AAAAAGH THE RAPE SCENE. EW.

My girlfriend hates scary stuff and I like it, but I don't feel superior to her because of it... Maybe that's not what you were getting at though.

Silent Hill = The Bees Knees

Why is pyramid head in Homecoming? I just ran into him for the first time in that game the other day. On second thought, nobody answer that, I fear spoilers more than the game itself.

Err... Can you point me to where you got the whole "50% of women fantasize about rape" stat? That one's new to me.

@KMCC

The same reason he was in the movie. Fan Service.

I've seen that 50% of women fantasize about rape stat a lot. I wouldn't be surprised. Needless to say their idea of what rape would be like is way off.

Colette your original features have been really great lately!

Also, I apologize for all the grammatical errors. I was just too excited...

So if I'm a man, does that mean my refusal to play Silent Hill games on the grounds that they scare me shitless makes me ... not even a girl? THEN WHAT AM I???

Beautifully constructed article, Colette. It resurrected a few of the finest Silent Hill moments in my memory. I find this feature particularly interesting in that my girlfriend and I have been planning a Silent Hill marathon for the holidays. She fits into the theatre-woman archetype you outlined above but also challenges it in her pursuit of fear-inspiring media, be it in movies, on the web, or our upcoming horror game session.

One point that stands tall in this article is your consideration of fear as a very real indication of immersion in a game. I think that last month's series of "The FEAR" musings placed a strong emphasis on this idea.

wonderful article! :D I love some good survival horror myself

i cried so hard during that cutscene, it felt so good to cry, to let it all out. it was a combination of the incredibly sad monologue and grueling search for catharsis within the game. but damn i've never cried so hard like that at any other game. it was amazing.

i'm not a scary movie person, watching them just makes me angry because a) i don't like most of the female characters in scary movies and b) i don't like it when characters do stupid shit that gets themselves killed. that said, i am definitely a scary game person. why that is the case for me personally, i can't tell you, i'm still trying to figure it out. one theory i've developed has to do with the sexual factors involving my enjoying multiple levels of masochism, but only when i'm in control of its limits.

in general, i think horror games are the pinnacle of emotional and mental involvement that is available through gaming. horror games are not games in which you can just turn off your brain and shoot the living daylights out of everything. to me, FPSs turn people into robots, and that's why i don't like playing them in general. i've always had the belief that the more a form of media/art makes the viewer/participant react, the more effective it is. never have i had a more intense media experience than playing silent hill 2. also, i have a firm belief that people who like playing horror games are generally smarter than the average gamer, and if someone did a study on that i think it could actually be proven.

that said, i feel incredibly proud to be a real woman! woo!

I've always been attracted to the horror genre in games, movies, and books along the same lines, despite being a pretty meek in real life (some might call even accuse me of being girly). Right now I just finished watching Saw 4 and am looking forward to Saw 5, and I replayed Afraid of Monsters: Director's Cut a few days ago.


Speaking of that, have you played Afraid of Monsters: DC Collette? It's absolutely, without exaggeration the scariest game I've ever played. It's got the jump scares, yes, but it's also got this pervasive horror behind it, and it's really simplistic horror. No Pyramid Head, no murdered wife. It really is like an instinctual terror of the dark and things IN the dark, even when they aren't around. The main character is a drug user and the game's set in the mother of all bad trips, it's fairly open in the setup from the get go, but the experience rises far above what you'd expect.
It's the first horror game to make me yell and shut the game off since RE1 and the dogs jumping through the windows, and when I first played RE1 I was ten. I first played Afraid of Monsters two years ago, at 18.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I've played all of the Silent Hill games, most of the Resident Evil games, and such. In these games, one expects to be scared, and so when one is, it's not as big of a deal, because it's expected. I like the more slow-build-up type of mind screw horror such as Silent Hill tends to have, and find the jump-at-you-through-a-window type of scares to just be kind of lame usually, though I guess those have their place as well. Now, I'm not knocking those kind of games as being pansy or whatever, because I love them to death, but my point here is that I've never been truly caught off guard and completely startled or frightened by something in a video game...

...until last night.

I was playing Fallout 3. In-game time was slightly after nightfall. I crested a small hillock and suddenly came upon the dead body of a Giant Radscorpion, which I had not killed myself. It was pretty much right on top of me and directly in my view, suddenly and out of nowhere.

The thing was somehow upended by 90 degrees, so that the front half of it (head + claws) was embedded in the ground, and the tail and middle/hind legs up dangling in the air. The thing was jerking and jittering around like mad. And, worst of all, it was completely silent, and not making any of the usual bumping/scraping sounds that a dead body in that game tends to make when it's colliding with the terrain.

For a split second when I first stumbled upon it, I was absolutely certain that I had just come across some new, horrifically Lovecraftian enemy that was somehow able to avoid showing up on my radar, and that I was about to die a most terrible demise. It is the most freakish thing I have ever seen in a game, even after I realized what it was (which took more than a few additional seconds). I'm surprised I had the wherewithal to not empty a full clip or three from my Xuanlong assault rifle into the thing.

I just stood there watching it for a few minutes, and the sense of pure revulsion barely left me at all during that time, even after I finally realized what it was. I quicksaved and then quickloaded because, in the past, I'd seen weird physics things happen on loading a game, especially to glitchy things like this. In this case, when the game loaded, the corpse instantly righted itself and then fell, without a sound, down through the earth, never to be seen again.

This unintended glitch was simultaneously the worst visceral shock I've ever experienced while playing a video game and, once that passed, was actually even almost up there with the creepy mind-screw type of horror that I get out of games like Silent Hill, at least for a little while. I mean, yeah, eventually I was just "Oh, it's nothing more than a freakish glitch" but at first I was all like "OH MY FUCKING GOD WHAT IS THAT I'M GONNA DIE" followed by "No... really... Jesus Christ what the hell is that, seriously? And WHY ISN'T IT MAKING ANY SOUND AT ALL?"

Silent hill! :D

Love scary movies, love watching people play scary games, hate playing scary games.

My wife has bigger balls than me, she's Korean so she reads manga all the time, but really freaky stuff. She reads ghost stories with demon babies and freaky stuff like that. She wants me to play Silent Hill so she can watch, since the only game she plays is Katamari Damacy, but I'm too scared.

Something about controlling and making the scary stuff happen freaks me out, when I'm watching I can close my eyes or look away whenever I want.

I am a coward.

When I first saw that scene, I was confused. "Did I just see that? Is that thing doing what I think it's doing? Is this still a game I'm playing here?" Talk about a unique gaming experience.

Silent Hill 2 was the only one I played out of the series, but man, does any other game even come close to it in the space of games? The only game that comes pretty close is Braid, which has similar themes of guilt and confusion.

Silent Hill 2 - a must play.

I've sign up just for posting a comment!

I think that we, the women that play videogames, must fight a lot of prejudices and that image of dammsel in distress that must be save, is one of them. I love Silent Hill series, and in fact I've got a blog dedicated to survival horror in spanish called Raccoon Hill (wow!, how original I am! XD).

My first survival horror was Silent Hill 2, but that "sex" scene didn't scared me at all. The truth behind that videotape at the Lakeview Hotel shaked all my conception about videogames and since then I'm a terror-adicted videogamer girl, and of course, a Silent Hill lover.

Great article, Colette!

P.D.: Here in Europe, we're still waiting for Silent Hill Homecoming,... Until February 2009!

Damn
I mean seriously damn
Colette you have gain a plus elevnty bajillion points in my book
kudos on your piece

I'm a huge survival horror fan. Whenever I pick up a good horror game I have that tense feeling in my spine throughout the whole experience.. and I love it. My biggest fear however is that I'll stop being scared of these games.

Also I sometimes post in a silent hill fansite forum and find that about 50% of the members are female. So it seems to me that Silent Hill in particular has a decent sized, if somewhat reserved female following.

Thanks everyone -- I am glad you enjoyed it! :)

@Matthew Blake -- yep, we want to make the Real Men Play... thing a series. Hope to bring you guys more very soon!

Haha, some of these comments should have been Blog Posts!
Good Job Colette!

I haven't ever finished a Silent Hill game, not because I was scared but because I didn't know much about the series growing up. I was more into Resident Evil. I would love to play the first few eventually, unfortunately I know pretty much all Silent Hill lore from just being in a community like this so it wouldn't surprise or shock me and probably not scare me that much.

The rape scene was the weirdest and scariest scene in any game. When I first saw that scene I was like 9 and I made a joke that it was rape and I didn't know.

PS. Never laugh at this rape scene when a girl is around.

the rape scene was very unexpected for me. its the first in a game i thought. although i would prefer that the game just did not included or even thought about it (rape w/ pyramid) i think it was kinda interesting and fit the disturbing sick horror theme of silent hill. i don't like anyone in my family see it though while im playing. xp