If you haven't played my most recent project, Closure, I strongly recommend that you go play it. This is the 3rd article I'm writing about the game, and it is on the subject of how to communicate fear.

Now, near the end of Closure's development cycle I started to show the finished product to more people. I had purposely made the game to have a creepy atmosphere, however I wasn't really trying to make a frightening game, just creepy. There's a difference here, in that "creepy" generally relates to a mood and an environment, while "frightening" manifests itself into conscious fear. Yet, some people playing my game said they freaked out at parts, or jumped, or on the edge of their seats- all effects of someone being truly scared rather than just creeped out.

Thinking about why this happened was an interesting experience too. It's a side effect of the mood we created in the game, not necessarily a conscious design choice. I thought about what other games and movies did to try to frighten people. Zombies, gore, screaming, lightning, shape shifting backgrounds, surprises, and somewhat random, loud noises. This stuff doesn't really effect me though. I don't know too many people who are scared of zombies anymore, and people learn to expect what's coming to them in a horror game, therefore you end up with a lot of people disappointed that the game didn't really cause them to be frightened, because their own mind imagined something much worse than the games actually had.

And herein lies the difference between the games that try to be frightening and the games that actually are frightening. Games that try to be frightening try too hard. They do all they can to spell out what people are to be afraid of, through the use of gore, zombies, screaming, and dialog. There's no room for imagination. "I wonder what's going to be around this corner... oh just another screaming zombie *blam* ok he's dead." That's not frightening, that's startling. People often confuse the two because often times fear can cause you to be startled over simple things.

My game, however (and I'm not saying that this is unique to my game or anything) leaves a lot open to interpretation. In addition, nothing eventful happens in my game. There's nothing to be afraid of if you look at it logically- no enemies, no consequence of death. All fear people feel is purely psychological, just like most real fears. People come into the game expecting the type of horror they're used to seeing, and when there is none their minds start imagining it for them. People jump because they think a bush is some demon, they keep thinking something could be following them, they fear something jumping out of the darkness to "get them". Yet none of this happens, and the longer it goes on not happening, the more the mind fears what could happen.

Not everyone gets scared, however the beauty in this is that if they aren't, they won't complain about it "not being scary" because that isn't the main point. I'd rather have a few people be genuinely freaked out than a lot of people complaining that it doesn't do it for them.

In terms of portraying emotions in a game, fear is probably one of the hardest to get right because everyone's been desensitized to gore and screaming. Sadness is probably the easiest, which is why you see so many artsy things have a sad and depressing story to them. Speaking of sad games, Aether was nominated for a Mochi award. I will be there, so wish me luck and good luck to everyone else nominated!