Survival horror isn't about disempowerment

There's an extremely common thought among game designers that survival horror games are based on disempowerment. I really don't know how this got to be a common theory, because it's wrong. It's wrong in the same way that "the sun rises" is wrong.

Balloons rise. Smoke rises. The sun does not do that. The sun only appears to rise because of our perspective.

The disempowerment thing is the same. It only appears to be founded on disempowerment because we're looking at it from the eyes of the player, and that's what it appears to be from that perspective.

But it's not.

Survival horror is, in the very first word, about survival. The primary challenge of the game is going to be about surviving, not about winning or shooting accurately or gaining levels. It's a different focus, although often not a very tight focus.

In order to make the game about survival, "disempowerment" is required. More accurately, "game balance that makes the challenge of surviving actually challenging" is required.

Thinking of it as disempowerment is probably not accurate, because disempowerment implies some kind of absolute norm of power that you're undercutting. That's not really accurate: it's just game balancing, and surviving has more subdued encounters. Typically, attrition is a much more powerful and effective tool to make survival feel like survival. Even that, however, is not the core of survival horror.

For example, the scariest games I ever played were System Shock II and Silent Debuggers.

System Shock II didn't have disempowerment as it is commonly defined. However, it did have the long, grinding road of attrition. Similarly, in Silent Debuggers it was rare that any given enemy would threaten you, but trying to hunt them all down before they blew apart critical ship resources was a terrifying ordeal. Especially since every level you advanced left destroyed resources destroyed. Again, attrition. But attrition is just a survival mechanic, not a horror mechanic.

Neither attrition nor disempowerment make a game horrifying. Neither do any competing ideas, such as limited information, excessive travel dangers, safe-and-dangerous zoning, and so on.

There's loads and loads of games that use these things and aren't horrifying. For example, Chess. Cooperative board games. Solitaire.

If you really aren't convinced, think about all the times you had an enforced stealth mission. Was it horrifying when Link had to escape prison again? Was it horrifying when Sam Fischer wasn't allowed to shoot anyone this mission? Similarly, what about when you're deprived of weapons and have to push through the beginning of the third act with your weakest weapon. Those are all disempowerment scenarios. Horrifying?

No! It could be heart-pounding, but that's absolutely unrelated. Football is heart-pounding.

To be blunt, the core of survival horror is the horror part. There's not really many non-survival but-still-horror games on the market, so the two words have become wedded in our mind. Survivalhorror.

The feel of the game owes a lot more to the horror half of that, even though we've been giving the survival half all the credit. Having a tense moment does make it easier to convince you that things are horrifying. But that's more like having a crack to shine the light of horror through, rather than it being the light of horror itself.

What is "horrifying"?

I would say it's seeing people hurt. Broken people. Suffering.

Yeah, that easy.

See, in video games, most of the mobs we face aren't "people". They may be shaped like people, they may even have faces, but we're taught to dehumanize them. They don't have any real human characteristics.

But in a horror game, we give those human characteristics back to the enemies. The enemies are recognizably individuals that have suffered and been driven far past sanity. Bloody nurses, baby-headed spiders, butchers with their faces torn off...

Of course, it's best to take it further. Not only have the enemies been given human characteristics, but the NPCs and often the avatar have been given human characteristics as well.

The avatar is the most common: terror by direct proxy. We put the avatar in a situation that would make him scared, and the player therefore feels his fear. This is the "survival" part. So if you want to talk about survival horror's "disempowerment", this is what you're doing. This one piece. You're building a situation where the avatar should feel scared.

But let's not overlook the NPCs. It's an extremely common and very powerful tool to build up the NPCs as humans before killing them or turning them into monsters. Sometimes it's very quick and easy - a few lines of dialog and then they are eaten by a monster. They are chased down a corridor while you can't follow. You find them dead, with their last email still on their PDA. Whatever. You understand that they were people who suffered.

Sometimes games take it a lot further, a lot more effectively. System Shock 2 is pretty much the reigning king of this even now, with the classic build up and staged reveal of SHODAN. It's actually legitimately horrifying. And the scariest parts of the game are when SHODAN acts more human. Those are the horrifying parts of Portal, as well. You can connect with the enemies as humans all the sudden, which means that they aren't faceless monsters: they're completely broken humans. Horrifying.

The most effective horror methods are those that let us feel the fear and pain of those in the situation. As an example, if a little girl is killed, you'll probably be horrified. But if her family survives it, and you hear their wailing grief... that'll turn it up a lot. This is one reason why horror games tend to torture rather than kill: the expression of pain is horrifying, a very clear way to communicate suffering.

Survival horror. Survival, sure, the survival part. You can argue it's disempowerment. I would argue that it's simply making the challenge of the game "survival" rather than whatever other default you would go for.

It's the "horror" part that matters, though. And that's just seeing suffering, seeing broken humans. Understanding that people hurt.

At least, that's what horrifies me.

Dead Isn't

Everyone's talking about Dead Space 3 now. Most of them are pretty much saying what I would probably say if I played it: "it's not scary". "the constant money-shop pestering is annoying", "well, it's fun when they stop with the bullshit."

I won't be buying it. I wasn't pleased with Dead Space 2 - it was formulaic and boring to me. I tried to think about why.

The general theory about scary games is that the main character needs to have no real power. You get scared because you can't really win - you can just claw your way towards desperate survival.

I'm not sure I buy that theory 100%, because System Shock 2 was scary as hell. So was one of the Aliens vs Predators games, although I can never remember which is which given their Capcom-esque naming conventions. In both games you play heavily armored space marines capable of taking down any enemy you face. Even the bosses are usually brought down by simply shooting them a lot. But they're pretty scary.

Dead Space was kinda scary. Dead Space 2 was scary for about an hour, maybe. Crew Cut Beefy White Guy #102,911,158 cuts his way through the two games pretty much the same way, so why is one scarier and the other not? Why are neither as scary as Aliens vs Predators Ultra Turbo Gold Edition? Hell, why is House of the Dead 2 (Suffer like G did?) scarier than Dead Space 2?

I think it's my immersion in the threat. That is me, the player. How threatening the world feels to me.

In both System Shock 2 and AvP, the threatening world was really tangible. It was extremely rare for either game to feel "cheap". Every threat you ran into felt like it belonged. Of course there's a mech in there. Fuck, the room is labeled "mech storage". None of the threats are popped into existence solely as a transparent challenge to the player. You are in this hellish world, and it is tangible. It works like the world would work.

On the other hand, Dead Space 2 (and 3) both suffer from serious monster-closet disease, where enemies basically just randomly run into rooms to give the player a challenge. There's not really any reason why the monsters constantly attack the decontamination chambers. There's no reason for them to come crawling out of the walls right at this moment. They just do it because it's their job to scare the player. It's a haunted house ride instead of a horror game.

Of course, the challenges making sense are not the only thing that makes games scary. There's also how often you die. And that number should be extreeeeeeeemely close to "once".

Dying is a constant threat in Dead Space 2. On the other hand, in truly scary games, it's actually pretty easy to beat any one encounter. The question is how many resources you come out of it with. If three dogs jump in through the window, you probably have enough time to blow them all away... but how many bullets did you waste? Is it maybe better to try and use a shitty weapon to save good ammo? Maybe even the knife - but then you might actually die!

Dying in a scary game should be close to taboo, because dying means getting to try the same damn thing again and again and again. It's not scary to die when you respawn at a checkpoint. It's scary to reach the end boss with only a few bullets left.

Dead Space 2 features a huge number of cheap deaths - presumably because they want you to see the implausible death animations they've created. More than once I died after completing an objective, and it reset me back to an old checkpoint. This isn't scary. It's fucking annoying.

Death isn't scary in a video game. It's annoying. Saving your progress when you have only a few bullets left is scary.

Scared Avatars

I was thinking about horror games where having the player take actions similar to a scared person might make the game more scary.

For example, in some of Frictional Games' works, monsters would only see you if you looked at them. So you spent a lot of your time hiding in a corner, waiting for the monster to move on.

Also, there have been a few games by Quantic Dream where you manage your sanity by taking boring, day-to-day actions. The games weren't very good games, but it stuck with me, this idea that pouring yourself a glass of water and watching a bit of TV would calm your digital nerves. It's an immersive and powerful pacing tool.

I'm kind of interested in amping this up.

We can add in other things people do when they are scared and nervous, like hum to themselves, run wildly, look around a corner nervously, duck back, and then look again... a whole bunch of little behaviors. And then we can incentivise them gently, often transparently.

For example, maybe you will nervously run your finger on the wall if you walk along it at a specific distance. This creates noise, but also a small amount of san recovery. It's something the player will discover just in the course of playing the game, but they quickly learn to use it as a tool or avoid it as a hazard.

Maybe tidying up gives you san back. A book put back on the shelf? Plus one san. Knock a book off the shelf? Minus one san. Pick up broken glass. Straighten paintings. Scrub sinks... incentivise player behavior, rather than just making the avatar hear voices.

If you look around a corner and then duck back, there won't be a monster there. But if you just come waltzing around the corner, there's a monster in the nook. Don't even tell the players - just let their instincts figure it out. When they get scared and low on health and start acting cautious... that's when the pressure lets up. The moment they get cocky... the hammer comes down. It has nothing to do with how many resources they have, it's all about how confident they act.

Just kind of brainstorming. I think it would be fun to create a game where your avatar's connection to the world is more important than his stats. A game where the players learn to act nervous and scared.

I wonder whether it would make them nervous and scared.

Gasp! Scary!

Now that Halloween is safely tucked behind us, we can get on with the true nightmare season: Christmas. To that end, I'm going to talk about scary games! Specifically, I'm going to design a scary game using some basic principles and techniques that we'll discuss.

First thing first, my pet theory about scary games is that they operate on a steady diet of information imbalance. However, even if you don't buy that line, the techniques included here are used frequently and pretty well tested.

Alright, from that perspective, let's talk about what makes a game scary!

Normally, people talk about setting, monster, hero. I personally feel that's not really a very good way to approach game design, but let's hit on some of the basics.

Dark and foggy, you can hear the monsters long before you can see them. Who knows where they'll jump out from! 

This is a classic example of a very basic philosophy, and one followed by every kind of scary game. Even non-scary games have scary enemies by having them follow these rules even in pretty friendly, brightly-lit surroundings (for example, the hands that reach out from the ground and drag Link back to the dungeon entrance).

I view this as a kind of information imbalance. The setting says that we're in danger, but doesn't give us any precise timing or magnitude. In an action game like Half Life 2, rooms/areas are generally self-contained. When you approach one, you understand that you're likely to face a certain kind of conflict and with a certain difficulty. You can often see enemies before they see you, and, of course, abuse of quicksaves and replays give you even more solid information about the enemy.

On the other hand, a proper horror game tells you that you're in danger... but never tells you how much danger, how soon. The sound of a gently hooting monkey tells you that one of those damn cryomonkeys is around here somewhere, but it's a very tense time hunting for it. The bank of large windows tells you that zombie dogs or birds are likely to burst through, but not when, nor how many. Rooms and areas frequently have no role in delineating challenges - challenges frequently start halfway through a room, or when you're just about to switch rooms.

In other words, the beating heart of the "dark, foggy, hear-em-before-you-see-em" setting is the setting telling you that there are enemies around... but not telling you when or where or how many. This isn't some exact science. If you can hear an enemy in the darkness, you can usually tell how many there are, and perhaps even a vague idea of where they are. If you step into a graveyard, you can be assured that they'll come up from the graves, so you know where they are... but not when, nor how many.

This is the art of giving the player just enough information to feel threatened, but not enough information to actually do anything concrete about it. The best the player can do is hug the walls, creep along, and keep their guard up.

Trapped and powerless, you fight overwhelming odds.

We talk about this when considering setting/hero design, but in honesty this is a mix-up. This conflates a movie setting design concern and a game setting design concern, even though they are actually two different concerns both served by a similar design principle.

In a movie, isolating a weak hero is a matter of making sense. If a killer started stalking me, I'd just pop over to the police station. So you have to explain why the hero doesn't do that. There are more ways to do it than simple isolation. Fight Club has some very scary moments where it becomes obvious that the police are in on it, and Terminator has some scary moments where it becomes obvious the police can't help. Neither features isolation as such, but they both solve the same basic problem: they both deny the hero the chance to get out of the situation.

In a game, that's not quite as pressing. Instead, the focus is on the level of power the hero has over his surroundings, rather than whether the hero can get out of trouble. Protagonists in video games are extremely active, aggressive, "solution-focused" individuals because that's the nature of playing a video game. Therefore, the setting is less about trapping them and more about depowering them.

Scary game heroes tend to move around a lot. In fact, movement is often the primary method a horror game player expresses himself. A game like Battlefield and a scary game might both feature moving, shooting, collecting stuff... but which elements are expressive will be different. A player in Battlefield expresses himself by how he shoots and strafes and takes cover. A player in Resident Evil expresses himself in how he moves from location to location, desperately gathering tiny bits of strength.

This is one reason why the "safe zone" plays radically different roles in games and movies. In movies, the safe zone exists so that the monster can eventually break in and make things horrifying. In games, the safe zone is a part of the player's ability to express himself. If you remove or damage the safe zone, the player loses the anchor of their expressive play. Moving from place to place matters far less if all places are equally unsafe!

Anyway, the game side of the design - helping the player express himself in how he travels - means that scary games need to have a very nuanced travel system. You can travel within a room - for example, skirting around the other side of a kitchen island, or sticking to the top of a rafter so the milling zombies won't get you. In that case, travel is tactical. You're choosing a path based on how well you can keep up your guard and whether there's any loot to be had over there.

You can travel between rooms - walking through gateways, opening doors, etc. This is strategic play, where you are deciding whether the timing for that room is right, or whether to hold off and explore other, safer areas and gather more power first, or maybe whether to return to your safe room... just in case.

You can also travel between zones, such as changing from the house to the back yard, or from the factory to the underground labyrinth. The biggest difference between zones is the chunking factor. Each zone essentially resets your strategic options, since you have to rediscover the safe rooms, map out the connectivity, and judge each room for safety all over again. Backtracking is typically not scary unless the zone has significantly changed since the last time you explored it... because you've already explored it. You've already done the sweaty-palms risk analysis.

As to my pet "information imbalance" theory, exploration of the areas is about gathering what information you can and trying to plot a safest possible course through it. There are many times where you'd prefer to tackle a dangerous room over one that looks safe, just because you can clearly see all the dangers in the dangerous room and the safe room has some information still hidden away.

Winning or losing? It's always losing.

In most scary games, a big part of the game is the idea that fighting an enemy is always a loss. Even if you win, you've expended valuable resources. This leads to radically optimizing your playthrough. For example, mastering the melee weapon so you can kill the minor enemies without losing any resources (although with a risk of getting injured).

One of the fundamental principles you'll always hear bandied about is that you need to have a powerless hero. However, I don't believe that to be true for a video game. A movie, sure. But in a video game, rather than the power level of the hero, the dynamics of conflict are more important.

Basically, a scary game's fights are always losses. There is no way to win a fight such that you come out of the other end better than you went in. Even boss fights - the reward isn't more power. It's just an open door. This is in direct opposition to action games, where the enemies drop ammo and health and experience points.

You gain power by scrounging and scavenging from your surroundings. You spend power on the enemies you fight. That's the scary game dynamic. The core of this is the tension - not knowing whether you'll be able to scrounge up enough to get past the enemies.

Risk, pressure, and regret.

A common line of thinking is that there's got to be risk in order to be scary. There's certainly some of that, yeah. But you need to be clear about whether you're talking about pass/fail risk (dying, failing the mission), story risk (can you defeat the oogie-boogie man?), or attrition risk (can you keep things from getting worse?).

The scariest games are scary because of attrition risk leading to pass/fail risk. A game where you have to restart the mission if you're noticed isn't going to be scary, it's going to be a mechanical aptitude test where you replay the mission over and over.

Instead, what's scary is when things get worse. If the player has unlimited save/load capability, this attrition needs to be quite slow so that he doesn't feel any given conflict went badly enough to make him reload. If the player doesn't have much save/load capability, it doesn't have to be as slow.

Things getting worse include mostly losing health, ammo, and maybe sanity points. It is possible to add in a lot of other "getting worse" factors if your game is going to be unusual, but in general attrition simply makes the next wave of enemies feel more dangerous because you are closer to being unable to deal with them.

Of course, the balance here is quite difficult. What one player may find a grueling last-ditch effort to squeak by a zombie using your last bullet, another player might be able to cruise by with just their fists. Nothing says this clearer than Thief, where getting in melee combat was supposed to be a knuckle-biting "you will die!" experience... but some players are good enough they can just gut everyone they see.

Because this is so hard to balance, a lot of designers lean heavily on story beats. They introduce "story risk" like "the house is on fire! Run!" Story risk will resolve the same way for every player, so it's a known level of pressure. Of course, that known level of pressure is much, much lower than the pressure of a properly balanced attrition situation.

Often, the story beats are also used to 'reset' the attrition-based power level, essentially capping how absurdly overpowered a skilled player can get. Another big limit is inventory management, which keeps really skilled players from collecting a massive stockpile of resources.

Some story beats feature a choice where you can do either A or B. We still stick with this idea as if it were actually a tense situation, but 99% of the time it's pretty boring. In order to make it tense, you have to do two things.

1) You have to make the choice actually hard. Not simply the same choice over and over again. IE, not "good vs evil" or any other 'A vs B' that repeats. Instead, each decision must exercise a different kind of choice. Good vs evil. Honor vs glory. Love vs good. Health vs authority. Whatever you can come up with.

2) The choice has to matter a lot, for a long time. The player has to regret that they didn't make the opposite choice. That way, when the next choice comes along, they are more crippled by it.

Screwing with the player's expression: the mastery of pacing.

The player expresses himself by how he travels in the game. This is where a player's delicate sense of risk, pressure, skill, and reward come together to express the player's personality. It is the paintbrush with which the player paints.

Therefore, it's also a major part of the scary.

Enemies are scary, sure. Especially when there is no way to win, just ways to lose less badly. But enemies are adrenaline-scary, not the kind of creeping, continual terror you feel when properly put into a scary situation.

You can get that by screwing with the player's primary means of expression. How do you screw with the player's travelling? Well, you can do it by brute force or with incentives.

A brute force example is when you can't travel freely. The floor collapses from beneath you. Enemies block your path out. You can't move over to where the enemies are, but they can still strike at you. You can also do it with some level of subtlety - fires you take damage from if you get too close, water that slows you to a crawl, ladders that leave you exposed while you climb...

Incentives are when there's no fundamental issue with the level, but their choices are suddenly much more difficult. For example, if you hear a cryokinetic monkey hooting, you'll want to hunt it down without exposing yourself to potential blasts. If there's a monster hunting you down, you'll want to run perfectly without getting caught. If there's an ammo cache on the other end of the room, you'll want to go there even though it's a wide open space...

Both brute force and incentive systems require a sense of pacing. If every floor falls out from under you, you're going to start treating it as a system-level rule and incorporating it into your basic play. So enough time has to pass between floors falling out from under you that you aren't worried about that particular problem any more.

Scary Challenges

A lot of scary games revolve around "how do I do this thing" puzzles. The most famous are Resident-Evil-style "puzzles" like "find the octagonal handle for the cupboard inside the demon statue's left foot, then gather up some slug resin so you can combine it with a banana and glue it into the cupboard so you can open the cupboard and get a triangular key".

These puzzles are derided as being very silly, but their opacity is on purpose. If you had a challenge where you knew the solution and were making concrete progress towards it, you're not going to be as tense. You know where the end is, you can measure your exact progress... not as tense.

These puzzles are everywhere, but usually they aren't quite so silly. For example, having to swing a catwalk around so you can cross a gap is the same kind of puzzle. It's not completely opaque, but you have to figure out that it's even possible.

These challenges are most brutal when you add time pressure in. For example, having to figure out how to rotate some statues while a boss monster continually chases you around. These will frequently result in death, so carefully play test them for balance.

NPCs

There's a lot of talk about NPCs and their role in horror games. Some scary games extensively feature NPCs in both major and minor roles. In others, you never talk to a single living soul.

One of the problems with NPCs is that they are generally reassuring. If there's someone to help you, then you have a safety net. This is why, in general, NPCs in horror games are either evil or burdensome.

Putting aside evil NPCs, burdensome NPCs are a mixed bag.

Having something to protect is very powerful... but you have to want to protect it! Frequently, burdensome NPCs are just plain annoying, to the point where you start to hate them.

You could theoretically fix this by making the NPCs much more intelligent (AI-wise), but this would fundamentally be making them less burdensome, and it would take a lot of effort.

Two easier solutions are to make the NPC remote, or to make the player choose to take them. If the NPC is remote, you can simply hook triggers into the game world. If X time passes, they get injured. If you collect Y prisms, they give you a better gun. Remote NPCs don't have any AI worth speaking of, and basically serve to put a human face on in-game challenges.

Making the player choose to take NPCs requires an adaptive/open world, since the player might choose differently at any given moment. A player that chooses to do something will generally be a lot more accepting of the difficulties involved than a player who is simply forced to do it. Choosing to do an escort mission is a lot more acceptable than being forced to... even if the player is eventually more or less forced to choose to do an escort mission. The act of opting in is powerful, even if there's really no way to opt out.

Fumbles and bad controls.

A lot of scary games have very bad controls. The reason for this is fourfold.

Firstly, very bad controls are a source of weakness, making the hero less capable of dealing with the enemies. Since dealing with the enemies is always supposed to be a losing proposition, bad controls cement the deal.

Secondly, bad controls are equalizers. Very skilled players shine with responsive, tight controls. While skilled players will still be better than unskilled players with clumsy controls, the difference will not be as large.

Thirdly, bad controls respond very aggressively to player panic. If a player is scared, their ability to use your shitty control scheme drops much faster than if your control scheme was really great. Therefore, if the player is scared, they will get even more scared because now they are shit.

Fourthly, it radically increases the pressure by making it harder to gather and react to information. Awkward cameras and controls don't just make combat harder - they make it slower and more difficult to gather and react to all sorts of information, including things like room layout, hidden items, NPC interaction, inventory management...

How is all that information imbalance?

I've explained a few of the above things as being based on information imbalance, but others I've left unexplained. And, of course, my pet theory is just my pet theory, so I didn't want it to intrude much.

Some of the things above - such as equalizing skill between players - aren't based on information imbalance. I don't think information imbalance is every little thing that could ever be scary. But I do feel that information imbalance is fundamentally scary, or least very high-pressure.

For example, when you are playing poker, there's a desperate push to read your opponent's faces, to count cards, to control your own expressions. The pressure of playing poker, even just with free chips, is tangible. And it's all thanks to the information imbalance. The high-level play of poker is almost entirely about gaining the edge in information.

There are a lot of different kinds of information imbalance. Let's mention some of them.

Information gaps are when you are given some information, but there are gaps. These gaps create pressure. For example, if you hear a hooting cryomonkey, you know that there is one... but not exactly where, or when you'll run into him. If you look into a room and see a cupboard, you know you can open it and there might be stuff inside. But you don't know how much stuff, or whether there's going to be a trap along the way.

The gaps create pressure not just to fill them in, but also to nullify them completely. If you hear a monkey hooting, you can try to fill in the gaps by hunting down the monkey on your own terms... or by skirting the area and blitzing through, trying to make it so that the encounter never happens at all. Similarly, if you suspect there is a trap in a room, you might try to navigate such that it will trigger when you are in the perfect position to weather it, rather than stumbling in as the designers intend.

Information scavenging is a primary method to try to fill in gaps or decide to go around. This involves skirting the edge of the situation looking for insights before approaching. It's valuable both as tension and as pacing.

Information delays are when you have information, but either too far in advance or not far enough in advance to be comfortable with it. This isn't the same as information gaps, because you have more or less complete information. An easy example of this is when monsters burst through a window. Yeah, you can see them. You know what they are, where they are. But can you act on that information rapidly enough?

You can go the other way, too. If you know right away that the final boss of the factory is Glouberk and he's in the manager's office, there can be a lot of pressure as the knowledge builds. You discover fragments of information that make Glouberk more menacing. You see the manager's office window from the factory floor and it's covered in goop... there's no surprise - eventually, you walk in and fight Glouberk. But even though there's no surprise, the delay is uncomfortably long, long enough for the pressure to keep building up. This only really works if you can keep flicking the player with reminders and additional bits of pressure - otherwise, they'll forget all about it pretty quick.

Bleed control is when you are the information source, and you are trying to limit how much you reveal, or perhaps even distribute misinformation. It also may involve trying to goad others into revealing more than they want to.

Chance is when you know roughly how likely something is, but you don't know how the dice will land. For example, you can release a chandelier and it'll crush anyone beneath it. You decide to use it on a heavyweight enemy in the room... but it's difficult to line up. There's not really any missing information, here. There's just a chance you'll hit them, and a chance you won't.

Chance is a bit iffy, because it adds a lot of chaos into what is typically a very carefully balanced experience. However, if you're making a less carefully balanced game, chance can play a very good role. Just remember: this is about having all the information and choosing to gamble, not about randomly getting screwed over.

Information pressure is when you have information, but if you don't act on it, it will either lose value or things will get worse. Pressure doesn't necessarily mean time pressure, although that is the most common.

Information swamping is when you have too much information and the challenge is to figure out which bits matter.

Other

So, if we take the information imbalance thing as a solid idea, can we come up with any other game mechanics that might be scary and aren't on that list?

Well, the format of modern scary games is such that some obvious mechanics aren't used. Chance, information pressure, and information swamping are all not very common in scary games, because scary games are fundamentally tightly scripted.

If we move to an unscripted scary game, we can radically amp up the roles these things play. For example, the game could revolve around high-stakes betting. It's a very popular subgenre in anime these days, sometimes revolving around a specific game (mahjong) or a random assortment of anything-goes high-stakes betting.

We could set our game in a town or school. Something high-pressure has happened - the town has been flung into a new dimension, your school grades depend on bids, etc. The result is an open-world game where all the NPCs have challenges you can accept.

In order to make it scary, we don't have to make it foggy, and we don't have to make traveling our primary mechanic. Instead, we can create the feeling of pressure through the less commonly used mechanics.

A big part of making it scary is to make the world wear down on your resources, and make the resources only gainable through betting. So there is a heavy attrition as the world gets more and more difficult to deal with. NPCs change as time goes on - the things they can provide, the things they are willing to do, the gambles they offer. The fear is, on the surface, because of the human flaws of these people who don't always cooperate to survive. At a deeper, mechanical level, the fear is because of the need to constantly make dangerous gambles to survive another day.

So the core play is deciding which gambles to take in which order. The resources you gain from gambles might be resources required to survive the world's attrition, but sometimes can be used to make other gambles easier or clearer. For example, if you win an easy gamble with someone for the right to have them cooperate with you, then you'll have an easier time with a poker game because they are signalling you while looking at your opponent's hands.

The game is about taking risks. To a lesser extent, it is about gathering enough information about any given risk to know what the risk actually is. Also, whether to expend valuable resources on making the risk less dangerous.

The game is about an information flood. You have to figure out which of the townsfolk are offering what kinds of deals, and glean out which gambles are worth taking and in what order.

The game is about information pressure. If you don't take a gamble soon, it's going to change as things get worse. David won't always be offering a simple high-low card pull wagering his help vs a can of beans. Maybe the gambles he offers will get more dangerous. Maybe less.

And of course, the game is about how the NPCs react to the grinding attrition of the world. This will vary not just by NPC, but by the various things you might do to help them (probably in gambles). For example, it may be that losing a gamble will allow an NPC to survive another day...

That game could be pretty scary.

It could also be tense but not scary if you allow for saving/loading or make the world's attrition level too low or make the NPCs too cooperative.

How do you get Started?

This is NOT an entry into the round table this month. I will do something more substantive for that. This is just the story of Why I Love Horror.

When I was just a wee lad, I had a normal childhood of Disney movies and Scooby-Doo reruns. The games I played (less than many kids I know) were things like Mario, Sonic, and Squaresoft back before it sucked.

One day, I purchased a game called "Cyborg Cop" for my Genesis. (Or maybe "Cyber Cop".)

It was a bit of a Shadowrun-themed game which took place wholly in a futuristic office building. It's graphics were 3D, but had no textures at all. The character creation was extremely varied - so much so that the first five times you played it was impossible to get a character that would survive.

It was a hellishly hard and not-very-good game. Until I got to one of the later levels - three or five. Then I ran into a werewolf. I couldn't kill it. I ran. I hid. I sat and thought. "Maybe I can run through the level while it's somewhere else? But how can I tell where it is?"

That was when I heard the footsteps. It padded up to me, stopped on the other side of an opaque wall. Paced back and forth. Loped rapidly off.

It was HUNTING me!

I was pretty young, and freaked out, so I wussed out and shut the system off. I never played the game again.

Ah, a budding love of horror.

Shortly after, I began to play my friend's Turbografix. Instead of the good games, I liked to play Silent Debugger. I didn't actually get to play it much, I was terrible at it, and it's a pretty poor game, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

In Silent Debugger, you don't travel from level to level. Instead, you are in a giant elevator, and the outer layers change but the inner layers always remain the same. Over the course of the game, critters invade various parts of your elevator and start to damage and destroy things like energy rechargers and ammo stations.

In addition, you had a way to tell when something was nearby, but before you could actually see and affect it. A bleeping.

You have to understand: these two terrible games were a stunningly different experience from all the games I'd played to that point. All the other games either had perfect information or levels which waited for you. This idea that things were happening - things you needed to do something about - this was new and full of adrenaline.

After this, I continued my illicit love affair with the horror genre in the form of movies - stolen hours of late-night TV or someone's well-worn VHS of "Evil Dead". But back in those days, horror games were essentially unheard of, and I wouldn't have been able to convince my parents to buy me one anyway. I watched a lot of kung-fu movies - a poor substitute, but quickly turning into an addiction in their own right.

When I got into high school and college, things started to pick up. I had a lot more access to horror movies. (Actually, I don't like horror movies. I like shlock horror, survival horror, and terror movies.) I also found a few really incredible horror GAMES that came out. System Shock and System Shock II are the most potent, but Marathon, Doom, Half Life, Aliens vs Predator, and a bunch of others certainly made their impressions.

(Bobs are flammable!)

Anyhow, this made me something of a specialist in horror related theory and techniques. This is, of course, in addition to at least a dozen blog entries. :)

To me, the only true horror games are first-person. Nothing immerses like first person. Third person does good things involving player vision, but you lose a lot of the visceral affect. I don't really care for most third-person horror games. The aiming feels stupid, a monster jumping at you doesn't have the mind-numbing shot of adrenaline... and the idea that you need to carry around random junk and hope some of it fits in some hole somewhere is just not horrifying. Seriously, who locks a door with an octagonal key? Losing immersion is THE quickest way to lose me.

And yet, immersion is just about the ONE essay I haven't written.

So, that'll be my entry into this month's round table.