As a medium, games have an unprecedented ability to manipulate. Control isn't a one-way street; with total access to all your unconditioned animal responses, video games are a canvas for truly telling forays into what we are capable of being frightened of. A game that can shock and terrify - not just your Condemned and your Alone in the Dark - delivers something that is carefully crafted, designed to flood your body with chemicals you aren't quite comfortable with. A skilled developer is an entertainer, but he is also a psychologist, with a keen understanding of what thumbscrews trigger what screams, and in games designed to make your reflexes tighten like Workmeng's choice of date and your pulse skyrocket like his lap javelin, effective game design relies on knowing what causes us fear.



Imagine that you're in a movie theatre, watching a horror movie. Not gore porn, but something tense, nerve-wracking, involving. Before an outbreak of violence or a climactic attack, the projection booth turns up the lights and the sound disappears. I think you'll agree: immersion is a key element in fright. Even in books and movies, developers rely on a litany of key devices to immerse you. In the art and science of video games, your sense of involvement hinges on sound, atmosphere, and seamless control. This is the more technical aspect of things. Does the sound not locate right? Is it too hollow, or dry, or cold? Sound technicians in the studios of master developers spend hours and hours cautiously tuning and retuning the equalizers, capturing different ambient sound and effects, tweaking and fixing and placing. Control can just as easily ruin it. Identifying with the protagonist is defined by how well you can control him or her. A jarring control scheme only pulls you from the action. Over this, graphics are a coat of paint applied slowly. Too thick, and the "horror" becomes self-effacing, the monsters almost comically serious. Too thin, the game risks being a run-and-gun shooter, a Serious Sam or Call of Duty reskinned with boils and facial deformities.



The Silent Hill series is an exemplar of this, a team that manages the trifecta of sound, control, and graphics like creators, not comedians. The Silent Hill "old guard", veterans who have been playing the series since its 1999 conception, generally remember it fondly. The sense of immersion, for its time, was spectacular. Though you might recall that the textures didn't have the high-res glory of a current-gen title, the game was still capable of creating anxiety and abject fear, and series mainstays like the rapetastic Pyramid Head still cause a sick fascination among the Silent Hill brass. Managing to call up emotions like that on a now-obsolescent platform like the PlayStation 2 is mighty hefty, and it was managed by recognizing what elements of a horror game make it a horrifying game.



Something that stands out about games that want to scare you is the balance of power; in a military shooter, maybe, you're an agent of a government with license on the most intimidating war machines ever made and the cojones to fire them on anything that looks even marginally darker than a sheet of paper. Or you've got the advantage of intellect, doing battle against henchmen with brains like wet paper towels. To become a classic, horror games have to turn this notion on its head, establishing early on the superiority of the world over the player. You can imagine pretty quickly a game that failed magnificently at this: 2K Boston/Australia's 2007 undersea epic, BioShock. Now, nobody will try to tell you that BioShock is a bad game. What it managed to do, it did well. The story was intriguing, the characters deep, the controls and audio and atmosphere spot-on. But what it did fail to do is make your player feel weak. Between the H-bomb arsenal that lived in your hands, the endless health buffet, and VitaChambers that roamed in packs, BioShock sacrificed tension, stress, and inferiority to mass appeal and accessibility. When reviews were forced to be critical of BioShock it proved to be one of the complaints listed most often. I quote Yahtzee Crowshaw from his review of the game: "When you realize there's no reason to be careful, nothing really poses a threat anymore... the game ceases to be scary or difficult."



Another element that defines horror as a genre is a sense of pace. A movie is only a horror movie until the deaths and scrapes and disembowelment reach just such a pace where it's no longer unusual to see somebody beaten to do with their own nose. Games lean on shock to do this: maybe a long find-the-item "Where's Waldo?" quest that drags its ass over three or four goddamn generations, and hot on the heels of that you get a wrench to the face. It's a matter of expectation. If you expect somebody to be trying to maim you at any given second, it no longer surprises you when they do. Amateur games - mods for every engine under the sun - generally fail at this. Sometimes, in a certain, special zombie mod, it's hard to suppress laughter at the slow, steady trickle of reanimated corpses that is trying turn your cranium into haute cuisine. But professional games do it, as well. A game that doesn't hold any special place in history, Clive Barker's Jericho is just such a game. Not helped at all by the menu of superpowers available to your team - the X-men of the undead - the game had the habit of turning its isolated hallways surprise parties into endless streams of the lumbering undead, a festival of mutilation. This is a mistake that comes from a misunderstanding: in any other genre, "man vs. world" is not entirely unheard of. In conventional FPS, it's even desirable. But horror prides itself on abrupt surprise, jarring you into a reaction instead of dragging it out of you, kicking and screaming, like you had just smelted its father into a bicycle helmet.



The success of a horror game is a precise art, as much as therapy or neuroscience. A game can't survive without being able to demonstrate how well it understands what makes you tick, and even better, what makes you jump. Amateur developers make the mistake almost daily of assuming that what works for shmups and army shooters will work for their ode to the undead. It doesn't. And frankly, as the games that have it all dwindle and become almost collectible, I think we'll start to see horror, as a genre, vanishing from the shelves.