In my spare time, I’ve been playing a game called F.E.A.R. Originally released in 2005, the game is a first-person shooter that I understood to have horror elements. I will now admit that I was wrong, and even if I’m having fun anyway, which I am, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed.
My mistake is totally justified. It’s called “Fear”, albeit with periods between each letter and an awkward backronym – First Encounter Assault Recon – to justify them. The cover art has a spooky little girl who looks like she’s auditioning for The Ring series. I expected something scary, and while the game is fifteen years old – so I could have probably looked into this more closely – everything I saw suggested something spooky.
Instead, it’s a pretty standard first-person shooter, which charges the player with running from room to room mowing down mostly identical bad guys. The only horror element is that sometimes the lights flicker and the little girl from the box wanders around in the background.
This lack of horror has made me think a little bit about why I wanted to play a horror game. Because, much to my surprise, I really enjoy horror games, and have since playing the first Silent Hill years ago. It was a long time before I even tried one, working under the assumption I probably wouldn’t enjoy them.
This wasn’t a wild assumption, as it’s rare that I enjoy a horror film – they have to be particularly well done – and gross-out imagery isn’t typically something I enjoy.
Part of it is my general enjoyment of a slower paced experience. Horror tends to move slowly because that’s an easy way to build tension – the more nothing happens, the more the player anticipates something happening. I tend to like slow moving games because I’m better at them, never being particularly good at extremely fast action titles.
The other reason I like it is the inherent tension that it brings, and the joy that comes when that tension breaks. In a strange way, horror is the same as comedy, in that it’s all about the build until you reach the breaking point – whether that’s a scare or a punchline – and that can be very enjoyable.
Horror, for whatever reason, is at its best when you have a degree of control, when you can decide just how fast or slow you want the experience to be. Whether that’s a haunted house in person – and there are excellent ones in the region each Halloween – or a game, it’s all about moving through a series of places which may, or may not, have some sort of threat attached.
And yet horror films, for whatever reason, don’t have the same effect on me. I think it’s because there’s no control in a film, everything happens at the same time no matter what. There’s no escape, but there’s also no real threat – a game could force you to restart, a haunted house at least puts you face-to-face with the people trying to scare you. With control, you can theoretically outsmart the people who put you in the game. So part of the scare is discovering that you didn’t outsmart the people who set out to frighten after all.
And that brings me back to F.E.A.R., which had none of that. It’s just a game about shooting, and even if that’s its own kind of fun, it’s not much more than that.
