Freaking Out

It was 11:15 last night when I logged into Star Trek Online to set up my duty officers before hitting the sack.  “What the heck,” I thought.  “Might as well do one mission.”

And so I did, and for the first part of it, it seemed pretty routine.  Space battle followed by ground combat (and, presumably, followed by more space battle).  But when I beamed onto the Cardassian ship, I could tell it was anything but routine.  The place was *trashed* and eerie for a lack of NPCs after the first couple waves of mobs.  When I went into the sick bay, I almost jumped out of my seat as the screen turned a frosty white while “ghosts” faded in and out, seeming to kill at random.  From then on, the mission was an investigatory one, trying to find out why all of these crew members had died and why these ghosts kept appearing and changing the room like that.

Completely unexpectedly, I was finding myself freaked out by an MMO of all things, and kind of charmed that this could actually happen.  The strange thing is that it wasn’t the only time it’s happened recently, either.

A couple weeks ago I was going through my class storyline in SWTOR when the screen started doing really insane, freaky things that had me backpedaling away from the computer.  Without spoiling anything, it was apparently supposed to be showing me that something was going wrong in my character’s head, but I really didn’t know how to take all of the weird images and sights — many of which were lightning-quick, so that I couldn’t get a read on it.  The end result is that for a moment, I found myself experiencing a shade of fear.  In an MMO.

MMOs aren’t supposed to be scary, because they almost never are.  For one thing, for every one person who likes scary stuff, you’re going to have a whole bunch that will be repulsed by it, so it probably isn’t a wise business practice for a game company trying to appeal to the masses.  For another, you as a character are the Swiss Army knife of killing machines, boasting dozens of ways to slaughter those you oppose.  So if something attacks you, you aren’t going “AIEEE!  A monster!  Oh mercy me!”, you’re going “How many hit points does it have and what’s its loot table look like?”  We’ve killed so many giant spiders in games that it’s just impossible to take their presence as anything other than a crawling cliche.

So the best avenue for genuine scares that MMO studios have is to create convincing environments that play more on the “freakout” factor.  It might be a one-trick pony that loses all scare factor the second time around, or a completely random event (like a mob jumping out of a shadow while you weren’t watching).  But anything freaky’s always been my weak spot for horror films, more than jump-scares or unstoppable killers or elaborate torture sequences.  If my brain processes it as just plain *wrong*, it’s going to play on my imagination for days to come.  Maybe that’s worth it once in a while in MMOs, especially if it evokes actual emotion that isn’t typically felt in the course of playing these games.

These two brief experiences makes me wonder about The Secret World’s horror angle.  It certainly looks like it has the recipe for some good freaky setups, with zombies and ghosts and c’thulu-like creatures and Indian burial grounds and whatnot, but the proof will be in the experience.  Will it be hard to ever be scared when you’re not truly alone (thanks, chat window!) and have enough firepower to level a small mountain at your disposal?

I’m hoping that TSW does contain a genuine horror edge to it.  Ragnar Tornquist’s two Longest Journey games had a few moments that weren’t exactly scary, but certainly evoked fear and dread within me.  Some of the mob art I’ve seen is unsettling enough to know that I probably won’t want to play TSW with the lights off at night.  I’ve heard the mobs mostly come at night.

Mostly.

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• Posted in: Star Trek Online ♦ Star Wars: The Old Republic ♦ The Secret World