Author Topic: Horror Video Game Intolerance  (Read 3192 times)

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Horror Video Game Intolerance
« on: October 19, 2015, 01:21:27 PM »
I want to discuss about something. Recently, I've been bugged again about the fact Silent Hills PT may never come to be. So I've been thinking once again "how can some players play horror games more calmly than others?", etc. So I want to talk about a player's capability to play horror games, how long they can play it, what kind of horror games, etc.

To start off, I'm not a fan of horror games, I'm an RPG guy. In fact I dislike playing them, to an extent, not hate though. It's not that I'm a scaredycat or something, I mean, I can't even be scared at a horror movie unless it was a jumpscare, but the sheer tension of you being the character of a horror game just makes me go into adrenaline rush in most times, that I can't calm down easy and think what to do next. I only play them for the immersion, and to talk about it to other people. However that only applies to some horror games. I'm very calm in "survival-based horror" games. Ever since I was a kid, playing the RE series(my first game in the genre) was pretty fun. I was rarely tense, and that only happens mostly when I'm in unexpected situations, but I can quickly get my composure back up, being not an actual problem. The Silent Hill series varies my capability to play. Unlike RE, SH was pretty hard on me, maybe it stems from the game's atmosphere compared to RE, which was livelier. Other games of the genre I was able to play when I was a kid was Alone in the Dark, System Shock, Parasite Eve, Dino Crisis, and probably some more.

As time pass by, I'm becoming more incapable to play modern horror games...but I guess it's not that I can't play horror games, but rather I can't play the "harder horror games". Since I'm not a fan of the genre, I rarely check out news about them. But I have realized over the past years how the genre evolved to something more, more so that casual-slightly hard players of the genre like me might have hard time playing it. I always thought, I've overcome the horror genre 'cause I played them in my childhood, but it appears the newer games are enough to prove me wrong. Games like Amnesia, Outlast, Fatal Frame, etc., basically almost any game of the genre that renders you helpless without the capability to use weapons and such, are my number one in the list I CAN'T play easily. I have finished them, but I have not ever, hypercomplete them(eg. achievements, etc), because I don't want to play it again, even if I know what's going to come at me. Other games like Dying Light, Last of Us, Evil Within, Dead Space, etc., are the latter ones I can play calmly, to an extent, but still not as calmly when I was a kid. I can hypercomplete some of them. Btw, this all applies me playing alone.

In my family, both my cousin and I share the same traits when playing. We're nearly incapable when playing games like Amnesia, that'll take us quite some time to finish. However, both my grandfather and his son, my uncle who's around 6 years older than me can play them without any problems. I've always thought of them having balls of steel. They're not fan of the genre, but they can play it calmly. I'm not that surprised of my uncle, but my grandfather? I was impressed, and I mean really. My grandpa was the first one who played horror games, his favorite being the classic REs, SH, and Alone in the Dark 2(He loves the PS1). When he doesn't have something new to play in the genre, he'll replay the games a lot of times until he can hypercomplete it. And he'll do it again if he's bored. Newer horror games doesn't even bother him. He played Amnesia 1 and 2 in just 3 days easily, jumpscares don't affect him, and he even plays in the dark a lot. If there's one reason why I think my grandpa's tough, is probably because he grew during World War 2, and nothing scares him anymore than real people dying.

It would seem that I would never overcome my inability to play horror games calmly. More so that the genre and graphics are evolving. Now I'm thinking about them using the Oculus Rift, and other VR devices, that I might even abandon the genre.

How about you guys? Can you play horror games? What sub-genres? Do you have any problems playing?Why do you think some people are incapable/scared of playing horror games? Can people overcome their fears of playing horror games? Oh and do you play it for fun? :V

Edit: Sorry, I mean "CAN'T" easily play Amnesia, and such games
« Last Edit: October 19, 2015, 01:29:20 PM by En »



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commandercool

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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #1 on: October 19, 2015, 01:37:03 PM »
I'll expand more on this later when I have more time, but quickly I'll say that I do like horror games, I don't usually find them difficult to play, but on a related note I think they're fundamentally broken as a genre. Horror games have a serious problem with the idea of difficulty.

On one hand you want the game to be hard so that the player feels like they're in danger. Some of the Silent Hills sometimes have problems where players figure out easy ways to safely kill certain monsters, and those monsters stop beibg scary and become a chore, which is bad for atmosphere.

On the other hand, when games are too hard and players find themselves dying a lot, atmosphere takes an equal if not greater hit. Even if a monster or sequence is terrifying, being forced to repeat it over and over until you get past naturally breeds familiarity, which is anti-scary.

I'm not claiming that this balance is impossible to get right or even that no game has ever done it, but the subjectivity of horror and of video games makes them hard to mesh truly successfully in my experience. Sorry if that's a little bit of a derailment of the topic, but I think they're linked.
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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #2 on: October 19, 2015, 02:10:58 PM »
I never ever get scared when I play a horror game or watch a playthrough of one. I believe that's because I'm the cold analyst type of player. Whenever I play a game, see a movie of read a book I don't ask myself ?Is this scary? Funny? Sad?? I ask myself ?Is this creative? Unique? Is it well made??. I judge artworks more by their design decisions than by their content.

If a horror game creates its atmosphere really well I get excited. If it does something boring like throwing me in the exact same situation countless other games have thrown me in then I get disappointed. Both of these possibilities don't involve me actually getting scared.

However, I personally find games that focus on horror and nothing else to be rater boring. Games with a good story or interesting gameplay can gain a richer flavor with the addition of horror, so to say. It can make a good thing better, but horror alone won't catch my interest.

Bio

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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #3 on: October 19, 2015, 02:25:18 PM »
I hate horror games. In fact horror movies are pretty fine, jump scares are jump scares yes, but psychological horror is just whatever. Now psych horror games pushes it over the edge. It is something about me having control that unsettles me to the point that I don't like to continue.

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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #4 on: October 19, 2015, 03:47:33 PM »
In Horror game, if I see something that I can kill, I'll kill it and I don't afraid of anything that is killable.

For a game like Amnesia with unkillable enemy though... I remember when I was playing Amnesia with my brother, it goes like this: "Okay... It's dark, maybe we should move carefully and watch out for the enemy." *5 minutes later* "What the hell!! That's a creepy little kid skipping in front of us! That's it." ALT+F4 *several days later* "Okay, enemies in Amnesia don't come in early part like this. Nothing to worry about." *An hour later* "Oh shit! What is that?! What is that?! Get me out of here!" ALT+F4.

When I was in my emo phase, jumpscares don't affect me at all. I remember when I play F.E.A.R, I react to Alma with annoyance. But now, any kind of jumpscares makes me jumps like a cat.

Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #5 on: October 19, 2015, 04:17:24 PM »
It depends.

I'm someone that gets startled easily, so a cheap jumpscare or so would get me, but that's only because if I get startled in real life, I tend to react with some... forceful reflexes. For actual "scary" scenes, it's hard to actually scare me since I've been desensitized to a huge amount of the terrors of the world and then some, but for things that tend to leer towards truly gruesome, in varying contexts of the term, more often than not fill me with distaste instead of terror. I guess that's just how I am though.

The simplest thing I do to offset my hard personality is to put myself in the shoes of the character. A game with good immersion should easily make me able to forget about my insensitivity and start caring within the bounds of the character. I feel like when you can visibly see and hear your character shudder and panic at whatever's going on, while understanding why it makes them so at the same time, is when something is truly scary to me.

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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #6 on: October 19, 2015, 06:09:54 PM »
I have a weakness when it comes to horror in general - be it horror games or just horror elements in non-horror games. Unsettling scenarios, creepy music, etc, etc, etc all make me feel physically ill. Jumpscares take it the farthest, oftentimes a jumpscare is enough to trigger headaches and sometimes even nausea.

Amusingly enough, the effect isn't as pronounced when I'm playing actual horror games, back when I played Resident Evil 2 for a little bit the game didn't get to me at all... At least not until your very first licker encounter on the window. Then I quit the game and never picked it up again, since said encounter was indeed enough to trigger a headache.

Much like what cmd cool said, there also needs to be a feeling of danger, I played through the entirety of Resident Evil 4 and only really had problems against the Goddamn Regenerators (and their lovey-dovey counterparts, the Iron Maidens), but this is because I personally had access to cheatcodes that made me immortal and made everything have 1 health. There was never any danger for me so... yeah.

At least until I got to the first Regenerator encounter, then I dropped the game and didn't pick it up for another few weeks, then the first Iron Maiden encounter and didn't pick it up for months because ahahahahahahahaha fuck you.

All of these are reasons why I'm wary of just about every link I click on the internet and everytime someone tries to be "cute" by scaring people in an otherwise normal video/whatever else, oftentimes I have to go lie down to help me get better after a jumpscare, and since the horror genre has been either turning into action games feat. monsters or jumpscarefests lately, I've been doing my best to keep away from said genre.

I don't really know if my tolerance towards this kind of stuff is stronger or weaker now that I've aged a little, but considering that the very first encounter in Undertale was enough to trigger both my headache and my nausea I'm going to guess that it's either the same or worse.

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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #7 on: October 22, 2015, 01:57:35 AM »
I scare really, really easy, and I have an overactive imagination that gives me weird dreams and occasional nightmares/screaming while asleep. Resident Evil's the only "horror" game I can play. Everything else that's meant to be scary, movies, books, video games, etc, just terrifies the absolute shit out of me and I can't handle it.
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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #8 on: October 22, 2015, 03:45:22 PM »
For me it also depends. I generally like horror games because of the strategy/puzzle aspect to them. Like the Penumbra series is fantastic. FNAF, not so much - that one seems to rely too heavily on startling rather than scaring. Penumbra was scary because of the story, atmosphere, and situations you run into.

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Re: Horror Video Game Intolerance
« Reply #9 on: November 02, 2015, 03:59:27 PM »
I actually kinda like horror games as long as they don't rely on jumpscares, i prefer atmosphere instead, for example Corpse Party has a brilliant atmosphere as well as a fucking awesome story, check it out if you want you won't be dissapointed.
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