The Obvious but Unsaid Horror Unique to Video Games
by Graham Walker; Professional Psychotherapist and Video Game Lover
Tags: Personal Reflection/ Phobias/ Horror/ Fear / Video Games
Trigger warning: The following contains discussion of spiders with some may find triggering. There is also one picture of a video game spider included int he article which I wanted to use for illustrative purposes.
Spoilers for : Dark Souls 2
I remember going to see Peter Jackson’s 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' at the cinema (movie theatre) with my dad. I had read 'The Hobbit' and 'The Fellowship of the Ring' at that point, and I think glanced at 'The Silmarillion' just to be able to say that I had. Going into that film (movie) I had little to no idea of the content or plot of the film beyond the notion that the Fellowship are splintered, travelling apart but still all trying to destroy the ring.
So when I tell you I have a severe fear of spiders you may understand how utterly and unexpectedly terrified I was mid film when a giant spider creature appears and attacks our protagonist, Frodo. I say fear here, rather than phobia because I am a pedantic psychotherapist. Spiders do indeed terrify me, very much irrespective of size, but to diagnose what is referred to as a ‘simple phobia’ the feared object has to impact on your life. I live in a part of the world where there are no poisonous spiders and few spiders of any kind to speak of. If I lived in say Australia, where there is an abundance of awful arachnids my fear may well impact on my life, but here in the UK I live virtually untroubled by my fear.
Frodo wrapped in spider webs. Even searching online for this image was pretty triggering for me!
Back to Lord of the Rings. If I was to describe Shelob- the giant spider in question- I would say she is… hmmm… she looks like… ahhh…
I literally couldn’t tell you. I have no idea what this creature actually looked like.
I have not seen this film again actually since that horrifying night at the cinema (possibly because I am avoiding the giant spider) and so my memory is hazy. But, this is not the main reason I can’t describe what I saw. The reason is because I didn’t see anything. I hazily remember Frodo traversing some sort of cave network and there being cobweb-like structures adorning the walls of these tunnels. Then there comes dramatic music, screams of terror from Frodo and legs. So many legs. I think Shelob screams as well. The notion of a spider screaming I find staggeringly terrifying. Something about the idea of a spider having lungs like a human that they can expel air from to make sound disturbs me to my core. Just writing it makes my skin crawl in a most unpleasant way.
And straightaway in that moment my hands were in front of my closed eyes and I did not look at the screen again until my dad assured me that it was safe to look and I felt confident that the scary music denoting the presence of this fear stimulus had gone (my dad had a habit of pretending the scary thing was not on the screen anymore even though it was- standard dad humour).
So, when I tell you I could not say what Shelob (I think this name and spelling is correct- I don’t dare google it to check) looked like it is because I legitimately did not see them at all.
If you have previously read any of my blogs you will know I am a big fan of From Software games. The first of their games I played was Dark Souls 2, somewhat seen as the runt of the litter, but as a first step into the world of ‘Souls-likes*’ for me I loved it. Like Dark Soul 1 before it, this game is a 3D, third person medieval/ fantasy game of slow, deliberate and difficult combat as you make your way through an interconnected world. Being my first foray into From Soft I found it very difficult. The first enemy I found was a huge troll which killed me over and over again. I went into a little house with an old woman. I thought it would be fun to kill her but instead she dispatched me with ease. Even the pigs in the hub area* killed me when I attacked them. For some reason I decided to persist with the game, but I used a walkthrough from start to finish. Every step of the way was guided for me.
Because of this walkthrough I knew beforehand about Duke’s Dear Freja; a huge two-headed spider boss fight. I read about it, accidentally saw a few photos of them and they terrified me. So, I chose to completely avoid this part of the game.
Now, if you have played Dark Souls 2 you will know that this is basically a compulsory part of the game. There are four mandatory bosses to defeat before you can access the final area of the game.
This is true, except not completely. There is another way to access the final area (without glitches involving binoculars and funky parry inputs) and that is to collect 1,000,000 souls. Souls are the currency of the game earned by defeating enemies. Suffice to say one million is a lot of enemies that you need to defeat, but this grind was far more palatable than the arachnid-infested alternative.
A player character with 1 million souls; the character level is so high as this is already in New Game+
So that is what I did, I merrily stabbed every non-spider shaped enemy I could lay my sword on (enemies re-spawn when your character rests) until I had reached my magic number of souls. I progressed, defeated the big bad and beat the game.
At which point the game asks you if you would like to start New Game Plus*. I had loved my time with the game and I had got pretty good with the combat (by which I mean I had increased my agility to stats to the point of having a reasonable number of i-frames*), so I thought I would give it a go.
I battled my way through the early game, dispatching the Pursuer first time. I made short work of the Lost Sinner and saw off the Ruin Sentinels in no time. I didn’t even need a walkthrough at all anymore.
I was finding it all so easy that I got cocky. I thought that I could take on Duke’s Dear Freja. Hubris- the destroyer of men. I decided to make my way to Brightcove Tseldora to take on this piffling spider boss and to stop my gaming life being ruled by fear. To get there you have to fight your way past some undead farmers and venture down a cliffside path to a giant door. I of course easily saw off the farmers and could see the door in the distance and began arrogantly sauntering my way down to it.
Now if I had continued to use the walkthrough I may have been aware of what was coming next. For arachnophobes like myself it is the jump scare to end all jump scares. As you approach the door to the area, down the cliffside path, with no warning at all the Duke’s Dark Freja climbs up the cliff path for a surprise attack. Out of nowhere a giant spider has just appeared, attacking me and screaming in my face (and I have already mentioned how I feel about that).
Can I describe Freja? Yes. Yes I can. She is a giant spider, towering over the player, with legs larger than her body, which form around her body like a living cage. Her heads are small but with a mouth obviously screaming and she looks at you with glowing red eyes.
This image will sometimes haunt my mind when I close my eyes. Sometimes I am in the shower when the image pops into my mind. The falling water from the shower head suddenly feels like the legs of spiders crawling on me and my body jolts in fear and revulsion. I open my eyes and look round in a panic to make sure I am OK.
The moment after that jump scare, I put my controller down and turned off the console. I have not played Dark souls 2 since that moment.
What is my point in outlining these experiences of fear? I find them such helpful moments to illustrate the differences in how film and videogames (or passive versus active medias) can handle horror, and how this can/ has to be received.
I cannot tell you what the giant spider in Lord of the Rings looks like, but I can tell you very clearly how the one in Dark Souls 2 looks. With a film you have the option to look away from the thing you fear, knowing that at some point you will be able to look back as the story has moved on. You have no such choice in most videogames. If I go into the boss arena to take on Duke’s Dear Freja I have to actively battle that boss in order to defeat it and progress the plot. I have to look at the screen and pay great attention to what is going on to engage with the combat mechanics and move things forward. Barring the collecting of one million souls in this example I have no choice if I want to keep playing the game to its ending.
Yes, you can play video game, such as 'Super Punch Out!' with your eyes closed... but it's not the norm!
This is such a different dynamic of engaging with media, particularly those containing elements of horror or phobic stimuli. Unless I have somehow learned to play a game blindfolded like some crazy players of ‘Super Punch Out!’ or ‘Super Mario 64’ (yes really!) I have to be paying attention to what is happening to overcome the current challenge. Yes, some games may have such elements tied into more passive, skippable or optional areas of a game, such as cutscenes or non-mandatory elements, but if developers choose to put something into an active section of a game that is compulsory for completion they are demanding that you look at what they have put there; demanding in a way that film producers must wish that they could do.
'Super Mario 64' blindfolded is an utterly astounding feat!
This is particularly true for jump scares. I have been playing the DLC* for Outer Wilds recently, which (without wanting to spoil too much) has a number of elements designed to scare the player including some jump scares. Well, perhaps you could argue it does not have jump scares but in my experience of the DLC I was in a location where I was not expecting anything particular to happen when suddenly and quickly something did happen, and I completely jumped out of my skin. But I did not look away. If it was a film I would have. I would have closed my eyes and put my hands in front of my eyes until I thought I was safe. But not here in the game. I recoiled massively and I sat in this strange position where I tried to hold my head as far away form the screen as possible whilst still looking at it, but I was still looking. I needed to see what was happening. Get a sense of why it was happening so I could learn and avoid it happening again.
I’m not sure how much developers think about this but for me it feels like something essential to consider when devising scenes in games.
Something that you can do in games though, but not at the cinema is pause the action. I am a big fan of the pause button in games. Particularly in having two young children, I appreciate being able to stop what I am doing at a moments notice to respond to whatever is actually happening in the world around me without fear that the game I am playing will keep going and I will have to suffer the consequences of what may come in my inactive, unmonitored moments. I’m sure many readers will have seen clips from Dark Souls where gamers have been away from their screen and their in-game characters have been found by another online player and paid the consequence. But this sort of thing is part and parcel with online play where you can’t pause someone else’s games. However many games- including Dark Souls can’t be paused even if you are playing offline. So, if my children call to me when I am in the middle of a boss battle I am suddenly faced with the choice of leaving them to cry or ‘accepting the L’.
This seems mightily unfair and unnecessary, but if we go back to Outer Wilds. After my first jump scare I now knew more of how the world worked and knew what to look out for. Despite this knowledge, the anticipation and experience of the scary moments still caused significant fear for me. I would roam around the world on edge, feeling full of fear, grasping the controller and my jaw tensing quite uncomfortably.
I was going to add an image of the DLC, but could not find one that I did
not consider a spoiler!
It was very discomfiting, and I wasn’t sure I liked it but I was enjoying the game and wanted to keep playing. Because of this I started just pausing the game when I felt any fear. Something would happen that would cause fear to rapidly bubble inside of me and I would smash the pause button as quickly as I could and suddenly I was out of the game world and back in my room sitting on my sofa looking at a screen. The tension I was feeling dissipated almost immediately; I was taken aback by how quickly my body shifted from sensations of intense fear to… nothing; just how my body feels in any moment. It was such a swift, stark contrast that I kind of felt like I was cheating at the game or cheating myself. The power of the pause button was immense. I could choose when to pause, how long to take to gather myself and mentally prepare for what was happening in the game before finally choosing to un-pause. When I finally re-joined the game the fear was much less and much more easy to manager. Looking back at my time with this portion of Outer Wilds I kind of regret my choice to use the pause in the way that I did, though I still loved my experience.
It shows another consideration for game developers; how to implement the pause function. A number of readers as they went through my section above on Dark Souls and the lack of pause may have reflected on the fact that Elden Ring can indeed be paused. You can’t just press pause, but if you go into certain parts of the menu the game will actually pause. I have no idea how intentional this is; it must be to some extent as it only works in offline mode, but either way it is an interesting compromise. The game allows you to pause it but not instantaneously; it has to be a deliberate player-choice, navigated to correctly.
Going into your equipment and opening 'Help' text boxes will pause Elden Ring in offline mode.
If this was the implementation in Outer Wilds I probably would not have paused the game as it just would not have been a quick enough option. Nor would it have been a movement I could have forced my hands to complete in such a moment of fear.
Video games already do a wonderful job of scaring us and manipulating the medium to dial the fear quite precisely, but the elements I outline here- the notion of not being able to look away, and how the pause function is implemented- I think could be used more so to hone those dials still further. However horror progresses in the medium, I know for one that I don’t want to look away.
That’s how I feel about this. You might feel different and that is OK.
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Hub area: (From Wikipedia) an area within a video game which connects its other levels or locations. The term can also refer to a safer area which players frequently return to, like a town. They are common in adventure games, role-playing games (RPGs), platformers, and dungeon crawlers
New Game Plus: A game mode available after beating a game which tends to be more challenging and may have variations such as enemy types or enemy placements.
i-frames: Periods of time in a game where your player character is invulnerable to damage or attacks- used in Dark Souls during the dodge roll.
DLC- Downloadable Content; Game content that can be accessed via online download, though may be on a physical copy, particularly in re-releases of games.
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