The “Fear” Factor

In a recent Gamasutra article, my colleague, Manveer Heir, argued that Naughty Dog,  when creating Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, shouldn’t have introduced monster rushers into the latter half of the game because all the player’s training up to that point had to do with patient, cover-based tactical combat. It’s akin to your high school history professor lecturing about 20th century US politics all semester long and then throwing a pop quiz on pre-WWII economic conditions in Germany.

The interesting part was the response to the article. Many commenters were completely fine with Naughty Dog’s inclusion of monsters. They liked the change of pace that it brought and even enjoyed the experience of unpreparedness, of fear. This got me thinking about a seemingly inherent conflict that game designers face. On the one hand, we’re in the business of creating player experiences, whether that be ‘fun’ and ‘engagement’ or ‘fear’ and ‘loathing.’ All human experiences are fair game for attempting to recreate in video games. On the other hand, as Raph Koster argues for in Theory of Fun, the medium of video games lends itself to a student/teacher paradigm. In this view, games are only good as long as the player is still learning. But what happens when the desire for a certain player experience, like fear, collides with everything the player has learned up to this point?

Does this mean we have to throw legitimate experiences like “fear” or “frustration” out of the equation because they don’t necessarily fit neatly into the games-as-learning paradigm?

One could argue that Uncharted is still, in fact, teaching, by throwing the player the ‘monster’ curve ball–in this case, it’s teaching how to handle unexpected situations that arise. Unfortunately, it’s not a full semester course, it’s a single isolated lesson in handling unexpected situations.  Far Cry 2 is a game that gives the full semester course. In addition to teaching the obvious things like taking cover in a firefight or picking off targets at range, it also teaches, on a higher level, about how to deal with unexpected situations through improvisation.  By building in mechanics such as spreading wildfire and guns jamming, the designers allow the player to inevitably experience moments of uncertainty and even dread throughout the game. Everything might be going well until the wind changes directions and the one-time small campfire becomes a raging inferno when it hits the local ammo cache. By dealing with these moments again and again, players begin to not only identify with what their avatar is experiencing, but also learn ways to cope with these experiences.

Traditionally, games have utilized a linear model similar to that of books or movies when trying to convey certain deep experiences such as fear or sadness. That is, an event such as a loved one dying occurs once in the game before moving on to other things. What if more games subscribed to the procedural model of relaying experiences to players,  where systems are designed to produce the conditions necessary for a certain experience a la Far Cry 2? I’m not saying all games need to adhere to this model and stay away from one-off experiences, however, it does seem like a good direction to explore given the medium’s strengths. Perhaps we’ll quickly realize that a systematic approach can’t create the same deep experiences that a traditional author-centric approach could, but we won’t know if we don’t try.