HORROR WEEK: Special Comment

And now, as promised, a Special Comment about games.

One of the better compliments a baseball player can receive is that he 'plays within himself,' a phrase meaning that a batter who is a contact hitter doesn't try to hit homers and thus create more outs than runs. The term sounds derisive at first, as if to describe someone who is unable to do whatever is asked of him, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

Throughout history, the arts have struggled to find the best way to express emotions and ideals. The different humanities each have something that they do best. You don't see many movies about the internal dilemmas of a man coming to grips with his fading vigor in his old years because internal conflict like that plays out best in the context of a novel that can explore internal monologues; likewise, the action and bombast of a triumphant war movie plays poorly as a poem but makes for a fantastic summer blockbuster. The arts must learn to 'play within themselves.'

Starting with, probably, the last-gen systems the constant bickering over whether 'games are art' debate has been pretty firmly put to rest, pretty much on the back of Silent Hill 2, though rumblings of 'games are art is visible even earlier, in spook-fests like the original Alone in the Dark. And games, as an art form, have one genre that is really and truly "in their wheelhouse" so to speak: Horror. When games (no pun intended) play within themselves,' they do it best capitalizing on the Horror genre.

Every art plays on one or more essential connections to the human psyche. Video Games combine the visuals and storytelling language of movies, but lack their ability to control information to the viewer. The sense of controlling the action is unique to games, and this sense of power is where the ability of games to craft a sense of horror and dread come to the forefront. The general conceit of controlling an avatar's actions on screen plunges people deeper into vicariously living the lives of the characters onscreen, building a stronger bond with their representatives than even an epic novel can offer. This bond created between player and character is literally divine; you are both God and his will given flesh onscreen, a duality unlike anything else in the arts.

This bond is absolute; the character's victories are yours, and you feel a sense of pride about every one of your avatar's accomplishments. Similarly, your character's defeats sting that much more than the tribulations of a character on screen or stage. And the unique connection becomes all the more intense when the risks facing your avatar are increased, your challenges made Herculean, your resources depleted and your enemies made legion.

This risk and realization of triumph in the face of overwhelming, dooming odds is what the great games are made of. You are emotionally invested in your avatar in a way you aren't reading or watching a horror tale, because (for lack of a better term) you are living the horror as it unfolds; you scream as a door opens to reveal monsters and command your avatar to run away, just as you yourself would. The real risk to your continued survival is heightened as you run the real risk yourself of dying in the most unpleasant fashion imaginable (and sometimes even in fashions beyond imagination!).

With the continuing advances in sound design, control scemes, graphical capabilities and raw storage size, games get closer and closer to you living the events on-screen as they play out. While a convincing game that depicts human-to-human interaction is still as far out as a Turing-Test-capable AI, a human-versus-environment game is real now, and the most effective way to capitalize on it in a way that movies, stage, the written word, song and poem can never hope to do is to scare the pants off of the player.