Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre in Video Games
Richard Rouse III
Game Storytelling works best when the plot is fairly simple...but the plot is something that needs to be immediately understood and which propels the player through the whole game experience...Since horror works best the less that is explained and the more that is left up to the imagination, it maps well to game storytelling. - p16
...back-story in subtle storytelling sections involving dialog over game-play, graffiti written on the walls, very quick semi-animated flashbacks, and cryptic journal entries...This enabled us to keep the story mysterious enough that the player would be left with numerous unanswered questions. - p17
In horror, the way the audience fills in the blanks will be far more disturbing than anything a writer could possibly come up with. - p17
Horror is also ideal for games because it presents a familiar world but with enough of a twist to make it seem fantastic and special. Horror stories are typically set in highly recognizable locations that players can identify but which have been invaded by some evil force. - p17
A horror game can introduce a supernatural element which justifies...Yet the familiar setting of horror fiction keeps the player grounded. - p17
A popular game design device is to give players some information about their surroundings, while leaving a lot out. - p18
In an immersive game, the player actually projects himself into the experience...With the player fully immersing himself in the world, fear becomes much more intense. - p20
...it's important to keep in mind that almost all narrative video games are power fantasies of one kind or another. If too much of the player's feeling of power is taken away, in comparison to what they're accustomed to experiencing in other games, they're going to feel frustrated and hence pulled out of the experience. - p23
...the most cinematic device, the cut-scene, surely one of the most jarring immersion breakers in a game's toolbox...it tends to pull players out of the experience. - p23
Gothic Bloodlines In Survival Horror Gaming
Laurie N. Taylor
In Gothic literature, lost histories are often uncovered through the castle or haunted house in which the narrative takes place, with frequent remarks on the past inhabitants through decorations, paintings, and other elements. In survival horror games...the same elements remain. - p53
Storytelling In Survival Horror Video Games
Ewan Kirkland
...littered with narrative fragments in the form of newspaper articles, lab reports, photographs, diaries, audio cassettes, painted portraits and computer logs, accessible through both game-space and what Aylish Wood labels "info-space"...As Ryan notes, such techniques produce two narratives running in parallel: "the story to be discovered, and the story of their discovery". - p67
Written documents, an audio file, graffiti, all contribute to the foreshadowing of the level's conclusion. - p68
The design of spaces in survival horror games and the manner in which players are encouraged or permitted to interact within them are central to the genre's management of the interactive experience to fit a determined narrative patterm. - p68
To use Ryan's terminology, in survival horror video games spaces constitute the material signs or discourse through which the player mentally constructs the game's story. - p71
Just as a reader or viewer might not necessarily interpret their respective texts in accordance with the ideal interpretation, so players are unlikely to complete a video game in its initial play. - p73
In survival horror, the necessary actions which make up the "ideal sequence" of play are imbued with narrative significance: through the design and organization of avatars, spaces, puzzles, objects, adversaries, and the scattering of info space documents. Games elicit a story produced through game-play by requiring that certain narratively-loaded objects be picked up and correctly used... - p73
Storytelling in survival horror, in common with many qualities of video game narrative, is a process of uncovering not narrating (Grieb 2003: 166), solution rather than creation (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2008: 182) . - p75
...in survival horror buildings and spaces tell stories, much like the documents which litter them. - p75
The ultimate horror of survival horror is the suggestion that, despite our strongest feelings to the contrary, we are not the masters of our own fate. - p77
Haunting Backgrounds: Transnationality And Intermediality In Japaneses Survival Horror Video Games
Martin Picard
Silent Hill is considered to be more psychological, more about characters and atmosphere, and more about giving a sense of dread, anxiety and helplessness [Perron, 2006: 8-8]. - p96
...psychological horror, a type of horror akin to Japanese horror...In order to build tension, psychological horror relies on the characters' fear, guilt, beliefs, and emotional instability... - p111
Psychological horror is terrifying to gamers due to the tension built up around the story and characters' actions. It creates discomfort by exposing common and universal psychological fears, such as the fear of the unknown... - p111
I believed that our method to invoke the fear in the player's own imagination maximizes the recipient's fear. We do not simply show scary things, but provide fragmental information and create a situation that forces the player to imagine these horrors. I personally call it, "Subtracting horror" [Stuart, 2006] - p111
In Japanese horror, fear is not simply generated through suprise; the silence and suspense in-between the action is important too. This silence makes the player's fear build in his or her mind. Japanese horror is always designed this way [Stuart, 2006]. - p112
The Survival Horror: The Extended Body Genre
Bernard Perron
"the horror genre can easily do away with character and plot; it is the detail of the monsters, the rhythm of the tension and shocks that matter. Plot and characters are things video-games find very difficult to deal with" - p132
...the third [-] person perspective added to the dramatic tension by allowing the player to see things that would otherwise be lost in a first [-] person perspective, such as monsters chasing the player character... - p132
Agency is the second unavoidable concept at stake. Janet Murray has influentially defined it as "the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the result of our decisions and choices" (1997:126). - p138
Plunged Alone Into Darkness: Evolution In The Staging Of Fear In The Alone In The Dark Series
Guillaume Roux-Girard
It isn't what you see, but what you can't see. It's the suggestion; the subtle teasing of the subconscious; the lonely creaking of the floorboard resonating throughout an empty hallway; the slow advance around the corner; the swelling sense of dread as the ever-present evil that looms near refuses to reveal itself. Fear is not the adrenaline rush. It's the helpless feeling of beign alone in the dark [Fahs, 2008] - p145
The acousmatic sounds - defined as a "sound one hears without seeing its originating cause" (Chion, 1983: 19, freely translated) - populating the off-screen, induce fear because they create anticipation. - p152
As is the case with horror films, the silence...puts the player on edge rather than reassuring him that there is no danger in the immediate environment, increasing the expectation that danger will soon appear. The appearance of the danger is, therefore, heightened in intensity by way of its sudden intrusion into silence [2004]. - p153
To trigger sudden events is undoubtedly one of the basic techniques used to scare someone. However, because the effect is considered easy to achieve, it is often labelled as a cheap approach and compared with another more valuable one: suspense" (2004). - p159
Patterns Of Obscurity: Gothic Setting And Light In Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2
Simon Niedenthal
The emotions resulting from enforced player vulnerability - a hallmark of the survival horror genre - as experienced within the narrative themes, player tasks, and virtual architecture of the game worlds, offer a new venue for exploring the depths of fear, terror, and the sublime that were first plumbed by writers such as Anne Radcliffe, Edgar Allen Poe, Matthew Lewis and H.P. Lovercraft. - p168
One key way in which survival horror games create tehir emotional effect is by maintaining a state of player vulnerability. - p170
...obscurity is one means by which the appraisal period is extended, and the player is frozen in a state of uncertainty, in which action is considered but not yet possible...Often this is accomplished through strategies of visual obscurity related to darkness, atmosphere, and spatial occlusion. - p173
Dark environments are a cliche within the horror genre. Therefore, it is important to reiterate that darkness is only one means of creating obscurity that lends itself to the sublime terror of the survival horror genre. - p176
Hair-Raising Entertainment: Emotions, Sounds, And Structure In Silent Hill 2 And Fatal Frame
Inger Ekman and Petri Lankoski
Regarding the early horror film, Whittington mentions how sound became one of the main tools for maintaining narrative cohesion in films that otherwise would have lacked tension and suspense... - p181
The emphasis on sound has remained important even as the genre has matured. We suggest a reason for this resides in sound's ability to tap into emotional responses in a way that is extremely powerful, yet subtle enough to escape our conscious attention. - p181
They aid story comprehension by selectively attracting attention to events which are important for understanding the story... - p185
Power and Dalgleish suggest that fear relates to situations in which a person perceives that their personal survival, or their objectives are in danger. - p190
...the games further create anxiety by playing noisy and unpredictable environment ambient sounds. - 193
Daniel Kromand (2008) points out that horror games also tend to use "false alarms." Thus, when the usefulness of a certain sound has been established, it is sometimes used in vain, just to make the player more alert. This uncertainty of the functionality and role of sounds contributes to the deeply disturbing effect of sounds. - p194
Our analysis suggests that sounds are essential in shaping fear through goal-related evaluations...A particular sense of unease is created with sounds that cause contradictory evaluations: loud sounds accompany actions that would best be silent... - p197
Complete Horror In Fatal Frame
Michael Nitsche
Upon completion of the game, the player is left with no increased understanding or reward; it is unclear whether survival or a "happy ending" was achieved. The avatar could possibly be dead. Instead, finishing the game provides relief from responsibility and escape from its horrors [Hoeger and Huber, 2007: 156]. - p216
Gaming's Hauntology: Dead Media In Dead Rising, Siren And Michigan: Report From Hell
Christian McCrea
"Horror video games' emulation of white noise, photographic blurring, and celluloid imperfections, produces the uncanny impression of an older, ghostly or undead analog media seeping into, contaminating and enveloping the digital" (Kirkland, 2009). - p222
The Rules Of Horror: Procedural Adaptation In Clock Tower, Resident Evil, And Dead Rising
Matthew Weise
...the process of which I'm speaking is creative, not prescriptive. It is an authored process, by which conscious choices are made in how to change, manipulate, and re-arrange elements of an existing media text so that it conforms to an author's interpretation. - p239
...process of abstraction, by which certain elements are chosen to be modeled in a game system while others are omitted (Juul, 2007). - p239
Procedural adaptation is the term that I feel best encapsulates what video games do when they codify the conventions of horror texts. - p239
Watching someone run from a serial killer and running from a serial killer oneself are not the same experience... - p241
Reanimating Lovecraft: The Ludic Paradox Of Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth
Tanya Krywinska
The "cookie-crumb trail" device, as I will call it, provides game designers with a means of controlling the order in which a player encounters events, the predictability of which can mean that that cinema-style shock tactics can be more easily employed. - p274
The trail...can be played with to create shocks, surprises, work up a strong sense of trepidation and in many cases function as a means of acting as both environmental story-telling and warning of terrors to come... - p274
While the sound or other cues in cinema prompt the spectator to imagine they have to act, in games it is incumbent on the player to act on what they hear and see. - p275
...its interiors, is exceedingly dingy and run-down, the overall effect of the decaying-chewed-toffee colours is to give the player a sense of claustrophobia, underpinned by the presence of many boundaries that restrict the player's explorations. - p280
Personal Notes
This book has been fantastic help. A major influence (maybe) was the discussion of 'Procedural Adaptation' which means taking a book/film and adapting it into some sort of game. This is something I have done and may use this within my research or project title. The first page of this particular chapter had some nice descriptions.
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