In 2009, a competition on the somethingawful.com forums challenged users to create paranormal images. Victor Surge, using little more than creativity and Photoshop, authored the photo above (click here for full image).
Other users, taking note of the strange figure’s elongated limbs and exaggerated features, named it “The Slender Man.” Within weeks, Slender Man became a viral sensation. As memes are specially equipped for mutation and adaptation, other web users offered their own versions of Slender Man in photographs, short fiction, and videos. Some, like the Marble Hornets YouTube series, garnered widespread attention and soon became the go-to source for Slenderlore.
Many fans were introduced to Slender Man through the hugely popular video game Slender: The Eight Pages. Developed by Blue Isle Studios in 2012, The Eight Pages is a free, downloadable title that improves upon its simple predecessor, Slender.
The game included many conventions of the survival horror genre: limited resources, investigative features, and an ongoing sense of dread. From a first-person perspective, players were challenged to locate eight pages hidden in a darkened forest. Slender Man’s pursuit of the players becomes more pronounced and erratic as each page is recovered.
An impressive audio system of ambient sounds adds to an engaging aesthetic of fear. In a game market that has become burdened by developers who needlessly try to meld action and horror into convoluted, run-and-gun campaigns, The Eight Pages brings a measure of innovation, even with its “less is more” design.
Slender: The Eight Pages also moves horror games in another positive direction. The pages the player is tasked with finding change locations with each play-through. Though there are limits to how many different spots each one will be hidden in, there is a certain level of fresh suspense to each game session. Of course, the faceless, teleporting, otherworldly entity on the player’s tail adds to that feeling. Overall, these variables border on something I have long waited to see in the horror game sub-genre, and that is an “adaptive” horror experience.
To further explain, we might look at a similar concept. Adaptive difficulty has been around for well over a decade. It describes a process of an artificial intelligence’s internal, real-time reaction to external activity. As early as the mid-2000s, video games were given the capability to “react” to a player’s actions, dialing back the difficulty of certain in-game scenarios and increasing it for others in an effort to create a more varied gameplay experience.
However, most gamers can tell you that several play-throughs of certain games ultimately enables them to decode these internal patterns and reverse the efforts of the AI. While certain sequences may still give players a hard time, their conditioning to a game’s parameters will almost always allow them to advance without struggle.
Adaptive difficulty is featured more in multiplayer modes that do not include many scripted, narrative events (as a story campaign often does). A good example is Valve’s 2008 zombie shooter Left 4 Dead. Though a single-player campaign is possible, this game was clearly intended to be a cooperative effort where up to four players can team up to lay waste to an overwhelming number of zombies and “Special Infected,” like the bloated, bullet-sponges called Boomers.
There is no set pattern to the enemies’ attacks, and there are many moments when players will find themselves completely surrounded. The game adapts to encourage or impede players’ rates of success.
I’d be interested to see developers create a game that included an adaptive brand of horror rather than difficulty. Many of the frightening moments in franchises like Dead Space and Resident Evil follow a script. Once they happen, players know to expect them.
What if such a game existed in which each scare and spine-tingling moment occurred randomly? What if we couldn’t predict each window-shattering attack? What if game environments were so fluid that literally every inch of physical space was open to enemy attacks? Imagine every play-through of a game including a potential threat around every corner.
Slender: The Eight Pages and its sequel, Slender: The Arrival, are steps in the right direction. Outlast, recently ported to PlayStation 4, remains a fresh entry in the genre but still fails to re-create its initial play-through’s scares. Since 2012, there have been rumors of a game called Sound of Silence, an offering that will read players’ choices to create a setting catered to their specific fears. The extent of the game’s ability to do so has only been shown in brief previews, and no demo yet exists. Reports suggest we could see a release sometime this year.
As media in the business of haunting becomes more formulaic, weighed down by clichés, remakes, and “re-imaginings” (a rallying term used by the unoriginal), what we need is an art form with a clear sense of what we fear. As the next generation of game consoles gets off its feet, we are seeing technology capable of renewing the horror genre.
The newness of adaptive difficulty has faded. Let’s turn creativity toward readapting the entire gameplay experience, especially in horror games. After all, regardless of how we dress it up or the level of gore we cake it in, we have and always will fear that one thing: the unknown.