The hero (heroine too; I'm modern) walks: there's a distant dripping, a ghost-squeal of car tires. Their torch, or lantern, or genetically modified enzyme glow, lances out into the mote-filled blackness. There is no sound. There is only the water, or shit, or alien blood at their feet, rumours of broiling sky above, and the rusting, silent totality in front of them.


Do you know how hard it is to find screenshots of empty rooms in videogames?

Games developers must live pleasantly. Suburban homes, maybe a spot of TivO after dinner, Buffy on re-runs, meat-loaf in the fridge. A seperate little room where Daddy can play with his expensive plastic toys and draw concept art of the most depressing, dust-blown corners of humanity's habitance. Is this why they do it? Are their lives so wonderful, so full of pleasantness, that they have to detach sometimes, maybe in bed with their lovely, non-judgmental wives asleep beside them, and drift off to where the common currency is not kindness, but a nailboard in the septum, and your only friend is the condom you are wearing so that microbes in the sewage you are trawling through, lifting your automatic rifle above your head, do not swim up your man-slit?



Games are absolutely rife with these sorts of environments. The edges of the city. Nowhere have I been more aware of this than in the first FEAR game; riding in a helicopter, bathed in a heady glow from the instrument readouts, I peer into the plastic, cloth-swathed faces of my assigned team and then out, across the sound of this unnamed city, to where lights wink at me invitingly. There are families there. Happy men and women watching television. I don't care if I am a super-soldier. I am cold in this helicopter. The seat is hard. And I don't want to investigate a missing recon team who have quite obviously been used as supernatural floss by the Littlest Emo ever. DO NOT TICKLE HER.

But we still do it. We descend into Hell. The paint peels, the mundanity and awfulness of everyday human life saturates us; a discarded bottle, a pair of shoes, a pin-up calendar is frozen in our lamplight, and we remember that, once, people existed here, out in the cold, out on the edge. Warehouses where conveniently-placed fork-lifts contain a pair of gloves left there after the last shift. Even in the day these places must be grim, as many of you will know if you have ever been on an industrial estate. But at night... no-one is supposed to be there. It is supposed to be left to the ghosts and the cold.

And sometimes we go even further, down to where only people with hard hats and a clasp on their wedding ring go; sewers, power lines, runways, abandoned buildings. We creak and cross these, in rare moments where we aren't hitting tramps, or escaped aliens, or Russian drug addicts, and sometimes we listen. Most don't - our bright HUD, the only real interface with the game (the rest being window-dressing), winks objectives and goals. But, sometimes, stop. When you are playing Max Payne, or any of the Dooms, or FEAR, or most FPSs' and Survival Horrors from the last ten years, just stop.

Though they are a cliché, and reviled in games by most, they are real places. These places exist. And they are terrifying.