What Is Scary?

Exodus concept art by Archetype Entertainment

You'd be forgiven for assuming that I'm posting this because it's Halloween. You'd also be forgiven, if you've been keeping up with my social/travel calendar, for assuming that I'm posting this, belatedly, because I attended the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival last week and have been thinking extra hard about horror movies. But no, I'm posting this because I just watched about half of a YouTube video about some videogame I'd never heard of before today. The brain works in mysterious ways.

See, my reluctant participation in the annual rite of Star Citizen remembrance involved a bunch of YouTube watching, after which the algorithm was like, oh, you like ambitious science fiction videogames with no release date in sight? Check this out! It's called Exodus. It's got a bunch of former BioWare devs at the helm! And some novelist you've never heard of but whom people seem to like is involved! So is Matthew McConaughey, for some reason! In fact, here's Wooderson himself narrating some spooky lore about the game's bad guys. This all seems like it should be more or less up my alley.

But here I am, just a couple minutes in…rolling my eyes?

It's not just that it's not scary. There's a lot going on here that seems lazy. They're called the Mara Yama, for one thing. Big “Just give me Satan, but make it Buddhist” energy. The visual design of the ship in the opening shot is cool, but haven't we seen the rest of this before? A little Giger, a little Doom, a little Halo, a little Firefly. A heaping helping of Warhammer 40k. What if the Dark Eldar were also the Flood? Is that anything?

(Oh, remember how everybody in Star Citizen is some white dude named Ernst or Steve? A cursory survey of the Exodus site and marketing materials turns up characters named Jurgen, Edith, Kendall, Torrance, Evan, Max, and Tom. At least the space monsters are Indian!)

Of course there's nothing new under the sun, and if you can put a fresh, well-crafted spin on some beloved old trope, more power to you. (On the other hand, there's deja vu all over the marketing materials. Haven't I seen these “awakened bears” before? Weren't uplifted bears in StarDrive? And in Starfinder? Haven't we done “disposable workers engineered to thrive in harsh environments” a hundred times now? Haven't I seen this concept art before, in Mass Effect, Interstellar, Prometheus, Destiny?) But if it's not original, it has to be good. If it's supposed to be the scariest thing in the universe, it should be scary. This isn't scary.

Scaring players in videogames is hard. Startling them is easy enough, which is why jumpscares in dimly lit corridors are a staple of horror games. Rattling them requires a little more finesse, but is also reliably achievable, hence effects that impair the player's vision, hearing, or movement likewise being staples. Actually instilling fear in them? That's a tall order.

Fear is the expectation of danger, of pain, of harm. You can't cause (literal) pain to a player via their digital avatar, and your ability to harm that avatar is mechanically constrained. Few games punish a player more severely for failing to avoid or overcome danger than by taking her time (making her start over from a saved game or a checkpoint), and those that do tend to compound that injury only by removing some accumulated reward (money, experience points, items)—which is, at the end of the day, just time transmuted into another form.

Rather than fear of harm, the player is more apt to experience anxiety about avoiding frustration (or, if the stakes are low enough, just sheer frustration). Even when a single-player videogame features what is presented as irreversible harm—the ability to lose irreplaceable items, for instance, or the permanent death of the character—it's usually only an extreme version of the same: you can do the whole thing over. Once again, you've only lost time. There are a few interesting exceptions to this rule, like the infamous art game Lose/Lose, but they're few and far between.

In a tabletop game, of course, everything is different. Not only is the prevailing TTRPG convention to accept loss, change, and character death and incorporate those things into the shared narrative, but it would scarcely be possible to retrace one's steps with perfect fidelity as in a videogame (whether returning to a “checkpoint” or “saved game” or starting the entire narrative over and trying to do everything the exact same way). Thus you can scare a TTRPG player by threatening their character (you can even cause them physical pain, or something close to it, by harming or threatening their character, so…you know, be careful). But you can also scare a player by threatening another player's character, or even (especially!) an NPC.

It's a lot harder to do that in a videogame, which is narratively rigid and usually incapable of reacting or adapting to the player's actions in diverse, believable ways. It's not impossible, though. Videogames can often wrench more emotion out of the lives and deaths of minor, plot-inessential characters (I'm thinking of Paul Denton in the original Deus Ex, poor Miria in Fallout 2, a half-dozen people in Disco Elysium) than they can out of threats to people the player is being railroaded into saving (or trying and failing to save). Part of what makes Disco Elysium so great is that although you, the player, don't really have any control over what happens in “the main plot,” neither does your character. You're not being railroaded into the unearned drama of glorious success or harrowing failure, you're just stumbling through a situation too complex and too far advanced to be resolved by one cop's (or two cops') heroics. Most of what you can do to help or harm is just little stuff around the margins.

All of which is to say that while the Mara Yama would be terrifying if they existed in real life, hard as that is to imagine, and might be terrifying in the hands of a novelist talented enough to bridge that imaginative gap, they can't hope, as videogame adversaries, to be much more than an annoyance. An action-adventure game's avatar is fearless; what harm can fear-eating monsters do to him? They wouldn't even be good TTRPG antagonists; there's something both too circular and not interactive enough about “they're scary because they torture you and consume your fear and pain.” A scary enemy needs to actively threaten the things the players care about: their friends, their reputations, their social status. Maybe their magic swords, once in a while.

And videogames? Permadeath can definitely be scary, especially in dynamic settings—multiplayer survival shooters create some incredibly tense moments. But in single-player games, it's hard to scare players more than you frustrate them. SOMA is probably the scariest narrative game I can think of, and it's scary not because of anything that adversaries do to your avatar, but because it uses the model of the videogame avatar to force you to think about your own mortality, your own ephemerality, your own ontological contingency.