Editor’s note: I tend to agree with Gerard’s main point: that many video games are an expression of childhood power fantasies, and I can only play so many of those. I wish fewer titles these days coddled the player by not offering a meaningful, permanent consequence for failure. All genres — not just horror games — could benefit from such a redesign. -Rob
I was a child with a vivid imagination. I spent many hours in my backyard tree, defending my kingdom from invading nasties. My custom-built Lego spaceship took me far into the galaxy and back again — always with many stories to tell of battled aliens and uncovered treasures.
These fantastical adventures spawned from a special place inside my head — a place of joy and comfort, but also a place where I was the winner. I controlled the fantasy; thus, I knew that no matter how dire the circumstances that I would come out on top. I would win the day.
I do not believe that such an experience is uncommon during our lost childhood years, and I think this is why many video games take a certain form.
Playing as Faith, I will save my sister.
We often know we will win when we play video games. These realizations exist to make us feel good and become lost in a world like our childhood fantasies — to end in victory.
If games are an extension of our imagination, then they will carry that assumption of success unless deliberately exorcised by conscious thought.
Playing as Mario, I will defeat Bowser.
It is because of this that I feel the industry as of yet cannot bring itself to make a quality piece of horror gaming. The escapism that so many players seek is equivalent to the catharsis provided by those classic moments in horror cinema where the audience screams out loud.
We have no need to be cast adrift like the audience after Psycho’s shower scene — no matter how many times Infinity-Ward-designed AI kills your floating-gun portal to its world. We will be back in that world — connected and fighting on to eventual victory. There might be some twist. We might even die. But we will not lose.
Playing as Darsil, the stealthy Dunmer mage, I will fulfill the prophecies and defeat Dagoth Ur to save all of Morrowind from his cult-like Sixth House.
Horror is about feeling a lack of control and accepting that the world might be a place where you cannot win and cannot escape. By referencing the many audio and visual techniques of the cinematic traditions, games can repeatedly create unnerving moment after unnerving moment.
But this ends with you alive and your escape successful — no less empowered than the triumphant return of Abe to Rapture Farms to liberate his fellow Mudokan. We need to source another segment of our conscious experience in order to create true horror games.
Or maybe I won’t. But that is because I set out on a quest of my own making in the streets of Liberty City.
If games come from our imagination where we are in control, then maybe we need to search our experience for something altogether different. Maybe we need to remember our nightmares and what it means to have one — those moments when we lack control yet are still on an amazing journey.