The Survival Horror Dilemma Wednesday, May 20, 2009 : 11:00 PM PST By: Chris

Why do people get scared? That's a question I've been thinking about. The best, most distilled, answer I can come up with is this: people become scared when they believe they might (or know they're going to) lose something that they'd rather not lose. There is probably a deep, metaphysical discussion to be had regarding the subject, but I'm going to eschew that to talk about save files and survival horror games.

So, suppossing that fear stems from the possibility of loss, how can a game be scary to the player? Clearly, there must be something that can be lost by the player. Since the player is actually sitting on a couch and not literally in the world of the game, the only real thing that can be lost by the player is progress within said game, regardless of what nightmarish tortures the character on the screen is experiencing. That's the crux. Save files are explicitely designed to prevent the loss of progress by the player. As modern games trend towards checkpoints every few seconds, the ability for a survival horror game to induce fear decays towards null. Afterall, why be scared when you know with certainty that anything that happens on-screen can be rewound to a checkpoint that's just a stone's throw in the past?

The inverse is perhaps even worse. Games with no ability to save at all (e.g., many games of the 80's) can be absolutely terrifying as one considers losing 3 consecutive hours of progress to a single mistake while playing. The amount of frustration that comes with this approach is flat out insane and not worth it.

I think the original save system in Resident Evil was a brilliant middle ground. Not only did you have to find specific save locations (typewriters), but you had to have an ink ribbon in your inventory to actually save your game. Ink ribbons were a finite resource that the player had to search for. You couldn't save as much as you want and even when you could save you had to question if you really wanted to use up a ribbon. This system naturally created situations where the player could lose (possibly a lot of) progress in the game. Sometimes these scenarios were unwittingly created by the players themselves by over-conserving ink ribbons. In such situations, the unknown, unexplored areas within the game become something approaching scary.

In my estimation, there is one other possible solution for creating fear and anxiety and it stems from why we can find movies scary. While watching a movie there is no physical danger to the viewer (one hopes) and no danger of losing even progress. Yet, movies can be fear inducing. If a person is emotionally invested in a character then they can be scared for the character and any loss coming their way. However, traditionally, this type of character empathy has been hard for games to achieve - certainly harder than simply cutting back on the checkpoints.