On The Recuperative Power of Interactive Horror
(Editor’s note: The author of this piece Rose Winters. The credited author’s name above is incorrect.)
(Author’s Note: The opinions expressed by the author in this piece are reflective of their own experiences with depression, dysphoria, and mental illness. At no point do they intend to present their opinions or experiences as indicative of any universal.)
There isn’t a genre of video game that inspires as unique a reaction as horror. We need only glance at YouTube and it’s litany of reaction videos for games like Five Nights at Freddy’s or Amnesia to become acquainted with the phenomena that they have become, to the modern audience. There are obvious reasons why horror is well-loved, of course; being frightened is exhilarating and entertaining, and the horror is rendered trivial, once we share it with friends, or subvert it (as is commonly done) into comedy.
But what happens when the horror becomes non-trivial? When it’s intended to be experienced, and realized, fully, by the recipient? For the depressed or the dysphoric, interactive horror offers a unique empathetic capacity that eschews the things that dissociate the depressed from reality- a culture of toxic positivity, among other things- in favor of legitimizing the experiences that the depressed mind associates with it’s own recognized reality.
Some context here, maybe; queer folks have, historically, been pushed to the periphery, which means that they are often drawn to the unusual or the overlooked. I grew up, shall we say, terminally queer. I’ll spare you the grisly details, but there tends to be a marked difference both in the way a queer child tends to experience the world around them, and the manner in which their experiences are received. My world was colored by video games that expressed a very particular kind of weirdness: games that were sublime, daring, and occasionally horrific. The neon-drenched 60s pastiche of Earthbound, the surreal early 90s point-and-click adventure games, the unintentionally bone-chilling uncanny valley of the N64’s entire catalogue…games that (intentionally or otherwise) carried with them a metanarrative distinct from that which the game initially seems to offer.
Here is where horror begins to break down, in other mediums. In film and text, we experience horror only abstractly, filtered in precise intervals by the director or the author. Our fear is impersonal; it’s a presentation, a reflection, of someone else’s suffering, crudely exaggerated and stylized, cut and measured, and spoon-fed to a captive audience. The nature of the electronic gaming medium eliminates this precision. The experiences we derive from video games often defy the intent of their creator; it’s why comedy games often stumble on their face, or why we feel fear in something as innocuous as a poorly-designed digital face.
The buzzwords of horror are almost interchangeable with the symptoms of depression: Anxiety, discontent, hopelessness, sadness, for starters. Guilt, insomnia, social isolation, agitation…and terror, of course. The terror of an uncertain future, of having made an unfixable mistake, of being profoundly alone. The therapeutic, or recuperative, power of horror games comes in the most direct, unabashed, form of empathy possible. It is the complete realization of the other- in this case, the game- functionally acknowledging suffering, and when that suffering responds so immediately to the actions of the player, it’s hard to see it as anything but personal. The Walking Dead’s moral exhaustion validates the hopelessness of choices you have to make, when you’re depressed, when everything seems like a zero-sum. In Outlast, the protagonist is well and truly alone; their being subjected to horror after horror without respite mirrors the way that our misfortunes often seem to come incessantly and without purpose. Perhaps most strikingly, in Silent Hill, the player wanders a drained, lifeless reflection of suburban and urban living, encountering only individuals who fail to recognize the insanity of their situation. The favor of perspective, any perspective, that legitimizes your depression is invaluable, even if it’s uncomfortable or unpleasant.
Our experiences in games, and our emotional responses to them, are unpredictable, and this unpredictability is part of what makes them so entertaining, and why the feelings we garner from games are so keenly personal. Successful horror games are those that often embrace the weirdness inherent in their medium- perhaps mechanically, or artistically- and amplify them ad nauseum, or distort them uncomfortably. 2002’s Eternal Darkness famously used the strength of the medium to great effect, when the player’s “sanity meter” would have deleterious effects on the game’s interface, or Amnesia’s screen-blurring to obfuscate the monster that hounds you. The early iterations of Resident Evil featured limited ammunition; certain parts of the game become profoundly terrifying if you hadn’t handled your scarce resources effectively.
When I was a child, I played a point-and-click live-action adventure-horror game for the PC called Phantasmagoria (a game that’s aged pretty well, I might add). A sprawling, macabre, adventure across multiple CDs, the game’s many hours would culminate in a scene that resulted in the protagonist’s grisly, disturbing, death, if the player hadn’t retrieved and recognized the significance of a Christmas ornament in earlier chapters. Cruel, unfair, and personal.
The angle I’m trying to play is that there is value in the intimacy of these experiences. My depression was, perhaps not uncommonly, a very intimate ordeal. Sometimes it was random and cruel. Sometimes it felt painfully deliberate. Always, it felt personal. Depression (and the dysphoria that was so helpfully packaged alongside it) put me at odds with the narrative that the rest of the world seemed so happy and easily to adopt: things were fine. Things get better. What do you have to worry about? So many people have it worse.
The divide between personal suffering and the attitude of the world-at-large only bridges the gap between the suffering individual and the world in which they live. It took me a long time to accept the legitimacy of my suffering (and an even longer time to surmount the bullshit of the neolib “linear-scale betterness” mentality, though that’s another article), but finding self-worth amidst the ongoing denial of your reality can be overwhelming. As a consequence, I sought out means to cope…but ultimately, what I needed, was sympathy. Not the false, uneasy, sympathy that arises from obligation, but the reflection of my experiences from the mind of another.
Art as therapy is a long-accepted form of treatment in medical and psychological fields; art necessarily reflects reality, and reality, like art, is often harsh, uncompromising, and disturbing. Setting aside the debate as to whether or not video games constitute art (they do), or whether or not art is important to the layperson (it is), we have to accept that by the very nature of their interactivity, they involve the player in a process that demands personal contribution every time they play. The implication here is not that being in a state of personal horror can or should make everyone feel better- for some, perhaps even most, being scared can often do more harm than good- but that our experiences, whatever may comprise them, gain value when they are recognized. Through recognition, we get legitimization, and without that, we lack even personhood. Parceling out the effects of a genre into discrete emotional categories (e.g., horror makes you scared, and that is a bad feeling; shooting something makes you strong, and that’s a good feeling) only contributes to the same forced perspective from which these personal horrors have derived…and, frankly, I always found the horrors of a game preferable a welcome respite to those of reality.
Blakely Winters is a part-time writer, programmer, musician, queer curmudgeon, and débutante conservationist. An Oregonian native, they can be found on twitter @darkroomdoor.
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