Frights, Fears, and Fallout: Layers of Horror in Popular Gaming

Introduction - What Kind of Fear?

In my personal gaming history I have two distinct memories of fear. The first time I was truly scared while playing a game was during the first Resident Evil in what has become a notorious scene from the game.[1] Though at the time Resident Evil felt more like a slower action game than a horror game, there was one key moment when the player walks down a hallway when suddenly one dog, then another bursts through the windows from the outside causing fright, disorientation, and panic. This is an example of a pretty standard jump scare in games (and other media), and though it did frighten me at that moment, I didn’t carry any greater fear of those dogs and what they represented beyond a slightly heightened anxiety while I walked the halls of Spencer Mansion.

The second - and more persistent - memory I have of being scared in games comes from the early hours of Fallout 3.[2] While wandering the capital wasteland the player can stumble upon the Super-Duper Mart, a dark and gloomy grocery store that has been taken over by post-apocalyptic raiders.

* Raiders Inside the Super-Duper Mart - Fallout 3

Unlike the dogs from Resident Evil, the threat is known, expected, and mostly visible as the player can see some of the raiders. The raiders are silhouetted - moving in and out of the shadows as a green-tinted fluorescence faintly lights up the ransacked aisles of this former grocery store. Faintly in the distance the ceiling stocks a different kind of meat: bodies. Human remains are draped from the ceiling by chains as an indication of what fate awaits the player if they are discovered here. Because I arrived here early in the game I had only a few resources and lacked the power to fight out of the situation, but I felt I needed what the raiders had if I was to make it out in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout 3. As I snuck about the store trying to loot what I could without confrontation, my heart rate went up over the many minutes it took to work my way through the store, and when I heard footsteps or saw a raider around the corner that I didn’t anticipate I would feel a slight moment of panic. When it was all said and done there wasn’t a single jump scare in the Super-Duper Mart, but I left that sequence of Fallout 3 with a persistent memory of fear that sticks with me to this day.

These two examples of my earliest scares in games show us that there are different kinds of fear and horror that we can respond to in different ways. Throughout this article we look at how jump scares and sudden frights compare to our everyday fears and the longform terror that certain approaches to storytelling, game mechanics, environment, and atmosphere can produce.

Sudden Frights

Sudden frights, better known as “jumpscares,” populate many horror games. When we play horror games, we know what we’re signing up for - an experience riddled with tension and anxiety and moments of shock and horror. Players excitedly opt in to having the pants scared off of them. There is a certain enjoyment derived from being scared in the way of sudden frights. From haunted houses in amusement parks to horror films, the anticipation of what frights are to come becomes part of the entertainment. To discuss what makes things go bump in the night, we’ll take a closer look at the some of the game design in Outlast[3] and Amnesia: The Dark Descent[4] and how they afford sudden frights for players. Spoilers ahead for both games.

Outlast is a first-person survival horror game. You play as journalistic investigator Miles Upshur, who goes to Mount Massive Asylum after receiving a tip that there are some shady dealings and situations happening at the institute. Equipped with a camcorder, Miles explores the asylum discovering everyone is either a) dead, b) clinically unwell, or c) clinically unwell murderers. He comes across “Father Martin,” a self-proclaimed acolyte to “the Walrider,” which is revealed to be a nanomachinic phantasm controlled by one of the patients locked away in the very depths of the institute. Similar to Outlast, Amnesia is also a first-person survival horror game, but with more sophisticated puzzle elements. The game starts with the player waking in a stone room of a castle, no recollection of who they are except that they are called Daniel. They are directed by letters written from past Daniel to kill a man called Alexander who is residing within the depths of the castle. There is a lurking threat of a “Shadow” enclosing in on the castle to kill Daniel, as well as horribly disfigured monsters that stalk each of the castle’s areas.

What is stand-out for these two games, and many other horror games like them, is the use of the unknown as a device for generating fear in players. We fear that which we do not, or cannot know. In Amnesia this takes shape in the literal lack of knowledge as a result of Daniel’s self-inflicted amnesia, and in Outlast it is the context of Miles as an investigative journalist - the player inhabits the roles of two relatively clueless protagonists traversing unfamiliar grounds. This is also reflected in the environmental design of these two games. Both the castle in Amnesia and the asylum in Outlast include maze-like corridors and shadowy corners to keep the player guessing what might be around the corner or lurking in the darkness. Haahr explored the variety of ways that horror games modify a player’s vision to contribute to feelings of fear and unease: obscuration (shadows and mist), distortion (warping the player’s vision), and mediation (viewing the world through a secondary lens - like the camera in Outlast) are found in both games[5]. Even the use of a first-person perspective in both games restricts the player’s field of view, emphasizing the feeling of catching a glimpse of something in the corner of your eye. Or, the “peeking” mechanic in Outlast, where Miles can quickly glimpse around a corner can suddenly have the player confronted by an enemy who spots him. Fear as an affect mounts in the anticipation of an attack from something we do not know[6]. With this modification of vision, tension is built over time, all with the purpose of breaking it.

* Corridors in Amnesia: The Dark Descent[7]

Compared to environmental design, audio design in these games help to offer players insight into what might be just out of sight. While the ambient sound of creaking wood and whistling wind might set the player on edge, certain sounds can signify an enemy or threat is nearby. In Amnesia, the groaning of the Monsters signal their proximity to Daniel, and in Outlast the jingling of chains, or heavier footsteps signal the bosses of certain areas hunting Miles. Though these audio cues offer instructions to the player, these enemies are still “audible but unseen”[8] - they are unknown to the player visually, adding to their frightening nature. The exposure of the enemy to the player after hearing them trail them for some time adds to the jumpscare feeling when they are finally spotted. In contrast to ambient sounds, when being chased, the audio ramps up immediately from ambient to intense music and heavy breathing as the player attempts to evade the threat. This scenario typically emerges when the player is spotted however, so while there is of course fear and panic in the sudden chase, they are somewhat emotionally prepared for the pursuit. However, when (from seemingly thin air) an enemy appears behind the player - who has been diligently surveying their shadowed surroundings and listening for audio cues - the jumpscare is a resounding success. An unpredictable appearance after having all the tools to know when and where a threat is reveals to the player just how powerless they are[9].

Powerlessness is an important element in generating sudden frights. At the opening of both games the player is instructed that they can only run, hide, or die. There is no option to fight the threats pursuing them. It is a total subversion of the typical power fantasy videogames offer. The player is not a gallant fighter equipped with magic and strength, they are just some guy trying to escape a hellish space. When an adversary suddenly appears there is no defending yourself - they are a palpable threat. Additionally, resource management, a mechanic taken from the genre defining Resident Evil, adds to this powerless player feeling. In Amnesia and Outlast the resources are related to keeping the area around brighter: tinderboxes and oil in Amnesia, and batteries for the camera in Outlast. In Amnesia, being exposed to dark areas drains your sanity until you die, whereas in Outlast the camera’s night vision allows you to see enemies more clearly. Without this night vision feature, moving through the asylum is significantly more treacherous. Players (unless they know the locations of all the resources) are typically on the precipice of not having enough resources throughout the game - this scarcity threatens their survival. Sometimes players might have to expose themselves to frights in order to reach areas with more resources, as some rooms may be in closer range to enemies paths. The toss up between gaining resources and risking being caught vs. fleeing the area entirely and guaranteeing safety is the strategic decision players must make throughout the survival horror experience.

* Nightvision with the camera in Outlast[10].

Even guaranteeing safety is trepidatious in sudden fright games. Resident Evil had safe rooms where the player could save the game. Amnesia and Outlast have no such mechanic. However, in Outlast there are certain story moments and cutscenes that show Miles progressing with the game’s objectives: find a key, get to the security room, etc. Players are led to believe in the early game that these cutscenes showing success in moving to the next step in escaping emulate the videogame “checkpoint” moment, a moment of respite from the tension, but one of the first major jumpscares happens right as Miles reaches the security console and is grabbed by Father Martin and injected with an anesthetic - putting him to sleep and trapping him deeper in the asylum. Like powerlessness, the not-so-safe-checkpoint is a subversion of expectations in how videogames typically go and contributes to sudden frights.

A final tangential note on sudden frights comes from beyond the two discussed games and looks to player deaths in games. In games like Alien[11] and Tomb Raider[12] the ways that Ripley and Lara Croft die can be attributed to sudden frights. There is a gratuitous gore that takes place in all the creative sequences in Ripley getting caught by the Xenomorph, or Lara missing a grab in a quick-time event that surprises the player, expecting initially a fall to her death or a fade to black. The variety of these death sequences means until the player has seen all the animations, they preempt their failure with bated breath to see which horrible way they’ve caused Ripley or Lara to die this time.

Sudden frights are an anticipation of fear, the enjoyment we derive from being spooked, and the pay off for well-designed gameplay experiences. We scream, laugh it off, knowing it can’t really hurt us, and continue playing, awaiting the next jumpscare on the horizon. There’s a reason horror games with sudden frights propelled many early YouTubers’ careers - frights are enjoyable, memorable, and it is fun to watch someone else get scared alongside you. Sudden frights rely on the standards and expectations of the horror game genre to do what it does successfully.

Persistent Motivating Fears

While describing the role our emotions play relative to the actions we are compelled to take while playing videogames, Nele Van De Mosselaer writes about the experiences of Charles, a fictional videogame player. Charles represents a common type of occurrence in videogames, as he confronts a slime in a horror game:

“He is shocked when a green slime monster suddenly comes creeping towards him on screen. Charles shrieks in terror and hurriedly moves the control stick on his controller to run away from the slime. After seeing that it is much faster than he is, he fears for his life, turns around and starts pounding the monster with his fists. The monster moans in pain, but manages to kill him.”[13] 

Van De Mosselaer notes Charles' motivation to take these particular actions in the game. First running and then attempting to kill the slime

“...seemed at least partly inspired by his fear for the fictional monster: it was his fear that made him hurriedly move his control stick away from the monster and start mashing his attack button when the monster came too close. Imagine a less anxious Charles who doesn’t fear the slime monster, but rather feels anger towards the creature because it already killed him three times before. It is likely that this Charles would not be similarly motivated to use his control stick to run away from the monster, but would rather move the stick towards the monster and start pressing his attack button more deliberately.”[14]

We could extrapolate from Van De Mosselaer’s example that even the slightest fears play a strong role in motivating the ways we play across various genres and game mechanics. Beyond the pure affective reaction to a fright that triggers a startle response, fear compels a great deal of our gameplay actions and our metagaming decisions in contemporary game design. In a horror game the enemy being a horrific zombie instead of an unremarkable adversary can potentially change the fight response into a flight response, but what is fear’s role when we take conventional notions of horror out of the equation?

Humans have a range of phobias (the dark, spiders, ghosts) that are played up within horror and horror-adjacent genres, but we also harbor many everyday fears (will I lose my job, will my partner leave me, I don’t want to become ill, etc) that also drive our everyday actions. Let’s think about the play pattern of some popular gacha games with limited time events like the HoYoverse games, or persistent games like Lost Ark[15] or World of Warcraft[16] that encourage you to play every day to grind for in-game currency. FOMO, or the “Fear of Missing Out” is a key driving force in these kinds of gaming models. The idea that a player may miss a limited opportunity or may fall behind other players is a legitimate fear in these kinds of games, and compels players to play compulsively. Often these games are more associated with addictive play patterns, but the fear of dropping to lower social status within the playerbase is an equally motivating drive for players to play often and take action even if it is less bombastic than Slenderman or a zombie.

It is also extremely common for character death in games to be a fail state for the player. On one hand we could say that this taps into the quite pervasive human fear of death, but players mostly know that death in a game and death in real life don’t have the same stakes. Still, dying in a game does tap into our pre-established associations with loss and the drive to avoid it. Games can turn this dial up or down by making that loss more or less permanent. In games like the Diablo or Fire Emblem series for example, players can opt to make ‘hardcore’ characters or choose ‘permadeath’ when beginning the game. This is where a single character death in game means that a character is lost forever without the ability to retry or start from a checkpoint. These kinds of playstyles are popular and add a level of tension and excitement to these games, and they do so precisely because the fear of loss and even fictional death can create new emotional stakes for every decision a player makes about their characters.

Nuclear Anxiety and Lingering Terror

In Brian Massumi’s opening chapter to The Politics of Everyday Fear, the names of high-profile accident victims like Buddy Holly and James Dean, famous disasters like Chernobyl and Bhopal, and infamous diseases like Tuberculosis and AIDS are prominently displayed throughout the chapter in large bold font.[17] The shared connection between these words is their symbolic power to evoke a range of persistent fears and anxieties from within us. Not only can they put memories of tragic and horrifying events from the past into our minds, but they also impress possible horrors of the future upon us: Future horrors that we’ve come to anticipate because of our knowledge of the past. That frightened anticipation is better known as terror, and within that terror we experience anxiety because of the possibility that those future horrors may do us harm.[18]

Returning to my first examples of Resident Evil and Fallout 3, I can better explain why the raiders of the Super-Duper Mart stuck with me compared to the shock of Resident Evil’s dog jump scare. Compared to the dogs, the persistent symbolism of what the raiders represent in the post-apocalyptic American landscape of the wasteland has been consistently evoked since that first encounter. At first this happened throughout Fallout 3, but I encountered that feeling again and again throughout the franchise, as one of the persistent themes of the Fallout series is the depths to which desperate people can go. Nestled within larger fears that the series draws upon - such as the still-looming specter of nuclear conflict and those associated fears[19] - is a much simpler and small-scale possibility that the people around us may turn to violence and that I, and those that I love, may suffer the horror that follows because pieces of our societies are becoming less and less sustainable.

David Peckham channels the work of the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, who contends that “anxiety ‘is the price we pay for our ability to imagine the future.”[20] A franchise like Fallout helps us imagine one of those possible futures, and it does so by drawing on historical and emergent fears that exist within our world. Rather than simply evoking the panic response through a jump scare like Resident Evil’s dogs, trying to stealth through the Super-Duper Mart became a walk through many layers of fear that only grew over time. Horror, terror, panic, and anxiety were bundled together in a complete package of fear. The atmosphere of the room and the hanging bodies produced horror and anticipatory terror that I would be caught with dire consequences for my character. I experienced slight panic that I would be discovered as I heard footsteps or thought I was discovered. Ultimately, and most importantly, the implications of the raiders within the world of Fallout and how it represents a horrific possibility for our own world has compelled me to carry that memory beyond the boundaries of the game itself as a lingering idea of what it is possible for us and our world to become.

Games have the possibility to immerse us in horrific situations more than any other medium, but immersion alone isn’t enough to produce meaningful and powerful horror. True horror comes not just from our reactions to sudden sounds and horrific creatures, but from the heightened state of those startling moments alongside dire implications for our world and our existence within it. If a game can use a scare to evoke this kind of looming threat - no matter how far off it may seem - that is when we become truly afraid. Sudden frights come from the unexpected, whether the source is mundane or supernatural. In contrast, persistent fear and anxiety arises from the ‘what ifs?’. In Fallout’s case, it’s the ‘what if?’ of the all-too-real breakdown of society. There’s an enjoyment and comfort you can derive from being spooked by something you know isn’t real, but what is more unsettling to consider than the perils of our own possibilities?

[1] Capcom, 1996.

[2] Bethesda Softworks, 2008.

[3] Red Barrels, 2013.

[4] Frictional Games, 2010.

[5] Mads Haahr, ‘Playing with Vision: Sight and Seeing as Narrative and Game Mechanics in Survival Horror’, in Interactive Storytelling, ed. Rebecca Rouse, Hartmut Koenitz, and Mads Haahr (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), 193–205, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_20.

[6] Sara Ahmed, ‘The Affective Politics of Fear’, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 62–81, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/concordia-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1767554.

[7] Amnesia: The Dark Descent Full HD 1080p/60fps GTX1070 Longplay Walkthrough Gameplay No Commentary, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyUf3Ctx-Ck.

[8] Rebecca Roberts, ‘Fear of the Unknown: Music and Sound Design in Psychological Horror Games’, in Music In Video Games (Routledge, 2014).

[9] Tanya Krzywinska, ‘Hands-on Horror’, Spectator 22, no. 2 (2002): 12–23.

[10] OUTLAST | Full HD 1080p/60fps Longplay Walkthrough Gameplay No Commentary, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZNfd04GO-U.

[11] Creative Assembly, 2014.

[12] Crystal Dynamics, 2013.

[13] Nele Van De Mosselaer, “How Can We be Moved to Shoot Zombies? A Paradox of Fictional Emotions and Actions in Interactive Fiction.” Journal of Literary Theory 12(2), 2018: 286.

[14] Ibid., 286-287.

[15] Smilegate, 2019.

[16] Blizzard Entertainment, 2004.

[17] Brian Massumi. “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear.” The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; 3-38.

[18] Joseph LeDoux. Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.

[19] Ryan Scheiding. “War Never Changes? Creating an American Victimology in Fallout 4.” Representing Conflicts in Games: Antagonism, Rivalry, and Competition. Edited by Björn Sjöblom, Jonas Linderoth, and Anders Frank. London: Routledge, 2023; 135-152.

[20] Joseph LeDoux, Lecture, New York State Writers Institute 2016. Cited in David Peckham, Fear: An Alternative History of the World. London: Profile Books, 2023, 7.