A Macabre Wrapper - Fear in Gaming
When the rest of the family is asleep, and I have a couple hours of quiet darkness alone, there are few things I love more than nestling into the couch and scaring the everlovingchrist out of myself with a scary videogame or movie. But in all of my boardgaming, there are very few, if any, experiences where I've genuinely felt fear.
I want to explore some reasons why that may be, and see if there are any design elements that boardgames may be able to adapt in order to scare its players.
(One thing to note early on is the difference between a horror game, and a horror-themed game. Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper or Mall of Horror are both what I would call horror-themed games; they are about something horrific, but the mechanics themselves [rummy and voting, respectively] don't really support that. Games like Kingdom Death: Monster and Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space do at least attempt to support their horror themes with game mechanics. What I'm interested in exploring is how well do games like these succeed, and why or why not. Horror-themed games [though I quite enjoy both of my examples] are of less interest.)
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There are some critical weaknesses that the boardgame medium has when it comes to inducing fear.
The most obvious, and I'm struggling with a succinct word to represent this so bear with the over-explanation of an obvious fact, is one of immersion.
By this I mean that boardgames are a collection of mechanics that the player has to operate and enforce themselves. While a videogame or movie is visually pumped into your brain from a screen, and though you may interact with the world via a controller, the world needs no input from you to exist.
If you're playing a boardgame where it becomes foggy, it doesn't literally become harder for you to see. It's just a die roll modifier or maybe a keyword or flavor text that burns off to the discard pile. The dark and creepy corridors of an enemy-stalked Space Hulk or Hadley's Hope are pre-built maps with clearly delineated spaces to facilitate movement.
An enemy can't burst through a window unexpectedly and jump-scare you; you knew the enemy was there because you put it there, and physically moved it or spawned it into your space. At most you suffer some sort of mechanical disadvantage for the "surprise round," but you aren't actually surprised. And even if, say in a hidden movement game or with Space Hulk's blip tokens, something that you didn't know was there suddenly appears, it's not going to manifest in such a way as to literally cause you surprise unless you're playing with a particularly theatrical opponent.
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Another disadvantage is in something I'll label atmosphere. By this I mean a set of external factors that influence the experience.
Ever watched a horror movie with the music off? It's typically quite dull. Toss in Yakety Sax and it'll switch genres to comedy. But that same movie, with the sound and music loud, the lights off, alone in a room, can be nightmarish.
Boardgaming misses out on this. Sure, a couple games come with some (often cringe-worthy) music, but it's not composed in direct support of the action. It's background music, and it won't swell just before you roll the dice and then screech when the monster attacks. And playing a game in the dark is, well, tough (though with most rulebooks these days, I certainly feel like I'm playing them in the dark ZING).
Other people can also be a barrier to fear. Dead Space had some truly terrifying moments, but playing Dead Space 3 cooperatively with a friend means interrupting what could be (in DS3, it wasn't) well-crafted horror with complaining about work, catching up about the kids, and the occasional beer burp. Most horror videogames are played solo, and movies don't typically require direct interaction with other viewers. But boardgames will likely be played with friends, easing the feeling of being afraid.
There is obviously solo gaming, and that may be the best bet for horror boardgames. But though it may alleviate one of the problems of atmosphere (though not all of them), it often exacerbates the problem of immersion, as good hidden movement or fog of war mechanics can be tough to pull off when there's only one player to maintain the board state.
A few games, like Mansions of Madness: Second Edition, try their damnedest to overcome these shortcomings, but even at their best those games still can't overcome the significant sway these factors have in creating fear. They may be so significant as to conclude that, outside of a few arguable exceptions, horror boardgames are limited only to having a horror theme; a macabre wrapper around an otherwise scare-less game.
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There are, however, design choices in common across horror videogames, and even movies, that I think could inform boardgame design. You won't end up with jump-scares or nightmares, but it's a start.
One primary design aspect can probably best be described as disempowerment.
Almost all horror is about being disempowered. In movies it's a trope at this point that the characters will run into danger or make stupid choices, but the reason that happens is to force the viewer into a situation over which they have no control. You have no power here. Instead you are pushed down this dark hallway and have no choice but to watch it unfold.
And the antagonists are always more powerful. They can hide easier, kill faster, shrug off attacks, look like anyone, or swarm. Or sometimes all of those.
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To see that design in gaming, videogames have you covered.
Alien: Isolation and Resident Evil 7 both put the player in a position where they have to survive in a space with an enemy so much more powerful than they are that the game doesn't even bother giving you a chance to fight back if you're caught. If the xenomorph finds you, roll the death cutscene. These moments, where you're being hunted by something that you have no power or control over other than to run or hide, are some of the scariest moments in gaming I've played.
Videogames disempower you in other ways. Many of them limit your resources, such as health packs, ammunition, or flash light batteries. Systems like this make every missed shot, or every tiny scrape, feel like that much more of a loss. In Dead Space, ammo was often hard to find or costly to buy, making every shot count and adding much more tension to fights; in Dead Space 3 your guns were almost always full-to-brimming and you waltzed around mowing down easy-to-kill enemies. This empowerment made Dead Space 3 an action game, and rarely scary.
Videogames also approach disempowerment in some unique ways. Resident Evil 4, for example, has notoriously bad controls. You can't strafe, you can't move and shoot at the same time, aiming is slow and finicky, you can't dodge, and even the general movement speed is sluggish. But this is purposeful and creates tension. As you slowly aim and shoot at enemies, they plod towards you, getting ever-closer to your fixed position. Will you drop them in time, or should you cut and run? But can you run away fast enough?
Dead Space required you to interact with a menu to change loadouts and check inventory. But the game would not pause while you scrounged around. This created great tension, as you could still hear banging getting closer to you as you tried to manage inventory before getting attacked. Your guard was never down; you were never fully in control.
Videogames also get to use their strengths of immersion and atmosphere to aid them in disempowering their players. Darkness, blind corners, and weather effects all immerse you in the world while also decreasing your control over the space you are in. And you have no control over the music or sound effects; these are forced on you and, if used well, will keep you off-balance in constant anticipation of bumps in the night or a sudden orchestral jump-scare.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem even went so far as to try to mess with the player, making it seem as though their television had changed channels, their character had died when they hadn't, or even that the player had accidentally deleted their saved game.
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Horror boardgames often have to lean very heavily into disempowerment as one of their main sources of mechanical support of the theme.
Plenty of games pit you against opponents much more powerful than you are. Kingdom Death's battles, especially the first time you take on a new creature, often see you very underpowered both physically and in terms of knowledge of the creature's abilities. Most zombie games pit you against much greater numbers. Up close, a Genestealer will rip a Space Marine apart in seconds. And if Azathoth wakes up in any Arkham Files games, it's typically game over right there.
I don't see many games incorporate instant fail states, like bumping into the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation. Dead of Winter's red die is about the only thing I can think of (and, I say, its best mechanic). I think many players would find these fail states frustrating (certainly many people hate the die in DoW), especially depending on the length of the game and the logistics of restarting the game (as well as setup and tear down time). I'll get into this a bit more later.
Resource management comes up a lot in games, but less often is it used to create tension. Arkham Horror: The Card Game tracks uses on weapons, spells, and items like flashlights, forcing you to choose if it's worth it to use up your resources or risk going without. Firing off a shot and missing does feel bad, but the resources here don't feel so precious such that I ever really feel disempowered by a lack of them.
Dead of Winter and This War of Mine both do an OK job in creating tense situations due to resource constraints (though I wouldn't call TWoM a horror game). Space Hulk handles guns jamming in an interesting way; Doom: The Boardgame handles running out of ammo without having to track every round fired, which is nice.
Generally, though, most games don't feel tense to me due to how resources are used. In many games you are constantly gaining, collecting, saving towards some goal. There may be losses, but turn by turn you feel like you are making progress. But progress isn't scary. Most good horror games flip the equation: you are constantly losing resources. There may be windfalls, but minute by minute you are digging your own grave.
Geoff Engelstein has a great GDC presentation about loss aversion in gaming, and how losing something feels twice as bad as gaining the same thing. This is important to keep in mind if you don't want players to feel bad, but it’s then twice as important if that's your goal. (To Geoff's credit, he doesn't say one is better than the other, only that this is a tool we can use to manipulate player emotion.)
Boardgames don't have access to as many nifty tricks as videogames, such as slowed controls or lack of pausing. But, from a design standpoint, these are just methods of decreasing the control a user has over how they interact with the medium itself. In boardgaming, a good example would be the use of a timer. This removes the power that players have over the pace at which they play (though I think a game-length timer like that seen in The Omega Virus would work better for a horror game than the pandemonium-inducing timers in games like Galaxy Trucker or Escape: The Curse of the Temple). Mansions of Madness: Second Edition has a timer which actually does a pretty good job causing tension because, even though it’s measured in turns and not seconds, it’s hidden from the players through the app, thus reducing the immersion problems as compared to so many other games with a “doom track.”
Other examples could be reaching into a dark bag full of aliens in Last Frontier: The Vesuvius Incident, or determining success of an action in Dread by pulling a block from an unsteady Jenga tower. Neither of these are outside the norm when it comes to how we play games (hell, one is, itself, an actual game), but combined with other elements, both can change how experience playing a horror game.
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Another important aspect of good horror is that of loss. But I didn't bold that word because loss happens all the time in gaming, and I don't think that's the critical aspect of the design. What's critical is that prior to loss comes investment.
The best horror movies are the ones that have characters who are well written enough, and well acted enough, that you actively do not want them to suffer. Your investment in them as a character makes you that much more tense, scared, and worried when they are put under threat. And having them die feels like a significant loss. I'll watch Jason impale scores of nameless campers with indifference, but even after dozens of viewings I'm still always nervous for the crew of the Nostromo.
Games have a leg up; players are already invested due to being active participants and trying beat the game. Videogames can have cutscenes to tell a story and get you invested in their characters and world.
But there are other ways to build investment, though in gaming there is a risk of going too far. For example, most videogames have some system in place to save your progress as your play. In a horror game, if your game is constantly saved and you can simply reload to jump back a couple minutes in time, then you really don't have all that much to lose. Many of the best horror videogames (Alien: Isolation and Dead Space both do this) do not automatically save your game; instead you have to survive to the next save point. The more time it's been since you saved, the more invested you are, the more fearful you become of the loss. And the harder that loss hits if you don't make it.
But space your save points too far apart, such that a player is losing hours of time and replaying huge chunks of your game, and emotions will shift quickly from enjoyable fear to frustration.
Players can also become invested simply by having a lot to lose. There are dozens of indie roguelike games published each year where you drop everything when you die. As the the game progresses, and you amass resources, your investment grows and the game becomes more and more tense; you have more to risk upon death.
Again though, like garnering investment through a player's time, this has to be carefully balanced. Giving a player more to lose also means giving them more to win, which can directly contradict the idea of disempowerment. If they make it back alive with their wondrous bounty, can you still maintain a feeling of fear?
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Boardgames are in an odd place when it comes to investment. Typically they have only one save point: a fresh start. And often, the work that goes into learning the rules of a game, finding time to play it, and setting it all up on the table build so much initial investment that killing a player and sending them back to the start just feels disrespectful, rather than a design choice to illicit fear. Especially if the fail state is conquered through trial and error or is perceived as random.
It works better in short games, where a quick loss doesn't feel so punishing. But too short and the player is no longer invested and can just shrug it off and try again, meaning no one play will feel nearly so tense.
Some boardgames have tried. Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords has you play a long campaign where you build a character up over many sessions, and if your character dies, that's it for them. But they didn't quite have the guts to follow through on it, as players can always just pass their turns and let the clock run out if they think they're close to death. Kingdom Death: Monster prides itself on its body count, but you soon realize it's the gear that matters, and the gear persists (usually) when its wearer dies. I soon wasn't invested at all in my characters; they weren't long for this world, and their death wouldn't matter much anyway.
The most successful games that give you something to invest in, and then lose, are often war games. In Ambush! you can build up characters and stories over many missions only to lose them to a stroke of bad luck. It works because you don't lose the game and start over, you just lose one of many characters you are controlling (and probably the mission) and then bring in new recruits and advance. It still feels respectful of your time, while also giving you so much to lose. Ambush! is not a horror game, but it's one of the few games where I've actually felt afraid to roll the dice.
I mentioned the red die from Dead of Winter already, but similarly, players control multiple characters. The loss of one can be huge, making rolling that die potentially scary, but it's also not the end of the game.
One game, though, that stands in stark defiance to all of this is The 7th Continent. 7C challenges players with a game that can take 20+ hours to win, but has a fail condition that completely ends the game (with a random draw from a deck, no less) with no save points. It's honestly a gutsy design choice. I feel like too much of the rest of the game goes against good horror design for me to feel scared while playing it, but with some tweaks and a different theme, the basic mechanics of 7C might make for a really great horror game.
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These design elements don't exist in a vacuum, however. The interaction between disempowerment and investment is what I think makes some of the best horror.
The save points in Alien: Isolation, spaced just far enough apart to have you sometimes literally screaming for the next one to show up, wouldn't illicit that response were it not for the unkillable, unpredictable creature hunting you through the station. And the best horror movies take time to introduce you to solid characters, only to put them, and you the viewer, in a powerless situation.
I think the best videogame example of this is Dark Souls. Though not often considered a horror game, Dark Souls scared me in a way few other games have.
Dark Souls achieves disempowerment simply through difficulty. Notorious difficulty. Every enemy in Dark Souls is dangerous, and a few wrong button presses or a bit of bad timing and your character is slumping to the floor.
Dark Souls achieves investment through the use of its souls system. Every enemy you kill earns you souls, which you can spend to make your character more powerful. As you explore you build up more and more souls on your character. But when you die, which you inevitably will, all your souls are dropped.
So the game gives you a lot to lose, and then throws you at enemies very good at making you lose it. As you fight your way through the world, from fire to fire (where you can "bank" your accrued souls) the intensity steadily increases.
But Dark Souls has a trick it pulls on you. It does this whole process to you twice. When you drop your souls, you respawn back where you started. All the souls you've earned are floating quietly where you went down. If you can make it back to them, you can have them all back! But if you die on the way there, they are gone forever. If you weren't nervous the first time you went through an area, you certainly will be on your return trip, when everything is on the line.
The accrual of souls wouldn’t be tense were it not for the difficulty of keeping them, and the difficulty of the game would not be nearly so terrifying were it not for how much is on the line. The interaction is what makes it perfect.
This design has the benefit of actually being a bit less punishing on the player (as at least you have a chance to not lose everything), but at the same time it bounces you back and forth between tense and more tense.
I can't think of any boardgames that nail both the disempowerment and the investment quite so perfectly, while also wrapping everything in a good horror theme. Though I do think it can be done.
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Ultimately, I think boardgames are at quite a disadvantage when it comes to fear. Their struggle with immersion and atmosphere may be too much to overcome, though some games have tried and won a little ground.
But there are times, few and far between and rarely in a horror-themed game, where I have been nervous about what's on the next card or afraid of what the those snake eyes might mean. It happens with the perfect combination of disempowerment and the loss, or even just the threat of loss, of investment. I think a design that leans heavily into these may actually be able to be a truly scary boardgame.