Sunday, October 20, 2024

Horror In Gaming: The Most Immersive Art Form

Gaming is objectively the greatest art form.  Encompassing literally everything that makes the other mediums artistically great while uniting or transcending these elements, it is the interactivity that separates gaming from the text, audio (including music and voice acting), or aesthetics of everything from literature to sculpture.  Someone might personally prefer something like the passivity of watching a film, with movies having their own potential for greatness, but artistically, gaming has more to it than cinema ever could and it could contain everything films themselves possess.  One can control to some extent the pace at which one reads, regarding another medium, but the act of reading does not affect either the broad plot or the details of moment by moment events.  Video games require player input to progress and that progression is not necessarily uniform for every player.

What separates gaming from all other art formats is its inherent component of controllability as affected by the player's choice, that of being able to make the character do or not do whatever is permitted within the full range of actions.  Horror has the potential to become all the more visceral thanks to this.  No longer is someone merely imagining imposing events, conjuring up mental imagery to match the words, while reading them or watching things occur in a strictly cinematic fashion with or without their input.  Ominous environments are not just observed; they are navigated with real-time human direction.  Hostile entities are not just seen as a fixed, exact course of events unfolds; they must be fought or fled from by the player.

With gaming, the character only advances through whatever grim or intimidating circumstances are present if the player makes them.  When you have to make your character conserve bullets or other limited weapons, like in The Callisto Protocol or certain Resident Evil games (though only certain franchise entries actually embody serious horror well), this vulnerability is heightened.  When your character cannot defend themself at all, as with the entirety of Outlast and the human portions of Agony, the vulnerability that comes with player control is at its highest.  Someone who gets anxious towards a horror movie they do not need to manually progress through could be downright terrified by a horror game--some enjoying this and some avoiding it.

You have to hide, you have to aim the firearm, and you have to find your way through the digital world, perhaps while being hunted and with no means of protection.  Gaming is already interactive by nature, or else it would be an entirely passive experience like other artistic mediums.  This is what gives it a more potent capacity for making it likely that even people otherwise not philosophically oriented would reflect on their actual beliefs and decisions and perceptions, when this is facilitated correctly (BioShock does this very well).  Horror gaming has all of the philosophical potential of literary or cinematic horror to address fear, survival, and general metaphysics, as with cosmic or religious horror, which can be easily combined.  It also has the even grander immersive nature of player control.

What delights or intoxicates someone in artistic form might still be unwanted in real life, so it is not as if everyone looks to horror to find experiences they wish they themselves had.  The very nature of a video game nonetheless lends itself well to deeper levels of dread, unease, or excitement than the same genre in any other medium.  Of all that gaming can offer, virtual reality would be the most immersive possible subset of this already more interactive art form.  Other than being attacked or stalked or forced to walk through macabre settings, there is no experience closer to the real thing.  Far from being a medium to dismiss for its immersion and storytelling, gaming has no superior or equal in all of artistic expression: while some mediums might be more suited to particular goals or creative urges than others, there is not one with greater potential or transcendence of the others than gaming, and this inevitably spills over into interactive horror.

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