Design in Fear

It's almost Halloween, meaning almost everywhere you look, you can see discussions and reminiscing of the things that scare us most. Being a psych major, the subject of fear has a special place in my heart. Why do we enjoy it so much? The subject has been covered at length before, and the short version of it is that we love it because we get a high off the fight or flight response. That's great, but not exactly what this blog is about. How fear is CREATED, though? Now that's the question.

Fear is a product of design, short and simple; it is the result of careful planning on the part of the developer, and the strings of emotion can be plucked in an amazingly varied number of ways by sound designers, level creators, writers, and the other parts of the development crew. It is a concerted, focused effort that can either work to a terrifyingly effective degree, or flop like a fish on a pier.

Fear is an intensely personal thing; what makes us afraid is dictated by what we ourselves are afraid of. Fears can manifest themselves in anything that carries a negative memory or experience, but those aren't the kinds of fears that video games tend to try tapping into. Instead, video games tap into what human beings as a whole are scared of. Darkness, loneliness, helplessness, lack of experience or preparation, and what horrible things lurk just beyond our realm of understanding. What is through that door? I have no idea; it could be anything! The imagination runs wild as it tries to fill in the blanks, and the mind is always preparing itself subconsciously for the worst of outcomes...and that is exactly how a video game can generate fear.

When I think of games that scare me, I tend to look towards one of my favorite game franchises, Konami's "Silent Hill" series.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about the Silent Hill games is how different the fear evoked by them actually is from, say, a movie. Movies can evoke dread, they can raise the hairs on your neck and give you a JOLT as that unexpected thing pops into the screen, and you feel scared for the people you're watching. There's the suspense of wondering what will happen next, and having no way to know but to keep watching, and to feel helpless at whatever outcome plays out before your eyes. But through it all....it is entirely passive. You watch the movie, things happen in the movie, and you are powerless to change it. On top of that, as I had noted before, you feel scared only for the people you are watching, and after the credits roll, are thankful that the same thing didn't happen to YOU.

In a video game, none of this is the case. Let's take Silent Hill, for example.

Silent Hill 1, for the PlayStation 1, follows the story of Harry Mason as he searches for his daughter, Cheryl, in the resort town of Silent Hill after having gotten into a car accident. Something is obviously wrong with the town; it is covered by a fog that obscures anything more than 10 feet away, there is no electricity, and there are no people. The entire town is completely dead, and the only sound that can be heard is the echo of your own footsteps. As you try in vain to search for Harry's daughter, you find a huge bloodstain leading into an alley, as if someone were dragged. Gathering your wits, you follow it...following along into the darkening alley as a piercing air raid siren cuts through the silence, extinguishing the daylight and seeming to summon an unearthly rain. You pull out your lighter...the tiny flame barely able to light an area more than three feet around you, and you can only proceed further and further into the alley...not quite sure why the blood is getting thicker on the ground, to the point where all you hear is the pounding of the rain and the squelching beneath your feet as the ground is littered with chunks of bloodied meat of some kind. You notice there are hospital stretchers and overturned wheelchairs lining the walls, humanoid shapes obscured by bloodied sheets that cover the stretchers...and then you can see the walls give way to a tangled maze of bloodied barbed wire...and then before you, the ensnared and nigh-mummified corpse of a man held up above the alley, in the same position as Jesus on the cross. The music, having been either nonexistant or low and groaning before that point, spikes in a demented crescendo of dissonance and metallic clangs that are suddenly punctuated with the sounds of something sneaking up behind you. And that's when you are grabbed from behind by what look like mummified children wielding scalpels. You have no weapons, you have no way out...you can only watch as they overwhelm you, and kill you.

That is the first ten minutes of Silent Hill 1.

That exact scene is the culmination of a number of different elements strung together by the developers, all designed to unsettle and frighten the player. Even the smallest of elements (The silence, the loneliness, the oddness of the situation) is enough to get beneath the skin and stay put, refusing to go away. The sensation of tumbling down some kind of hellish rabbit hole while feeling your way through the alley is so incredibly palpable, because it is not Harry Mason that is doing the tumbling; it is YOU. You control Harry, you tell him where to go and what to look at...and if he dies, it is because you put him in that situation. It is because if you were Harry, you would also have died.

The interactive nature of a video game means that instead of passively watching a series of events unfold, you instead are forced to experience them. Have you ever seen a scary movie in which you thought to yourself "Don't go in there! He's gonna get you!!", or something to that effect? There is no helping it; the movie will go on no matter how much you wish it wouldn't, and bad things will happen with you having no say or input whatsoever. In a game, the tables are turned and you are instead forced into the situation of having no choice but to push onward, no matter how awful the situation continues to get. How do you survive, when there literally is no way back? Keep pressing forward...and endure it.

There are many other ways a game like Silent Hill can present fear by manipulating the variables in a situation, and that brings me to another one that I had mentioned; the oddness of the situation.

Have you ever seen something that just...didn't make sense? It felt so odd, so out of place, that it unsettles you...and makes you feel like what is happening cannot possibly be an accident or coincidence. Something like this freakish two-headed baby demon, pointing a deformed finger at you, staring at you even though its eyes are closed. (This is a monster that you encounter MANY times in Silent Hill 4: The Room, and before attacking, it stands exactly in this posture.)

Silent Hill 2 for the PlayStation 2 is what truly exemplifies this method of scaring the player though, in a particular section of the game that, to this day, I absolutely HATE to play.

Silent Hill 2 follows James Sunderland, an unassuming man who received a letter from his wife, asking him to come to Silent Hill, to find her at their "special place". The problem is that James' wife had been dead for three years. That right there is enough to feel that oddness of the situation, but Silent Hill 2 is not content to leave it there.

At one point in the game, James is forced to enter the "Silent Hill Historical Society" building, a glimpse into the history of the town itself where the player can see how Silent Hill had formerly been the site of an American Civil War POW camp, as well as a center of occult activity in the years before then. That's when you see it; an impossibly long staircase that looks ripped into the wall, that leads right into another of those rabbit hole from hell scenarios...only this one is longer. Much longer. The staircase feels like it leads into hell itself, the end nowhere in sight, as a sound that can only be described as a hollow, solemn death horn sounds again, and again, and again...and faster and faster, as you descend the never-ending staircase. And then, finally, there is a rickety wooden door, that leads you into a full three to four hours of falling ever deeper into the maw of madness that is Silent Hill's dark underbelly.

You come across a long-abandoned prison buried hundreds of feet underground...but then you have to go beneath that. You then find yourself in the corpse disposal chute used by the prison in the days of the Civil War, still stocked to the brim with ancient and silent corpses. You jump down the corpse chute, and end up in a sewer labyrinth. You go through the labyrinth, finding a hallway that looks as if it were ripped from the prison you had just traversed, only that it had been turned on its side. Your only way forward is to jump into the sideways hallway, falling and falling, winding up in another hole in the ground that leads to a floorless prison cell. Jump in, feeling like you have to be thousands of feet beneath the surface by now....only somehow, the next area appears to be outside, in a small enclosed area. It is raining, and you can see that it looks like the small, near-forgotten area is a strange makeshift cemetary. One of the grave markers is sat in front of an open grave, only the grave itself looks like a bottomless pit. On the marker is written "Here Lies James Sunderland". You have to jump into your own grave (As seen in the picture above). Down, down you go...further down, taking an industrial elevator further down...then winding your way through an empty, newspaper-plastered labyrinth that makes no physical sense, hunted down by a physical manifestation of guilt and punishment the whole way (Who happens to be Pyramid Head, the subject of the picture just below!), forced to watch a doppelganger of James' wife die for the second time in the game, and then....it goes ON AND ON.

The game *DOES NOT* let up! There's even more after that, and each and every little moment of it forces you to feel like the situation cannot possibly get any worse, and yet it does. The entire time, every area you visit is pitch black. There is barely any music; just silence and white noise. The smallest sound makes your heart pound. At one point in the sewer labyrinth, the game even traps you in a small room with a key you need to progress further, kills your flashlight (The one and only source of light and safety you have), and forces you to change the battery. Once the flashlight comes back on, you find that the entire room is flooded with insects that are slowly killing you, unless you can guess the 3-digit code to unlock the way out.

This entire scene, from the moment James enters the Historical Society until the time he finds himself back outside on the shores of Lake Toluca, is a descent into a psychological hell. It doesn't even exist, as confirmed by the game's developers, but it is intended to be a gigantic storytelling device, all giving no subtle hint that the man you play as has done something terrible...something he has repressed, that he feels guilty for, and that the town of Silent Hill itself is punishing him for his crime.

To this day, I am stunned and even humbled at the symphony of fear that Silent Hill 2 in particular is able to conjure. The game knows what scares you, and not in a corny way that sends "chills down your spine", or "keeps you on the edge of your seat", or any of those other tired phrases used in the film industry to show how frightening something is. Silent Hill 2 is genuinely terrifying, because it pulls no punches. It portrays a horrible, depraved scene obscured by darkness and fog, forcing your mind to expand on what could be just out of sight, and then it pulls the rug out from your feet when you least expect it, to show you something true about yourself.

The antithesis of Silent Hill, and of fear in gaming as a whole, can actually be personified by horror gaming's other, more prominent poster child, Resident Evil....although it didn't start that way. Let me explain, in brief.

Resident Evil is the brainchild of developer Capcom, released in Japan under the name "Biohazard". The series plumbs the depths of more physical horror, complete with cheesy (But enjoyable!) storyline and oodles of zombies and other mutant abominations that want nothing more than to kill you.

Resident Evil gave the horror video game genre its mainstream kick start, although it was by no means the first scary video game ever created (Horror games go back much further, with games like 7th Guest, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and Alone in the Dark on PC). The games originally held up their fear factor by depriving the player of resources, a great tactic to keep a guy like me from actually finishing any of the earliest games; it was truly terrifying to be surrounded by enemies, to only have five puny pistol bullets in your clip, and no healing items. It brought that feeling of helplessness and powerlessness front and center, and ensured that the game was truly a terrifying ordeal, even if the games never did attempt to get inside your head and scare you in the darkest and deepest of places like Silent Hill did.

As the series went on, even though the games remained of a very high quality, the actual fear generated from Resident Evil games began to take a back seat to action.

I have no problem whatsoever with a good action game, and the fact is that the Resident Evil games make GREAT action games...but the cost of all that action is the fact that while playing them, you no longer feel helpless. You could be up against a hundred zombies, or mutants, or whatever else the games throw at you, and not feel a single iota of fear, because you're the heavily-muscled man with the enormous machine gun and sniper rifle. You want a zombie gone? All you do is point your gun and squeeze the trigger; you feel like you have something to rely on, even when things go from bad to worse.

Resident Evil 5 is the most recent game, and the one in which the fear has essentially been removed from the experience. You have a partner with you throughout the entire game (The lovely Sheva Alomar, no less), you have an arsenal of high-powered, customizable and upgradeable weaponry, and you have a LOT of ammo. As long as you persevere, nothing can stand in your way. Add to this that most of the game takes place in broad daylight, in the bright sun of an Africa besieged by parasite-infected humans known as "manjini". Fun? Absolutely. Scary? Not one bit.

Compare this to Silent Hill 3, for instance. Silent Hill 3, you play as an ordinary teenaged girl named Heather who is simply trying to get home to her father. She has no experience whatsoever with a gun, she isn't very strong, and she can't move very well. Silent Hill 2 has the exact same thing going on; James Sunderland is only an ordinary man, with no combat experience at all. His first weapon is a plank of wood with some rusty nails lodged in one end. Resident Evil 5, on the other hand, places you in the shoes of a man with biceps bigger than my head, who at one point wields a minigun. Who would YOU feel safer playing as? Easy choice.

The point of all of this is that fear is a nuanced and fragile thing that relies entirely on a game being able to provide a sense of insecurity to the player, and all of this is done through design.

Using the same kinds of principles, a game designer can evoke ANY kind of emotion, from elation and joy to depression and worry. I haven't even really gotten into all of the ways a developer can inject all of these emotions into the software, from level design to music, to use of white noise and silence, and even to small things like puzzle design. There's so much ground to cover!

So for this Halloween, if you REALLY want to scare yourself, go and pick up a game! I guarantee you, the experience will be one you aren't likely to forget, and while you play, take a moment to appreciate the work that goes into making these things as frightening as they can often be. It's tough work, but they have pulled it off in a beautiful way that never ceases to amaze me.

For a little help, here's a list of games I recommend for this Halloween if you'd like to scare your pants off!

-Silent Hill 1 (PS1), 2, 3, or 4 (PS2)

-Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (PS2)

-Condemned: Criminal Origins (360) or Condemned 2: Bloodshot (PS3, 360)

-F.E.A.R. 2 (PS3, 360)

-Dead Space (PS3, 360)

-Demon's Souls (PS3)

-SIREN: Blood Curse (PlayStation Network)

Happy Halloween!!


And as a bonus, I have here a short documentary on Silent Hill 2, called "Alchemists of Emotion". Enjoy! It's an intriguing look into the people who make these games possible, the ones whose jobs it is to scare you, and to make you think...