An angry woman with a chainsaw charges at the player. To protect himself, he raises his arm. Snap! The hand is gone. Crawling and whimpering, the victim seeks refuge in an abandoned house. This is a scenario from the horror game “Resident Evil 7,” which has been released for all popular video game systems. As is typical for survival horror games, it’s all about sheer survival – everything is at stake from the very beginning. You do not need to play a horror game to get this rush. Try out the new playamo casino for the most entertaining way of gambling.
The body is vulnerable, and the game makes this very explicit. Horror games have been around as long as video games themselves. Initially, due to limited graphics, players needed a lot of imagination, but current games in this genre have achieved nearly realistic visuals. The graphical effects of modern games contribute to a richness of detail in horror. The skin of monsters glistens, the fog is more lifelike than ever, and the weapons look and sound like they are taken from reality. When the rain patters against the windows, the boundaries between the digital and the real seem to blur completely.
However, the fundamental mechanics of these games have remained the same since their inception. In the 1982 game “Haunted House,” released on the Atari 2400, players must escape a haunted house. If they are hit by an enemy nine times, they lose. In “Resident Evil 7,” players must rescue a girlfriend who has been missing for three years from the clutches of a deranged family. Ultimately, they themselves are captured and must escape. If they are bitten by monsters or injured by chainsaws too often, they lose. “The evil is hardly conquerable in these games” In the 1990s, survival horror games experienced a boom. Franchises like “Resident Evil,” “Silent Hill,” and “Alone in the Dark” established a sub-genre of horror games that, despite explicit violence, primarily staged human survival.
There is hardly any other video game genre that connects players so closely with the characters they control. Both anticipate additional horrors lurking around every corner. This also means that horror games rely far less on interpersonal relationships or the diversity of characters than other genres, such as role-playing games. Dialogue plays a minor role. It’s solely about not getting killed. But how does this genre position itself within a discourse that repeatedly confronts video games with the label “killer games,” accusing them of brutalizing consumers? Christian Schiffer, the Grimme Award-nominated author of the ZDF’s three-part “killer games” documentary, finds a clear answer to this: “In the ‘killer game’ discourse in Germany, horror games hardly play a role. Rather, it’s the so-called first-person shooters, games that give players significant power, that keep appearing in this discourse.” In survival horror games, however, it’s about the opposite: being a victim. “The evil is hardly conquerable in these games. Meanwhile, players are very vulnerable.
The authors of these games demonstrate their power by making players their playthings.” At the same time, violence is portrayed as threatening and abhorrent. Not without reason do these games only function through flight. Violence is not pursued; on the contrary, players flee from it.
“The narrative is once again in the foreground”
There was a prolonged phase in which horror games focused less on the vulnerable body and more on a protagonist who seemed omnipotent. Many of these games, which emerged primarily in the mid-2000s, staged the destruction of grotesque body forms – zombies, mutants, and aliens.
These games primarily demanded that players eliminate hordes of enemies with overwhelming firepower. In the midst of tentacles, mouths, and faces, the actual subject of survival horror was almost lost: the vulnerability of the body and the wordlessness of pain that defined the narrative. “Horror thrives on emotions and not on blood,” says Gundolf S. Freyermuth. He is a media scholar and director of the Cologne Game Lab, an institute at TH Köln where the “Digital Games” degree program is offered. “We are currently experiencing a re-literarization that brings digital games closer to text-based adventures of the 1970s.
After a phase where the focus was on approaching films, mostly through graphical means, it is now the narrative that takes center stage.” Even in horror literature, it is the nameless terror for which words are lacking that defines the genre. Unlike video games, literature must rely on readers’ imagination…
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