Jumpscare != scary - How horror games devolved into peek-a-boo simulators

The concept of genre is interesting, when you think about it.

It harkens back to the need within human psychology to label everything, to categorise and organise so we can better understand everything around us. In terms of genre (and especially video-game genre) these labels exist to help use sift through the literal millions of games released throughout the years. Action games, RPG games, adventure, puzzle, etc. You name it, we've got it. We even have hybridised combinations of genres, like puzzle adventure or action RPG. These are results of brilliant and innovative people who decided to experiment by combining established genres together in clever ways. As an aspiring developer myself, I salute these pioneers of our industry!

(Cue patriotic music and bugle flare)

The problem I find though, and the point of me writing this, is that there seems to be one genre that refuses to budge and evolve in any meaningful way: the horror game. In fact, it seems to have devolved; most 'horror' games nowadays consist of setting up a spooky environment (i.e. Haunted House, cursed mansion, 'it's all a nightmare dream', etc.), having the player wander around aimlessly for a few minutes, popping in a disfigured creature on the screen with a scream and insta-killing the player back to main menu.

To me, this is a clear step backwards in game design standards as far as horror goes. Especially considering how, over 10 years ago, we had far superior titles like Silent Hill and Resident Evil that actually scared players without needing such 'jump-scare' moments. These days, I hardly ever witness or hear about a horror game in years that manages to convey that vital feeling of trepidation and dread that should accompany you throughout gameplay.

These days it's all 'oh no there's gonna be a jump-scare... Ah! There it is! OMG that was so scary! xD'.

Sigh.

Let me clarify this right here and now: what you experienced was not scary. What you experienced was startled. A feeling of surprise that, while similar, is not the same as fear.
My primary point of concern and annoyance with this is that the the general public, and even the development industry itself, seems to have convinced themselves that this is what a horror game is. I won't even get into the indie horror scene, as that field is so full of generic jump-scare games that it feels like looking into a cloning factory. But even the latest Resident Evil teaser, while being generally well put together and intriguing, simply has the player wonder about for a few minutes before getting knocked out by a deranged-looking man. The player never feels tense, oppressed or otherwise fearful while meandering about the environment.

Now admittedly, this is a fairly petty argument in the first place. Not only is it arguing semantics, it seems somewhat preposterous when you consider that all things horror tend to go the jump-scare route. Look at any horror film, amusement park ride or even novel, what you'll find as the common theme of the reliance on jump-scares to entertain their audience. Does this mean that I'm wrong? Am I simply whining about nothing?

I say no. Because while novels have jump-scares, they often spend paragraphs or chapters building a ominous atmosphere beforehand. Also, most horror novels rely far more on descriptive the horror in detail to scare the readers, providing subtle and cerebral scares instead of sudden lights and noise.
Amusement park rides contain mostly jump-scares, with workers dressed as ghosts or monsters providing most of the interactive jumps. But this is largely due to park rides having a very small window to entertain you, much smaller than other mediums. As such, they use the quickest and easiest way to scare and startle people; namely, jump-scares.

Horror films are the easiest comparison to video-games, since they are both visual mediums using sight and sound. Looking at horror films, it does indeed seem like most of them rely on a repetition of 'silence -> tension -> jump-scare' to propel their plot.
That is, until you look at international films.
Many European horror films,and especially in the case of Asian films, use grotesque imagery and a constant threat of the villain to create an ominous, panicky atmosphere that is seldom imitated in western horror films. There may be some bias here, but having seen several Japanese horror films (considered by many to be masters of horror) I can guarantee you will never see a blonde woman scream as a monster slashes up her friends, buckets of blood splashing onto the screen. No, the horror seen in international films is one of subtlety, of implied terrors lurking beneath the surface and the audience being plagued by uncertainty and hesitation. If jump-scares are used, they are used sparingly, and the screen does not cut to black every time the monster pops up for an ambush.


Some rebuttal of other counter-arguments:

• "What do you mean? I felt scared the whole time I was playing (insert jump-scare game here)!"

No, you didn't. This may sound condescending, but it's true.What you felt was the tenseness associated with the anticipation of the next jump-scare. This feeling is, while similar, different to the feeling of dread and trepidation that you would feel in actual horror games. Again this sounds condescending, but by actual horror games I refer to games that maintain the same feeling of tenseness and anticipation without completely relying on jump-scares.

• "There's no point arguing about this, since 'horror' and 'scary' are subjective and everyone experiences it differently. You may not find it scary, but other people do."

Well yes, that's true; fear is a purely subjective emotional response, and what is or is not scary cannot be definitively determined as a single thing. But while true, this argument is irrelevant to the subject at hand. Why? Because it's clear from a game design perspective that all these jump-scare games, even the AAA ones, have a clear goal in mind; to startle you. Everything in its gameplay loop feeds back to that single moment of 'BOO!', which provides a momentary high of emotion. But, once that high moment ends the tension drops all the way back down to ground-level, to the monotony and tediousness of bumbling around in a room. this would be fine if the game escalated its high moments each time, if each jump-scare was somehow new and unexpected, but no. It's always the same animatronic monster / little girl ghost / disfigured creature, and the game doesn't even try to go anywhere beyond that.


The overall point with all this, or the TL;DR version, is that horror games are slowly turning into long, drawn-out games of 'peek-a-boo'. Horror games are not, or at least were not, about players being stuck in a purgatory of being startled and instantly killed by a cliched monster that shows on screen for a half-second while giving you hearing damage. You can use jump-scares occasionally, since they are a legitimate tool for tension and entertainment. But please developers, don't let that be the only party trick up your sleeve. Learn other techniques like creating an atmosphere, placing subtle scare details, and designing a game the propels itself forward rather than repetition.

If you want to make a horror game, make sure the game you make can stand on its own without needing jump-scares.
Because if it can't, you haven't really made a horror game.

Planetarian ~ The reverie of a little planet ~

Until recently, I was a game reviewing critic. Sort of.

I won't get into details, but I was let go from an online game review website similar to the likes of IGN or Gamespot. I'm not actually sure if I can claim I was fired, since it was a voluntary position with no salary; the site was founded by a friend-of-a-friend, and only recently so. But I digress.

The point is that this post is a review, and one that I would have submitted to the site if I hadn't been 'fired'. Coincidentally, I don't know if anyone actually bothers to read my blog. I highly doubt it to be honest. But if you do; firstly, thank you. Secondly, I apologise for the lack of content (I mostly write this for my own amusement and to record my musings). I do try to make the posts interesting in case anyone does read, so there's that. But again, I digress.

So yes, the review. At the time I wrote it, I had just finished a Visual Novel (aka kinetic novel, or VN) titled Planetarian ~ The reverie of a little planet ~ on Steam. VN games are an interesting topic on their own, and many have differing opinions on whether they count as video games. Personally I think it's more akin to a book that you read on a PC, so this review focuses entirely on the game's plot.


The plot, without spoiling, is essentially a small character drama. In the far future, humanity has ravaged Earth and themselves via drone warfare. Only the ruins, the automated killer drones, and a small population of survivors remain. Amidst this apocalypse, an unnamed male scavenger, the 'Junker', stumbles on a girl in the remains of a planetarium. The girl, Yumemi, is an android, and this meeting changes the Junker's fate forever, etc. etc.

Overall the story is about 2 or 3 hours long, and developed by a Japanese Development Studio know as Key. I'm familiar with their work (Clannad) and being Japanese myself, I read the entire story in its original Japanese writing; a small detail to note, since English translations may alter the tone or meaning of certain scenes.


So, did I like the story?

Ehhhhhhhhh.

I find myself in a difficult situation. On one hand, its a game developed by Key. If it's a game by Key, It's bound to have compelling story in it. To be fair the writing was actually pretty good (excepting the occasional over-reliance on exposition and unimaginative prose). So I really should like it and recommend. On the other hand.... I simply didn't. I didn't care about the characters, I didn't care about the situation they were in, and frankly I was more interested in the small flashback scenes fro the war.

Personally, the main problem for me lies with Yumemi's character. The problem being that she doesn't really have one. Her main character traits are that she's overly optimistic, innocent and chatters constantly. Unfortunately, these are immediately tied to her being a 'programming error' rather than any genuine personality. She's optimistic because she's programmed that way. She's innocent because her programming doesn't allow for any unnecessary learning. And it's explained that her talkativeness is an actual program bug that was deliberately left unchecked for 'cuteness'.

I was often left confused and frustrated by the story's attempts to characterise her, then immediately reminding us that her 'thoughts' are retelling of given knowledge stored in her data-banks. This implies Yumemi has no internal understanding of human concepts like happiness or sadness, these emotions are not original thoughts that she can experience. Instead, whenever she is 'happy' Yumemi is simply following programming routines telling her she is supposed to be happy.

I was particularly baffled by her apparent understanding of religion and heaven, having learned of the concept from the planetarium staff. Does Yumemi actually believe in heaven and prayer? Does she even understand the concept of religion? What about death, and mortality? The game writers seemingly attempt to display her understanding in the final scenes, but even that left me dubious as to whether she actually understood it or was just re-enacting expected behaviour based on prior knowledge.

All of this leads me to think that Yumemi is not human a character, or even a robot with the miracle of human thought or conscience. She's nothing like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man. No, Yumemi is simply a machine following it's programmed directives. In short, Yumemi  is a 'thing', not a person we can relate to.

So if we can't relate to the heroine, that's just leaves the hero. Thankfully, The Junker is immediately more approachable on account of him being human, and dealing with the struggles of a post-apocalyptic future. I actually liked his recounts of his time in the war, having nightmares about being in combat and remembering his time as a war orphan. These little snippets help build both the character and the world around him, plus struggling against adversary is a very human and relatable topic.

However, that was it. And by that I mean those little snippets was all The Junker had going for him. All we, the reader, ever know about him is that he is an orphan, a war veteran and is generally cynical about everything. That's about as generic of a character archetype you can get without adding 'grizzled beard and voice to match'. True, his meeting with Yumemi and (spoiler-free!) the eventual catharsis of the events that follow are touching, but even those events are typical character arcs that haven't been explored before. The Junker just feels very flat and boring as a character, and if it weren't for the fact we know he's human I'd suspect him of being an android too.

Overall, all I can say is that an interesting concept and a theme of human connection do not a good story make. It did cause me to ponder on artificial intelligence, and at what point we consider a robot to be 'human', but I am fairly sure that Yumemi is not a that point. Add to that a protagonist of 'Cynical Survivor Category 29 Subtype A' and we have a narrative that is generally dull and colourless, despite the unique twist of AI; and let's face it, even the 'AI + human connection' concept isn't exactly original.

Perhaps my expectations were too high for this game. I had heard it was a KEY game, and having enjoyed his previous works I expected something of a similar quality. I will, therefore, say that if you are unfamiliar with KEY or visual novels in general and want to give it a try, be sure to start with Planetarian ~ The reverie of a little planet ~ . It's a very good example of the drama and emotion you can infuse into a video game, proof that it's not always about guns and killing. This is particularly with a genre like VN, where most VN titles involve more mature content (I'm currently reading one about a young man trying to succeed on the stock market).

However, for me this VN left me a little disappointed, and a little nonplussed that it tried to pull my heartstrings with a story about a broken-down robot.

Short story time!

 ( felt like writing it)

‘Ben’ is a young man living in the city. Ben is depressed, suicidal, and incredibly tired of the life he is living. He lives a monotonous life, filled with the same routine; get up in the morning, go to work, spend his day doing things he resents, and go home to sleep. every day he day dreams about 'ending it', giving it all up and just sleeping forever.  Because God knows, he is tired.

So very tired.

One day, he daydreams that he steps in front a speeding bus on his way to work. Another day, while getting dressed for work he imagines himself using his tie to hang from the ceiling. Finally, on his way home from work he picks up a gun he had purchased. Next day he goes to his office, the 17th floor of a large corporate building. Its floor to ceiling windows gleaming, cold and emotionless like the world it belongs to.

 Ben wastes no time. gripping a sharpened pencil, he calmly stabs his next-door neighbour, a co-worker crammed into his tiny cubicle. Before anyone has a chance to react, Ben removes the gun from his suitcase. Blood, screams, tears. This, Ben finds relaxing. He finds it invigorating. He finally feels free.

Sadly, reality does not agree with his view. Has it ever? When he hears the police arrive, sirens blaring, Ben knows he is doomed. He will be arrested, placed on trial, found guilty in a matter of minutes and sentenced to prison. Taken away from the glimpse of freedom he had just witnessed.

Unless. Yes. This is the prefect opportunity. Ben had always been too cowardly to actually kill himself. Too weak, too scared. But the arrival of the police give him the perfect excuse.

Reaching the elevator, he takes it for one last trip to the rooftop. Pressing the button, Ben closes his eyes and smiles. To be able to do all this, break away from the usual routine and do what you want, is all he could ever ask for. He wants nothing more from life. He is content.

The wind is defeaning, and he can still hear the sirens below. But all Ben can see, all he cares about, is the bed. That bed, floating mere inches from the edge, waiting for him. Calling to him. Begging him to just rest.

Because God knows, he is tired.

So very tired.