Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Fear, a survival horror look

No, not the game Fear.  Fear from the game your playing itself.  We've all felt some kind of emotion playing a game.  Frustration when you get to a particularly annoying boss or puzzle.  Joy when you finish off that boss, or even anger or sorrow at seeing someone you've grown close to in a game die or move on.  Few games though, can invoke the fear, anxiety and sanity breaking madness of a good survival horror game.  Wether it's the fear from the unknown in the game causing the player to make a misstep, or making them look over their shoulder so much they fail to notice the danger right in front of them.  Since the original Resident Evil (and before it clocktower, yes I've been doing my homework) the survival horror genre has been attempting to scare, and make extremely anxious, it's player base.

This mechanic of fear is an interesting one.  I touched on it briefly in my last post, and will expand upon it a bit here as well.  Everyone experiences the fear in these games a bit differently.  I recall my most frightful experience thus far has been playing Silent Hill 2, alone in the dark during college.  With no lights on and by myself in the middle of a dorm room, nothing so far has given me that level of terror, and it actually made me play the game better then before.  I was paying more attention to things and straining to hear if anything was coming around the corner.  Other people become affected and become worse at a game.  They may lose focus and try to find that far-away tell tale noise, only to miss the giant monster coming from in front of them.  Other people cannot take the fright of the games and instead decide to walk away, never playing the games again.

This post is going to be cut a bit short, as it's a bit late for me right now.  I may need to skip a day or two of posts due to some real life issues going on right now, but I'll attempt to make them up as I go.

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