I wanted to use the footage to strengthen my narration and create interest and capture specific elements of the games I chose that influenced me and things that make the games unique.
My first ever video essay was based around my own opinion and knowledge of each game I chose to use. I wanted to really express my passion for them and why they hold such inspiration for me.
There’s a few bits I need to edit such as removing the face at the end of the video as it’s not needed and adding more narrative to explain the ‘choice and consequence’ in Until Dawn and how the game states at the beginning that ‘sometimes it’s better not to do anything’.
Working on ‘Movie Maker’: All my video clips and bits of narrative
Silent Hill is based on a real town that was evacuated due to an enormous underground fire within the mines below. Though the town no longer exists the fires still burn and will continue to burn for another 250 years. Konami turned it into a nightmare, the smoke became the fog, they created a story on the foundations, twisting reality and through this one of the greatest horror game franchises was born.
The atmosphere is created from the confusing and macabre story, the monsters roaming the streets and the auxiliary tone. The music is a variety of unsettling sounds, things that make you uncomfortable, keep you on edge and somehow causes a synthetic paranoia.
Silent Hill 2 is by far my favourite. Tormented and hunted by the bogeyman, haunted by an aesthetic reincarnation of the main characters wife. The characters/fiends met in the game symbolise the certain parts or desires of James Sunderland, the games protagonist. The main focus for me when using elements of the game for inspiration is the environment. Surrounded in fog and darkness with red, rusty lighting, swarmed by demonic noises in this decaying town with nothing but a torch to light up shadows and a radio that warns of danger. It gripped my attention to this idea of absence which gives something different within atmosphere and immersion.
Slender Man, the envision of Cthulu, the snatcher of children. The tall man of the woods. The stalker of dreams, the folklore in the fakelore. Slender Man became an internet sensation after a Creepypasta story and an image went viral. It led to poems, alternative stories, independent films and video games. The idea of him as influenced people to act on terrible crimes such as two girls stabbing their classmate as a sacrifice to show their undoubted loyalty to this imaginary being.
However, for me, he himself doesn’t interest me. His suit and featureless face does not trigger anything in me, it’s the chase, the fear of being caught. In the video game; Slender: The Arrival, you’re thrown into the woods like the original game. Searching for pieces of paper. There is no additional music but the sound of night, the echoes of your shoes in the dirt. The only added ambience is a deep, booming noise. The absence of anything else is what gained my interest, the less is more that creates the best atmosphere, and then he’ll stalk you. Your screen will start glitching and you’ll hear white noise that is enough to strike fear into you. That fear that you cannot look at what is chasing you, there is nowhere to hide, and you’re thrown into panic to escape him. That is what excites me, vulnerability and the inability to hide. It’s one of the most successful components in a simple game such as this.
Both Silent Hill and Slender Man have this element, this space around the light. Nothing but a torch to separate your obscured vision. What is hiding in the dark?
They have similar foundations of folklore, darkness, horror. Both execute them in different ways and that’s what makes them stand out from cliché. Silent Hill has psychology, dark stories of not so farfetched lives. Slender has a modern grasp of folklore, the Blaire Witch Project feel.
Slender Man is a first person game, where you are the characters eyes, you control them through their linear story, experiencing the fear that they feel.
This is what influenced my art work. Silent Hill holds the distortion of reality, how the town changes into an alternative one. How the paint tears off the walls, exposing a fleshy, decayed and rusty core.
Choice decision games are based around certain characters, your choice leads to their demise or their escape. What happens when you are that character? The choices you make will determine the destiny of you the viewer who becomes the participant. This is depending on a person’s level of curiosity, their connection with the characters. The immersion is key to that. The way a game grips you and pulls you in and how you react to its narrative and visuals.
Until Dawn is an interesting game. It screams cliché American hack and slash, cabin in the woods, a crazy serial killer with a thirst for teenage blood. But it is much more than that. It is deliberately cliché. That’s part of the red herring. You spend your time running from a masked killer, who, torments you with violent choices to save and sacrifice. Emotionally abuses you much like the Saw films. However, there is much more going on. It links its story with folklore, that of the Wendigo. That is the truth behind the game. This crazed man is not real. It’s an act influenced by our horror genre in modern day.
The Wendigo, in Algonquian folklore, is a monster or evil spirit native to the northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada. It is awoken by any man or woman who resorts to cannibalism. There is a true story about a man called Swift Runner, which involves the Wendigo. He killed and ate his wife and children, claiming that the spirit of the Wendigo had possessed him and forced him to do it. He was later hung for his crimes. The myth still resonates today.
The game is solely rooted by the ‘butterfly’ effect. Your choices effect future outcomes and can lead to characters dying. Gruesomely. The addition tension is that the game, at the beginning, mentions that ‘sometimes, doing nothing is better’. This with the timer on most of the decisions sends you into a moment of panic and rash decisions can occur. Though my work isn’t as extensive as that of this game, it still held an interest for choice, how you explore, how you interact and whether you escape or not. Like all games of this field. The trend quickly fades and a lot of the great traits of the game are lost to the next craze. Not only did the developers cleverly link folklore with cliché horror but they also worked hard to test the psychological effects it had on players. The differences between these forms of horror is the knowing, knowing the danger and knowing a wrong move will kill a character forever and the other is ambiguity, the unknown danger, the psychological art of the game.
These games are scary because we let them. We are the game, our reactions, decisions and responses are the fear that empowers them. The real monster is what lurks in our own imagination.
