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The Future of the Horror Genre
Happy Halloween or in gaming terms happy HALOween! No? Ok then, today is the day that the Festival of Horror should have ended, should have! We've missed a few days so we're going to do a Festival of Horror after party over the coming days and then finally we can go back to "Adventures in Gaming History"! Today, however, I thought we could take a look at where the horror genre could/ will be heading in the next few years!
Malcolm Evans' 3D Monster Maze was released on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1982 and is considered the spiritual origin of horror's most popular subgenre: Survival Horror! Since then the genre and subgenre has soared to new heights, graphics have gotten better, the story telling improved throughout the console generations. As companies like Atari rose and fell the horror genre remained strong! Games like Oregon Trial are still popular 30 years later despite the huge success of the modern horror scene showing that the history of this genre is still respected in the industry! Hugely popular franchises gave their series a horror quirk too, take Call of Duty as a prime example! In Call of Duty World at War we first saw the Nazi Zombies which are now a huge selling point for the upcoming Black Ops 3!
The horror genre is also able to adapt to the times, the various quirks of consoles! House of the Dead transported perfectly to the Nintendo Wii due to the arcade shooter style gameplay. This series was also adapted as a spoof Typing of the Dead using the Dreamcast keyboard and mouse but gaming has now truly reached the perfect advancement for the genre! Virtual Reality in gaming isn't a new concept, however, it wasn't until recently that we were ready for it, mainly because the technology wasn't advance enough to give us the immersive experience that we want! With the Oculus Rift and the huge amount of other virtual reality consoles and peripherals we can truly immerse ourselves in our favourite games and this gives us the true horror experience that we've wanted since the genre first appeared!
Alone in the Rift is one such game, except it's not really a game, it's more of an unsettling and creepy experience. This experience, however, is largely to the fact that we are, finally, able to live in the creepy environments we have dreamed of! The horror genre is constantly changing to immerse us in the world the story is trying to create around you, it started with word of mouth stories, to works of literature to images on a screen! Let's use Dracula as an example of this, imagine a situation where Bram Stoker told his friends about the story of Dracula. He's trying to create a world in which to scare people but word of mouth can only take you so far, he can only scare up to a certain point, until he finishes his novel. With words on a page Stoker can finally create a rich and full world and bypass his own mind warping the story after the 20th time of telling it! He has created a consistent horror story. With Dracula's huge success the character is given a film all of his own! Nosferatu in 1922 was the first film to use the character Dracula, the film was named as the film company (I forget which one made the film) couldn't get the rights to use his name! With Nosferatu we are all dropped into the same world created for us, we no longer need to keep thinking of this rich and full world created by Stoker. We can all experience the same emotions at the same time! When Dracula gets his first video game we are truly in the world created for us. We are no longer watching the iconic moment that Dracula climbs the staircase in Nosferatu we are climbing the staircase in Nosferatu! We are killing Dracula! The horror genre has given us the level of immersion we wanted, well, not quite and that's where the Oculus Rift comes in!
The Oculus Rift puts us in the horror film! The damsel in distress, or if you prefer, the Daniel in distress is us! Dracula isn't climbing those stairs after some character in a film or book, he is coming after us! We are finally the victim of a horror film! We may have wanted it but is this the future of the genre? If so we are left with a bleak future for the genre! Taking a look at IGN we can see a story about horror games on the Oculus Rift and it gives us an insight into how this virtual reality platform can be the final nail int the horror genre coffin! Alone in the Rift, among other titles, are too creepy. Immersing us to this level of being the victim means that we can take less of the game in one sitting! One girl ran outside whilst playing Outlast during the testing phase crying after only 40 minutes! Outlast maxed out the fear factor to new levels! The lead designer of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs stated that by maxing out the horror in a horror game you are, effectively, creating a game people cannot play. The can't and won't play the game, the developers would have shot themselves in the foot before the game hit the market! With the Oculus Rift and experiences like Alone in the Rift the horror genre has reached this point, a place where we're uncomfortable to continue playing. Keeping to the format of games like Silent Hill or Alien: Isolation allows the genre to truly scare us but only enough to keep us playing, to keep us determined for we may feel ourselves in a hrror film but we know we're not in any real danger!
