Fear Factor

I think I have a pretty good tolerance as far as fear is concerned. I’ve never lost sleep over a book or a movie, no, not even Bhoot. I’ve never scared myself shitless after watching a horror movie alone at night. Nope, all the usual, normal scary stories that happen to every usual, normal kid never happened to me.

But, if done right, video games really hit me where it counts. I feel for my character in Morrowind, I was scared of playing Undying with my headphones in the dark, and Silent Hill 2 does invoke a feeling of urgency, if not fear. Why is that? It could be the interactivity, the identification with the character at a very primal level. This could be the reason for most, but for me that’s just part of the reason why I react strongly to electronic stimuli. There is something else that leads a twenty something man to take his headphones off, turn on the lights, and then continue his gaming.

After playing games for most of my conscious life, I think I’ve gotten to the point where I can ignore the motor control aspect of most games, and shift my attention to the gameplay. Basically, I’m receiving all the benefits of interactivity without being distracted by many of the trappings it necessitates. I don’t have to think about pressing the E key to open a door, I just open it. The state of consciousness while playing the game when you are in the game, when suspension of disbelief sets in and you don’t care if the monitor is a 14 inch midget or if the bathroom tap is overflowing…

This could explain a lot about the vastly different experiences that casual and hardcore gamers have from games. If you’re concentrating on controls, maybe you aren’t concentrating on other things. Instead of trying to figure out the alternate fire key, I throw grenades at aliens trying to make a tasty morsel out of me. Me, not the pixelated, polygonal 3d model on a monitor in front of me.

However, I’m at least not as bad off as my friend Amit, who screamed when he played Half Life. He got so scared he never played Opposing Force or Blue Shift.

Although reading this would give the impression that I have the godlike game control skillz, it’s really more that I don’t pay attention to them as much. I’m actually pretty sloppy, and games like Spider-Man the movie (for the PC) really seem like lot of work for me. I am at home with the keyboard and mouse, but positively suck at gamepads, and their analogous mappings on the keyboard.

On another tangent, Scottish Television has made a 22-minute documentary about machinima, the art form that uses videogame technology to make animated films. The documentary is called Artery: Machinima.