Sunday Thoughts: Isolation

Isolation, in the real world, isn’t always all that scary. That’s not to say it can’t be, walking alone down a dark alley is often terrifying; but to me being isolated is far more depressing than it is terrifying. That feeling of utter despair, being completely alone in the world, is one that many of us are obviously familiar with, and one that can be completely overwhelming. For me it’s a feeling that few games ever capture, perhaps because, even with the best suspension of disbelief in the world, we know that we’re not really alone, not really as isolated as the game wants us to believe we are.

This is why, for me, games like Resident Evil or Dead Space can only give you the feeling of fear that comes from being alone, the feeling of being prey and having predators surround you. It’s a feeling that any good survival horror will manage to capitalise on, and one of the most primal feelings possible. Whilst there are still dangers in the world, they’re rarely in a predator/prey relationship unless someone’s mugging you. No, these feelings date back to lions attempting to eat us, and come from the deep bit of your brain that says “Hey! You don’t want to be eaten! Run for it!”

[drop]Pretty much all mediums have some work that ties back into this deep fear, in the same way that others hook into the sexual centres of our brain. That’s not a bad thing, and just because a movie or game is connecting to us at such a base level doesn’t mean it’s any less worthy of praise. In fact if it’s not done in a cheap or lazy way, jump scares for example, then connecting with us on such a deep and powerful level can be worthy of praise.

We all know that feeling when it does, when your heart starts racing and won’t stop, when you can’t turn the lights off and every little sound in your house sets you off. Those rare moments when a game manages to defy our perceptions of reality, drill all the way down and make us feel completely terrified and alone. For me some of those moments came from a series you probably wouldn’t be expecting me to mention; Halo.

Well ok, those of you who’ve read pretty much anything I’ve written before might have been expecting me to mention Halo, it has a tendency to come up. However, there’s a good reason here. I will admit that I had very little love for Halo 3: ODST. It didn’t really feel like a Halo game, mostly because you weren’t playing as a superhuman Spartan-II.

Whilst that might have stopped it from feeling like a typical Halo game, it did make you feel incredibly fragile. Bungie pushed this further by having you utterly alone for huge chunks of the game. When this happened with Master Chief it was of little concern, you knew you could easily survive almost anything the game could throw at you; when you’re playing as the Rookie (seriously, that’s his name) in ODST almost anything you saw could kill you in a few moments. The feeling of being alone and overwhelmed was almost tangible and one of the few things I actually enjoyed about the game. Even then it made me scared, but not depressed. There was no feeling of despair.

Perhaps it’s a good thing this isn’t in games, do we want to play things that make us feel like that? When entertainment frequently consists of escapism we don’t necessarily want to fall into a world where we feel like the ground is swallowing us.

On the other hand if gaming is to evolve into a more mature medium maybe we need games that make us feel like that.