on when products will be most profitable for them. Basically, it's a sucky model that does not link innovation to profit.

Sorry for the rambling rant. This came out way longer than I intended. Oh well, it was cathartic to write.

Thanks to Kotaku.com for this cool interview with Makoto Shibata, the brains behind the Fatal Frame series. Apparently there is a longer version of this interview, but I haven't been able to find it yet. Pretty interesting stuff.

This is totally off-topic for a horror blog, but I'm going to post it anyway. Resident Evil 4 was clearly game of the year for me until last month when I started playing Shadow of the Colossus. Colossus isn't a horror game; if anything, it's probably closest to a platformer. Created by the team behind ICO (Fumito Ueda et al), Colossus demonstrates that even simple platforming mechanics can become an emotionally substantive experience when put in the correct context. I started this site because I find horror games to be the only genre of video game to consistently focus on emotional manipulation of the player, but Ueda and his team have shown (twice now!) that gripping and emotionally relevant games can come in any package. Tycho from Penny Arcade explained the core of the game's power extremely well:            ... Shadow of the Colossus feels like an indictment of gaming as usual in many ways. There are elements of the story that are ambiguous from the outset, not because the story is being told poorly but because the situation you find yourself in and the powers you come into contact with are not drawn with absolute clarity. So while you go through the ordinary motions that we associate with videogames - discern objective, eradicate opposition, return for reward - you're engaged in a series of acts whose moral virtue is by no means assured. The supposed hero is assaulting majestic, sometimes docile, sometimes curious, sometimes sleeping creatures. They're almost all portrayed in a sympathetic light at some point, and it's hard not to feel disgusted at times for iterating Hollow Game Mechanic X by rote without any sense of the moral spectrum the acts inhabit. The game needs to be seen by every conscious organism on planet Earth. (source) The game is epic, unique, and thought provoking. I'm highly recommending it to you, despite it being in no way, shape, or form a horror game.

I highly recommend that everybody check out this very interesting article about women in gaming by Chris Crawford. It's not directly related to horror, but I think Crawford's line of reasoning may help explain why horror games seem to be more adept than other genres at reaching casual female gamers. His premise is pretty interesting, and though he is careful to point out that he's speaking in terms of generalizations, I think his conclusions are fairly convincing. The game industry is shooting itself in the foot by not courting the female audience, and as Crawford points out, most attempts at marketing games at women seem to simply consist of making everything pink.

Update: A long time has passed since I posted this article, and since then I've met a lot of people, including several women, who found Crawford's ideas and conclusions sexist and offensive. I didn't take his article that way--I thought that he was calling for more understanding of women as a target audience of game players so that the industry might make better games for them. A lot of other people, however, believe him to be saying that women like specific things thanks to evolution and that is that. Upon re-reading the article, I can see where they are coming from: he jumps too quickly from some interesting ideas on evolutionary psychology to some theory of his own about how that might apply to games. I think it's fair to say that he sounds as narrow-minded as the people he complains about earlier in the article.

So if you are just reading this for the first time, I'd like to reword my recommendation of his article. I think that the idea that women and men might enjoy different things in video games is worthy of discussion, and I think that the evolutionary psychology approach is an interesting perspective. I'm not sure that it proves that the industry should all go out and make games about social manipulation, and frankly, the research he presents is much more interesting than his conclusions. I do think that he has a point about the industry not "getting it" when it comes to targeting women gamers, but I think that he may also have a bit to learn himself.

Thanks much to Insert Credit for pointing out this enlightening interview with Takayoshi Sato. Sato is responsible for all of the CG in Silent Hill and did tons of work on Silent Hill 2 as well. He's since moved on to EA, and in the interview he discusses what it was like working at Konami during the development of Silent Hill. IC has also linked to Sato's personal page, which is pretty cool.

I've been thinking about the nature of challenge in horror games and games in general lately. It seems to me that there are two basic types of challenges:

1. The player is challenged to figure out what he needs to do next, and
2. The player knows what to do, but is challenged by actually doing it.

Let me provide a few examples. Myst is a game that is almost entirely driven by what I'll call Type 1 challenges. You are thrown into an environment with a lot of interactive components and you have to figure out what to do. There's a bit of Type 2 in there as well, because eventually you figure out what your long-term goals are, but most moment-to-moment challenges are in the form of "what do I do next?"

Devil May Cry is a game that is almost entirely Type 2. You've got moves to perform, you've got a single exit from most rooms, and all you have to do is beat the crap out of everything between you and the next exit. Of course, "beat the crap out of everything" is a Type 2 challenge because the enemies fight back. In this case your goal is clear but actually reaching that goal requires deft manipulation of the controller, use of combos and powerups, and exploitation of each opponent's weaknesses, etc.

I've chosen Myst and Devil May Cry for a reason. I think you that if you categorized all games into "mainly Type 1" and "mainly Type 2" categories, you'd find that most Type 1 games are PC-based, while most Type 2 games are console-based. Consider the platforming genre (Super Mario, Jak & Daxter, etc): this genre is almost entirely based on mechanical challenges (timing jumps correctly, that sort of thing), so it's heavily into Type 2 challenges. Same goes for racing games, music games, shooters, beat-em-ups, etc. On the other hand, Type 1 challenges are often employed in games where the actual performing of actions is not particularly difficult. Think of the Adventure genre (The Secret of Monkey Island, Syberia, etc): in these games, actually performing actions is almost automatic (click "apply", then click on the crowbar, then click on the door... the character cracks open the lock, etc). The challenge of these types of games is deciding what actions are possible rather than which are appropriate.

Maybe this seems like an artificial division, but I think it is valid. It occurred to me that the web game not pron (it's really not) is an excellent example of these two types of challenges. Each page in the game is a riddle, and you must often decipher a name and password or change the URL in a specific way to proceed to the next page. The riddles are very hard, but even after they are deciphered the game requires you to do some work before you can progress.

[SPOILER ALERT - I'm about to describe the solution to two early riddles in not pron. If you don't want to read it, skip to the next paragraph]
Early on in the game, you are presented with a picture of a candy wrapper. There are clues in the source file, but the real riddle is deciphering the URL, which is a Type 1 challenge. Once the URL has been deciphered, you realize that to progress you'll need to name the candy. This is an impossible challenge if you've never seen the candy before, but even if you think you recognize it some google searching will be required. This is a Type 2 challenge: the goal is clear but work is required to progress. In another page, you must first decipher that the background music is meaningful (Type 1) then record it, speed it up, and listen to the words that are spoken (Type 2) in order to learn the password to the next riddle.
[/SPOILER]

The problem with not pron is that it is not very fun. At least, I didn't really enjoy it very much. I don't mind hard Type 1 or Type 2 challenges, but when they are mixed together the results can be very frustrating. In not pron you are constantly asked to solve a difficult Type 1 challenge, but there's no reward and no progression until you also solve a related Type 2 challenge. The result, at least for me, was annoyance because I would routinely decipher the riddle of the page and just be too lazy to actually carry out the asinine work that actual progression requires. I'm probably also bitter because in solving one of the riddles required me to download some software that installed loads of spyware and adware on my machine... and that is where I draw the line.

Ok, so right, this is a horror game site. Well, let's talk about Resident Evil a bit. RE is a mix of Type 1 and Type 2 challenges, and it's expertly done. First and foremost, we've got challenges that involve traversal of the mansion. We need to find keys, unlock doors, solve puzzles, and collect items. This is almost always a Type 1 challenge, because we're looking for the next set of interactive elements that will help us progress. At the same time, we've constantly got to deal with the zombies. Killing or avoiding the zombies while maintaining scarce health and ammo is a Type 2 challenge: we know what we need to do but the actual action is difficult. The balance between these two types of challenges is key, and the best Resident Evil games give you both types of challenges in equal amounts, often staged in such a way that you never feel overwhelmed by the puzzles or the combat. I personally think that Code Veronica is Capcom's the best example of this. Of course, some people who are expecting all Type 1 or all Type 2 challenges are put off by Resident Evil, as I was put off by not pron.

This is a long post. Thanks for reading.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates, I've been balancing some end-of-the-summer travel and a few fast-approaching deadlines at work. In my absence, forums member Sadako has graciously posted her impressions of the recently-released (in Japan) Fatal Frame 3. Check it out.

Horror games mostly operate by mixing horrific content with simple game mechanics. Just looking at the combat systems in these games, we've got a few basic formulas: the pivot-aim-shoot Resident Evil system, Silent Hill's aim-charge-release system, Fatal Frame's aim-wait-shoot mechanic, etc. These game play systems are fun, but they are not intrinsically scary. One might argue that the way these systems generally prevent the player from moving while they attack adds to tension (especially because the player cannot easily deal with multiple assailants), but I think most of these systems are utilitarian: the game designers need the player to be able to attack enemies, and this is the method they have chosen. The fear part is then expected to come not from the mechanics themselves, but from the story, imagery, and character design of the game.

If you think about it, this utilitarian nature might be a deficiency of the survival horror genre. Many other genres are able to produce mechanics that are quite enjoyable without the assistance of context. Think about the delight that one feels when mastering the cape flying system in Super Mario World, or the despair that losing the ability of flight induces in NiGHTS. Driving the buggy in Halo is invigorating, and web-swinging in Spiderman 2 is awe-inspiring. These are games that use context only to sell the player on the setting, but rely on their mechanical rules to produce emotional responses.

Horror games are all about emotion, but the mechanics of most horror games are not in and of themselves scary (or even particularly interesting, usually). Notice that when the horror context was removed from the Resident Evil engine in order to produce Devil May Cry, Capcom spent a very long time on the mechanical end, building complex combos and upgradable weapons into the game. Why haven't horror game designers figured out how to evoke feelings of fear, tension, and unease through game play systems yet?

I'm probably not being very fair. The use of force feedback in Silent Hill 2, even during non-interactive scenes (such as when James must stick his hand into a dark hole) are done extremely well, as is the force-feedback heart beat in that series. The autopsy sequence in The X-Files: Resist or Serve is a good attempt, but it's muddled by an unclear input system and superfluous time limit. Siren's sight jacking system is used to very good effect, and that game is able to produce some excellent scares by forcing the player to worry about how much noise they are making (by running, walking, or crawling) when they sneak around. Finally, the visor system in Carrier had potential but failed because the game sucked so much.

Another thing to consider: frustration is the enemy of fun. Attempts to create a mechanics system that provokes a particular emotion has the potential to restrict the player's ability to control the game, which is a recipe for instant frustration. Siren and Resident Evil (among others) have received a lot of criticism because some of their game mechanics, while designed with emotional impact in mind, are just too hard for some players to use.

So what might a scary game mechanic look like. If we remove the context (character, setting, enemy design, etc) from the game, how might we still build tension, fear, and unease in the player?

I've written a new Feature about character design in horror games called Designing Characters to be Scared For. Here's an excerpt: By selecting a macho super-soldier as the lead character, the game designer forces himself to invent situations where even this highly trained mercenary is defenseless. For example, Resident EviIs giant snake monsters, colossal Tyrant enemies, and hoards of zombies are designed to make even the macho STARS mercenaries look overwhelmed. The same is true for the frequent underground laboratories, giant Victorian complexes, and corporate conspiracy themes that Resident Evil employs. These designs are a direct product of the robustness of the protagonists created for the title. In contrast, Silent Hills rather ordinary setting and less over-the-top enemies are a reflection of its "average joe" main character. Check it out! As with the other features, there's a spot for comments at the bottom.

Here are my notes from the talk at GDC titled Real Time 3D Movies in Resident Evil 4. This talk was a technical discussion of how the artists at Capcom went about creating the movie content for Resident Evil. Consequently, its target audience is not really RE fans, which is why I haven't posted it until now.

The speaker, Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, is a lead artist at Capcom. He began his talk with a discussion of why Capcom decided to employ realtime movies for Resident Evil 4. Pre-rendered FMV sequences are not time effective, he explained, as the rendering process takes so long that minor tweaks cannot be easily made. Realtime movies were also preferable because they provided more flexibility, and seamlessly integrated with the rest of the game.

Hirabayashi explained that they wanted to fuse the action of the game with the cutscenes, and this decided to make some cutscenes interactive with the action button. Most games simply interrupt the game experience when a cutscene comes along, but the Resident Evil 4 team wanted to keep people engaged. Using interactive cutscenes forced the player to pay attention, which was part of their goal.

Hirabayashi then shifted gears and began talking about the elements of a good realtime cutscene. He listed the following as elements:

• Smart use of time
• Believability, including using secondary motion to make animations realistic
• Appealing characters, even at the expense of realism
• Intelligent use of CPU and GPU resources: swapping textures and models during cuts, et cetera.

Hirabayashi also described the work environment that the team employed. Game artists typically rely on programmers to put their work into the game, but this approach is slow and time consuming. For Resident Evil 4, the team built a web server that could manage game assets and automatically convert animated cutscenes from Softimage to the game format. This allowed the artists to quickly iterate over their work without involving a programmer, and it moved a lot of work that programmers normally do to the graphic artists, which saved time. This system allowed the graphic designers to solve problems like memory constraints, and resulted in higher-quality work overall. Using this system, Hirabayashi noted that on other game projects typically spend 30% of their time creating scenes, 27% of their time tweaking scenes, and 43% of their time converting scenes to the game format. Under the web server system, the Resident Evil 4 team was able to put much more time into tweaking: 25% of their time was for creation, 50% for tweaking, and 25% for conversion.

Changing gears, Hirabayashi then went on to talk about facial animation in RE4. Ashley's face had 3500 polygons, which was about average for each character. They created 36 expressions for each character (implemented via morph targets), which was 1.5 times more than any other game they have done. To manage these expressions efficiently, they created a system that allowed them to package different groups of expressions depending on the scene. Given 30 slots for expressions and 25 basic expressions, they were able to select 5 unique expressions for each scene. This allowed them to only load the data they needed. Interestingly, they animated all of the facial expressions by hand after being disappointed with the results of motion capture and phoneme-based animation generation.

The "package of relevant" data concept was extended beyond facial animation. For each scene, the artists were able to choose between low, medium, and high quality models and textures. If they used both high quality models and a high quality texture, each character cost around 400k. However, having the ability to mix and match these assets allowed them to customize the level of detail needed for each scene. If they needed a scene that had a lot of lighting but did not focus on the characters up close, they could use a high poly model (good for lighting calculations) with a middle-quality texture. Or, if there was an extreme close-up with little animation, a low poly model with a high resolution texture would produce good results. Managing these packages of characters allowed them to adjust the relative complexity of each scene, and thus choose between a few highly detailed characters or several simpler characters. Interestingly, they also modified textures depending on the situation. They found, for example, that six different eye textures were necessary to make the character's eyes look correct in all scenes on a TV.

Hirabayashi also discussed a few of the lighting and visual effects technique used in RE4. Projection lighting is a form of projective texture where a 32x32, 64x64, or 128x128 texture is mapped over the light frustum, making it look like there is geometry between the light and the character. A good example of this is the knife fight with Krauser, where the characters appear to be under a grid-shaped ceiling with a light behind it. They also used real-time generated textures for reflection, and were able to animate depth of field by precomputing a blurry image and then shifting it slightly as the scene progressed. This approach worked well when most of the scene was not moving, such as during dialog scenes.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting lecture for game developers. I am not sure how much regular gamers care about this stuff though.

Right after GDC, I wrote about Akira Yamaoka's talk on Silent Hill. The slides to his presentation are now available in PowerPoint format. If you are interested in the design of the Silent Hill games, you should check this out. Also available is notes from a technical discussion on the cutscene creation process from Resident Evil 4 that I never got around to posting about. It looks like the Resident Evil talk has had a lot cut out of it, but if you guys are interested I can still post my notes.

Thanks to Insert Credit for linking to an article on Gamespot abut From Software's upcoming PSP title, Adventure Player. Adventure Player will run adventure games that user can create themselves on a PC with software called Adventure Player Studio. Several sample Adventure Player games will ship from From, the first of which appears to be Echo Night. Sounds pretty cool!

At the Game Developer's Conference last week, Akira Yamaoka gave a presentation about how the atmosphere in the Silent Hill series was constructed.

Yamaoka split his talk into two sections: Day and Night. The Day portion of his talk began with a discussion about how horror differs between American and Japanese cultures. Yamaoka called Silent Hill "American modern horror through Japanese eyes," and explained that he had set out to make a Japanese-style American horror game. He mentioned Steven King and David Lynch as inspirational writers, but he also pointed out that being Japanese, many aspects of the horror of Silent Hill were probably influenced unconsciously by Japanese culture.

Yamaoka talked at some length about these differences. He discussed the Japanese concept of onnen, which is a grudge or need for vengeance that might be manifested even after the person's death. Below is a list of characteristics that he described being rather culture specific:

Generally, Yamaoka said that Japanese style horror tends to focus on story (which is often very sad), while Hollywood style is often much more concerned with creating "surprise horror." This may be because Japan has a rich history of horror folklore, and whether they realize it or not, everybody who grows up in Japan today is exposed throughout their lives to these traditional concepts.

Yamaoka then switched gears and started talking about the creation of Silent Hill. He covered his "concept of horror," which included a story arc that Silent Hill follows. Among his various points, he noted that the story need not explain everything because the user will fill in the blanks. He also said that minor details in the presentation or story could help enhance feelings of fear in the user. Yamaoka then described how horror in Silent Hill is constructed as a progression of events that occur in the story.

1. Uneasiness due to lack of information or illogical explanation
2. Logical reconstruction via perception
3. Stacking up fragmented info / creating space for imagination
4. Providing general picture (this resolves the first part of the horror, but lulls the player into a more comfortable state)
5. True horror revealed

Returning to one of his earlier points, Yamaoka went on to discuss the importance of realism and reality in Silent Hill. He explained that for horror to be effective, the player must be drawn into the story and must be convinced that the characters and events are real. To this end, Yamaoka and his team spent a long time on the animation of the eyes of the characters in Silent Hill 3. The Japanese have an expression that roughly translates to "The eyes explain more than the mouth," (????), and this concept was explored at length in Silent Hill 3. In fact, a bug early in development caused the eyes of the NPCs to be slightly off their target, making everybody look like their point of focus was slightly off. This effect was so disconcerting that the development team decided to use it in the final version of the game. Yamaoka stressed that realistic presentation is not the same as realistic graphics; he noted that reality is built out of important details, and that things like realistic hair rendering and the like was not the way to make a more realistic game. He touched briefly on using the five senses to stimulate emotion from the player. He described ways that the subconscious can be shaken, such as exploiting the tendency humans have to be more comfortable with turning left than turning right (which is why most roller coasters have a lot of right turns). Yamaoka reiterated his point that reality was not a function of good graphics but of user believability.

During the Night portion of his talk, Yamaoka discussed the use of audio in Silent Hill. He described the ambience in Silent Hill as a product of auditory expression, especially the ambient sounds and radio static noise. He pointed out that while most movies use music to build tension before a horrific scene, he employed the sound of radio static when enemies were close to the same effect, which was more disconcerting to the player. Since Yamaoka is a musician by trade, he had a lot to say about the state of music in video games. He mentioned that until recently, music has been mostly an afterthought for most games, and has tried to avoid interfering with the rest of the game. However, if we consider the sound system as a form of interactive media, many more game play possibilities will be available, especially when the next generation of hardware effectively removes most of the limitations game audio makers deal with today.

Yamaoka closed his lecture with a brief discussion of how content must be created for the next generation. He emphasized the importance of metaphor, and noted that game systems other that graphics will need to improve if we want to communicate metaphors more effectively. Metaphor is difficult to express with visuals, he said, because a metaphor is a symbol that is different for each individual, while visual representations are generally not. However, other types of interactive media must be employed to really get metaphors across to the user. Yamaoka also talked a bit about content that appeals to more than just the player's eyes, such as force feedback. The goal with such content is to bring the experience into reality for the user. He likened this experience to listening to music live versus listening to a recording.

At the end of the lecture, Yamaoka took a few questions. I'm paraphrasing both the question and his response here.

Q: Can you tell us about the Silent Hill movie?
A: It will be similar to the games, closer to Hollywood horror than Japanese horror.

Q: Where did the idea for the radio come from?
A: European techno-industrial music and noise bands.

Q: How were you able to test your game? How can you be sure what you are making is scary?
A: This is difficult to begin with, since we're trying to do something that hasn't really be done before. We were looking for a balance between all new ideas and mass market appeal.

Q: Can you talk about the concept of emptiness in Silent Hill 4?
A: We decided that being alone is scary, especially when you cannot escape your confines.

Q: How do you tell your story without lying to the player?
A: We never lie to the player, but we may not tell them the whole truth. We misdirect the player with content that is simply confusing, and drop information that might be easily mistaken for something else. We also do careful testing to gauge how much of our story our users are really getting.

Q: How do you make fear personal to the player?
A: Everybody has their own concepts that they are scared of, and it's hard to target fear at a specific individual. However, you can take advantage of things that tend to scare just about everybody, and fill your games with these sorts of ideas.

After his lecture, I spoke with Yamaoka for a few minutes until they kicked us out of the room. I was quite interested in his entire presentation, but the point about Western horror versus Japanese horror was particularly intriguing. I asked him if he felt that modern Japanese horror in popular culture (horror movies, etc) were more influenced by Hollywood style or by traditional Japanese legend. I noted that The Ring and Juon: The Grudge were moderately popular here in the States, but that most people here are not really aware of traditional Japanese horror stories like Earless Hoichi (??) Yamaoka's take on the situation was interesting. He pointed out that Juon seemed very Western to him, as it spent a lot of time clearly showing the viewer the enemy (the cat-child, the woman at the end, etc). Ring, on the other hand, he found very Japanese; almost all of the movie deals with an enemy that we only briefly see, more of the horror is suggested than actually displayed, and the story is very sad. He said that he'd actually thought about giving a talk about Earless Hoichi at GDC, but was concerned that the story might be difficult for Westerners to understand (there is significant cultural context to the story, including a lot of Buddhist background; if explicitly explained beforehand, the story would lose some of its impact). If you are interested in the story, you can read it here, as translated by Lafcadio Hearn.

Yamaoka's talk was perhaps the best lecture I attended at GDC this year, and I feel extremely lucky to have chatted with him afterwards. I'll post more notes about horror games from GDC 2005 pretty soon.

Thanks to Kotaku for linking to info about Resident Evil 4's development cycle. This is just some message on some board for the moment, so until it's confirmed in Edge, take it with a grain of salt. Some interesting details from the post:

• Resident Evil 4 as we know it is actually the fourth version of the game. The first version ran on PS2 and was turned into Devil May Cry. The second version is the one from which we saw a early footage of a couple of years ago (with Leon and the shadow monster), and it was scrapped for not being "revolutionary enough." The third version had Leon taking Umbrella down, and was full of classic zombies, but this version was "a total failure." The fourth version is the version we know and love.
• They spent 1 to 1.5 months modeling each character in the game.
• The instant knife-draw move was added based on user feedback. At one point the game allowed players to strafe, but the move was removed because it made the game too easy.

Check out the full post for details.

I'm almost all the way through Fatal Frame 2. The game's been pretty easy, and after 9 hours I've reached what I believe to be the final save before the end boss.

Before I get into ranting about the design of the end boss, I need to briefly cover some Fatal Frame mechanics for those of you who didn't play the game. In the Fatal Frame series your only weapon is a camera. To fight ghosts, you take pictures of them with the camera at a key time. Taking pictures any old time doesn't do much damage, so the strategy is to wait for a special moment (the "fatal frame") and take the picture then. You know when this moment occurs because the lens turns red and a sound starts playing. The moment is very brief for most ghosts (less than 1/2 a second), and it usually happens just before they hit you, so the game is all about timing these super shots right. In FF2, you can power your camera up by collecting points. You get points by doing super shots. Powering up your camera can make it more damaging, give it a larger range, etc. You can also add features to the camera that allow you to do special shots that do more damage or affect the enemy in some other way, but you need points to "buy" these features. Also, you can save yourself from death by carrying around a Stone Mirror, which will refill your life to 100% if you die, but it only works once. It's sort of like the Aku Aku mask in Crash Bandicoot: it gives you the ability to survive a fatal hit one time. You can only carry one stone mirror around at a time.

So I'm not going to spoil the end boss battle for you, but I do want to talk about why the game designers had to make it so annoying. I think this is a case of the designers designing themselves into a corner. The boss doesn't follow any of the regular rules of the game: she can kill you in a single hit, even if you have a stone mirror. What's worse, you can't damage her with regular shots; she's only damageable during the fatal frame moment (which is approximately 0.001 seconds before she hits and kills you). Finally, her life regenerates as she moves around, so you have to keep hitting her over and over to kill her (a goal which I have not yet completed).

All of these changes would be acceptable, except that the designers have made a fatal error: they have failed to place a save point just before the boss battle. The last save point before the boss is pretty far away, and you are required to fight seven or eight spirits before you actually reach the boss. These spirits are easy to kill (they move in straight lines and have a predictable fatal frame moment), but they have a lot of life and are pretty annoying the sixth or seventh time you face them. It takes me a good 15 minutes to get from the save position to the boss, so it's quite frustrating to miss the boss's minuscule fatal frame moment and die instantly.

Why would the developers do something like that? The rest of the game doesn't have similar balancing problems. In fact, the rest of the game has excellent pacing.

The reason is that it is possible to get to the boss without powering your camera up much. You could conceivably play through the entire game without every upgrading your camera, if you were good enough at hitting fatal frame moments and had some patience (in my case, I didn't start upgrading the camera until about an hour before the end boss). It's also possible that you may have upgraded your camera in ways that are not going to help you against the end boss (like, maybe you purchased the "See" powerup, which lets you see spirits that disappear, which is something the end boss doesn't do).

So what the developers have been forced to do is give such players room for experimentation. They've made this long section with easily-killable-yet-high-points spirits so that you can power your camera up in different ways and try different combinations against the boss. They don't let you save before the boss because they don't want you to overwrite the previous save and lock in a single camera configuration. I suspect that the original did not contain the pre-boss spirits, and that they were added after they realized that play testers could get themselves locked into a useless camera scheme.

The problem with this "solution" is that it penalizes players who have powered up their camera correctly. The formula necessary to beat the boss is pretty clear and simple (most powerful lens + most powerful film, duh!), and you can easily max out the necessary attributes long before you reach the boss. The lack of save is a safeguard for players who haven't done this, but players who are "following the rules" are at a disadvantage because they have to waste a lot of time killing superfluous enemies.

A better solution would have been to put a check point just before the boss. That way you could attempt a given camera configuration several times and simply reload if you wanted to go back to the setup you had when you saved (as it is the game has no checkpoints, and you must reload upon dying). Also, many games feature bosses that don't follow the regular rules of the game, but giving the Fatal Frame 2 end boss have a one-hit-kill attack (and consequently breaking the earlier stone mirror mechanic) seems like a formula for frustration.

I'm trying to take more time to use this site as a place to write my thoughts about games down instead of just reporting survival horror news.

Some of you may remember a post I wrote a few months back where I complained that Siren is too frustrating and difficult. Four months later I am still playing Siren, but my opinion of it has increased. The game is hard, yes, and every level takes multiple tries to complete, but these flaws are forgivable because the rest of the game is so awesome.

Siren's biggest problem is that it has tons of new ideas and it doesn't communicate all of them very well to the player. It takes a while to realize that Siren requires you to leave your preconceived notions of how games work at the door and actually try to think critically about the problems it throws at you. Example: in most games, bushes are made using a couple of flat polygons with leaf textures on them in a plus shape. Typically games that allow you to walk through these bushes treat them as eye-candy only; they never have any affect on the game. However, even though the bushes in Siren look similar to most game bushes, they actually have an in-game function: you can hide behind them. When you hide behind a bush or other object, the zombies ("shibito") will not see you if you are sufficiently obscured. The definition of "sufficiently obscured" is a little vague, however, and this is where Siren runs into problems. The game designers have gone to great lengths to make their world as realistic as possible, but in doing so they have traded a degree of game mechanic clarity.

Siren gets away with these flaws because it does everything else so well. However, since the game is fairly vague about the perception of the zombies, a lot of playing is required before you are able to have a good sense of where to hide and how to move. Of course, this vagueness also increases the tension in the game by several orders of magnitude, as you can't always be sure that your hiding spot is sufficient or that the shibito is far enough away for you to walk quietly without being heard. I'm willing to put it in writing right here: Siren is by far the scariest game I have ever played.

The problem of vagueness extends to the game play as a whole. There are many, many cool mechanics going on in Siren, but they are not communicated to you clearly by the game and you are required to learn them on your own. My previous post was right in the middle of that learning phase, a time that can be quite frustrating because one feels like they do not understand the correct way to play.

However, after 4 months of playing this game (about 4 or 5 hours a week), I am mostly convinced that the steep ramp up time is worth it. The developers of Siren are innovating, and they are innovating in all sorts of crazy areas. Siren might look like a cheap knockoff of Silent Hill, but in fact it plays like no other game on the market. The closest analog I can think of is Hell Night, which employs some of the same mechanics. In the end, I don't mind learning new ways to play horror video games if the effort is rewarded. Though I have yet to complete Siren, I already feel like the debt has been paid in full.

We need more games that try new things, even if they are not entirely successful. It is very hard to deviate from the beaten path when it comes to game design, and I have nothing but respect for developers who are able to work new ideas into their games. I'm looking forward to the Siren sequel, and I hope that the developers are able to correct some of the issues with their initial design while continuing to push this genre in new directions.

Lately I've been battling my way through Siren. I haven't had a lot of time to play games lately, but a couple of times a week I am sitting down and trying to make some progress.

Siren is an interesting game. It seems to be universally loved or hated (GameRankings' page shows the reviews of the game divided almost evenly into thirds: 60%, 70% or 80%), and I understand the confusion. While I usually try not to pass judgment on games until I've completed them, I thought I'd post some of my impressions of Siren so far.

The Good
Siren gets a whole lotta things right. The graphics are excellent, both in terms of technical prowess and art style (though the way they use texture maps for facial animation is very strange). The game looks amazingly good, even though it is quite dark. There are a lot of really nice touches to the visuals too, like the bad VHS dub effect they put over the view when sightjacking.

The soundtrack is astoundingly good, perhaps the best of its kind that I've ever heard. The zombies ("shibito" in Siren) make horrible noises, the background sounds are amazing, and the sound effects for in-game events are top-notch. The voice acting is a little weak (a flaw which is compounded by the odd juxtaposition of British accents and Japanese faces), but it's certainly passible.

The controls are great. The buttons are a little difficult to remember sometimes (it's a little odd that the circle button is cancel), but the control and collision detection is easy and smooth. There are some things about the control scheme I don't like, but I'll get to those in a minute. Mostly, the control is perfect for this style of game.

I'm really hip to the design. Siren isn't like any other horror game to date, even though it certainly took some visual cues from Silent Hill 2. The play mechanics are pretty unique, and the focus on sneaking above all else is new to this genre. The sightjacking mechanic in particular is really well done; the use of the analog stick as a tuning device is brilliant.

The Bad
Not everything is perfect, however. The single biggest flaw with Siren is that it's just too damn hard. Siren is a sneaking game, which means that rather than solve puzzles or take out enemies, your ultimate goal is to get past the shibito without being seen. It turns out that not being seen requires a lot of patience and waiting, but it also causes the game to be scary as all hell. However, since such an emphasis has been put on sneaking, it's often the only option you have. If you are seen, your chances of survival are slim. On many levels you have no weapons, and on some you actually have to escort another character through the level. All of these mechanics sound fine in theory, but Siren's implementation seems very poorly balanced. One level will take an hour to complete after 15 tries, while the next will be beatable in 20 minutes on the first try. I am not very far into the game, but one particular level took me twenty-odd tries (over a period of three months) to beat. That's just unreasonable.

This level of difficulty is compounded by the ineffectiveness of the combat system. When you do have a weapon to wield it's still very hard to beat the zombies. Siren uses an odd combination of button pressure and timing to allow you to select how hard you want to hit an opponent, so the harder and longer you hold down the button, the longer your attack takes to complete and the more damaging it becomes. This takes some getting used to, but even now going up against an unarmed zombie can mean death for me at least 60% of the time.

So long, convoluted levels + ineffective combat scheme + ultra high difficulty = frustration. Frustration is the enemy of fun, and Siren really suffers from it. To win, your only choice is to sneak past your enemies perfectly. The margin of error is far too small.

All that said, some levels are better than others. The design of the levels themselves is pretty great. I am looking forward to finishing Siren, and I hope the later levels turn out to be better tuned than some of the first. Even if it doesn't get much better, Siren is a great example of how developers might go about developing horror games that are unique and innovative.

Kevin over at Game Hermeneutics has written an interesting guide to "generic" survival horror game design. Kevin seems to be mostly talking about Resident Evil, but his points are still valid. I've been thinking of writing an article in a similar vein for a while now. I think Kevin's done a good job of scratching the surface, but there seems to be so much more we can generally state about the genre.

What kinds of design ideas do you think make an excellent horror game? What ideas should be avoided?

I have a theory about Resident Evil games: I think that only every other game in the series is well balanced. The major criticism of the first Resident Evil was that it was too difficult, but RE 2 was inspired. RE 3's structure was somewhat disappointing, but Code: Veronica was amazing. And now, as I play through RE Zero, I am struck that the play balancing is considerably poorer than some of these previous titles: the pacing is off, the game is far more difficult than previous titles, the puzzles are mediocre, and the control scheme is starting to feel archaic (especially after the RE 1 Remake's awesome "Type C" control). That's not to say that RE Zero is a bad game (I'll write a full review when I finish the thing), but I am finding that it has not been tuned nearly as well as earlier titles.

Hence my "even-numbered RE games are better" theory (note that I am considering the order of release, not the order imposed by the game plot, so RE Zero is the 5th game). Should this theory prove true, I think we can expect Resident Evil 4 to be as awesome as the screens make it look. I am not sure how Resident Evil: Outbreak fits into this equation, but I guess we'll find out when it is released at the end of March.

I recently asked a poster named "spike" how he might correct the faults of Chaos Break, which he apparently hated. I'd like to extend this question to all of you for all the games in the database.

Let's say you get to decide how to fix one of the games listed here. You may choose any game that you think has serious problems. However, there are guidelines you must follow when fixing:

• You can't change any art, you must use the characters and models that come with the game.
• You can't improve the 3D engine or otherwise make major changes to the technology.
• You may make major changes to the way the game is played: change the combat system, add an inventory system or skills or whatever.

So what games do you think are the most flawed and how would you fix them? You may post as comments on this message, contact me directly, or sound off in the forums.

Please note that if your messages are devoid of content ("this game sucks ass, I'd just play something better"), I'll just delete them.