Monstrous Forms by Adam Charles Hart;

Author:Adam Charles Hart;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Target Fodder: Monster-Centric Combat in Doom (1993) and Beyond

If Amnesia, Layers of Fear, and The Lost Soul are exemplary of this recent trend within horror, the bulk of horror games since the early 1990s have been closer to Left 4 Dead’s guns-blazing, combat-centric structure. But, really, even beyond survival horror and related genres, much of modern gaming is founded on action-oriented games that are populated with monsters, and horror games are often distinguished by character design and atmospherics, both of which tend to implicitly refer to cinematic (and sometimes literary) horror traditions. That insistence on mise en scène and creatures that can be recognizably placed within a horror lineage is necessary to separate Left 4 Dead from, say, a military combat FPS like Call of Duty (2003) or a science fiction FPS like Halo: Combat Evolved (2001). Which is to say that, unlike Amnesia or Layers of Fear, the vast majority of games grouped under the rubric of “survival horror” offer some sort of combat option. This is, of course, baked into the DNA of gaming: video games present us with tasks to complete and obstacles to overcome, and this is equally true of Amnesia as it is for a combat game like Left 4 Dead. What made Amnesia (or Silent Hill 2 before it) so different and so influential was that those tasks did not allow for directly overcoming the monsters. But Left 4 Dead requires the gamer to spend as much time in its hellish, post-apocalyptic landscape as Amnesia does in its haunted castle. And when a “horde” of the undead sprint onto the screen, it can still be terrifying.

If horror TV tends toward narrativizing emotions, however, horror games are generally less interested in character. They can tell stories, they have protagonists and complex interactions, but—with the exception of “interactive narratives” like the Walking Dead games (2012–) or Until Dawn, games in which the characters are substantially developed both by and independent of player action—there will always be an awkward disconnect between player and avatar because the default mode for a gamer is to play as themselves. One is not acting the part of Daniel when playing Amnesia: Daniel is as much a third-person character as he would be if the gameplay was not first-person. You the gamer are making choices that reveal Daniel’s story and move his character forward, but would anyone think to put themself in the mindset of a 19th-century Londoner to properly play the game? An actor assigned the part of Daniel in a film adaptation would find some version of this, and a writer working on the screenplay would at the very least need to imagine what Daniel’s thought process would look like. But none of this sort of psychological melding, or even curiosity, is required to properly experience Amnesia. Daniel’s story is compelling, as is that of the unnamed artist at the center of Layers of Fear, but those games tell stories about their protagonists, while you, the gamer, move through the world.

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