The F.E.A.R. type of game is scary for about the first three "events", and then it becomes mundane. Scenes with Alma become time wasters, moments where you know no enemies will spawn. Halo 3 does it with the Cortana/GraveMind "telepathy" bits, with the dilated lens and the slow-mo, it just made me wish I could skip it.

Scary is hard to do in a video game, because you know, absolutely, that the game was designed by a person who wants you to be able to finish it. Roguelikes are scary because that world doesn't care whether you live or die, and historically, it prefers to see you die. Should I go in there? What if there isn't ammo all over the floor? What if there's a monster that's not weak to the item I just picked up?

No matter what, players are metagaming ten minutes after they figure out the controls. If you want to scare them, threaten the gamer, not the character.

Silent Hill

Just to get some perspective on where you're coming from, do you enjoy horror literature? Which authors?

If your game design ideas are shaped only by contemporary games, that's a Markovian process, which rarely produces anything interesting or new. Reach out to the past, to different media, and your idea of what a "horror game" is will surely broaden.

Quote:Original post by TheKrust
Now, about graphics, belive it or not, I had someone say to me (in all seriousness) that they find Rougelikes scarrier than Doom ... uh huh. So yes, a big part does rely on graphics, but all that aside, where do you think the majority comes from?

The fear of loosing and the acceptance that you will loose.

Also, it doesn't hurt that the absence of detail allows your imagination to fill in extra details thus making it more scary for yourself. Accepting that your character will very likely die and that you'll have to start over again, that seems to be a very tricky thing to establish in players. It certainly gets discussed frequently with little consensus. Maybe it has something to do with the replayability of rougelikes.

Meh... I had a post, but lost it because I typed in the wrong password. Most of what I said was just a rehashing of an old thread titled "Creeping Horror?", so you can see what I have to say there. [smile]

I'm not a psychologist, but since everything we experience is subject to the scrutiny of our consciousness it makes sense to consider a psychological approach to the problem of making a scary game.

Fear occurs as a result of being placed in a situation where there is a perceived threat to something a person cares about a great deal. For example, one's life, the personal safety of a loved one, the protagonist of a well written screenplay.

Fear also ranges from a slight doubt all the way up to mortal terror. For example, we can fear the next electricity bill because we are worried we can't afford it, or we can wake up in a burning house with no obvious escape route and the sound of our baby daughter screaming in the next room.

It follows that in order to be more afraid of a thing, we have to care a great deal about the impact that thing may have. In terms of a game, to make a player more afraid of things in the game, they have to care more about the consequences of the things in the game.

Thus it is important to make the player care a great deal about your game. You don't _have_ to of course, but as others have mentioned scary graphics and schlock horror can only take you so far. After a while it's just another pixel to click on unless you can keep the player emotionally involved.

Other people have used Doom 3 as an example. I actually played it. It was a whole lot of fun, but not in the least bit scary. It was more laughable because I didn't care about the events in the game, it was just a mad fun run of zombie killing with no real consequence. If you fail in Doom 3, so what? Theres no emotional attachment to the protagonist, so theres no real sense of fear.

Beyond getting the player emotionally involved in the game, the next step is to undermine their confidence in their senses. This is because we tend to fear the unknown, but out brains work overtime to analyze and make sense of a situation, and fear subsides as a result. To prevent this, mix things up a bit. Try to avoid letting players get used to something, make it unpredictable. And I think try not to take it too far, too much unpredictability seems chaotic, makes no sense, and people like things to make sense.

Anyway it has already been pointed out a game can be scary with crap graphics, a book can be scary with no graphics, as fear occurs in the mind. Having said that, good use of the audio / visual elements can really heighten the overall impact, but this should complement rather than replace the process of involving the player in the fantasy game world.

Anyway my usual disclaimer, this is all just my subjective opinion.

Thanks for the link, Way Walker..kudos for the 7th Guest reference. And for somehow working Chasing Amy into that discussion :-)

It also reminded me of Thief 3. How could I forget? I know a lot of people disliked it for the smaller levels and such, but holy crap it was scary at times. Definitely the best example I can think of. The slow reveal of The Hag was masterfully done, as I remember it.