How the Character Designs in Horror Games Scare
Contributing to the Overall Story and Experience
This article was written by Burak Gürlek for the “Bilkent University, COMD 354 — Game Design and Research” course.
In any visual media involving characters and storytelling, character design is one of the most important aspects of said media. Even before the consumer begins to indulge in the story, they will be exposed to the character designs in the story. The appearance and details in a character design are the first information the consumer gathers on a conscious level and unconsciously. It describes the character through the information it conveys, sets the setting and mood, and contributes to the story and the media experience. For a character design to work, the designs must have strong intentionality so that the consumer can directly acquire the information being included. Especially in horror media such as horror-themed games or any game that aims to work with themes of discomfort or wants to unsettle the consumer, it is crucial to utilize the character designs and the contrast between the individual characters to scare, unsettle, make the experience immersive, and establish relationships.
About Horror Media and The Psychology of Fear
The way horror media and, therefore, the characters it employs work principally differs from other types of media. So, to understand the design utilized in the media, one has to grasp how horror media and fear in general operate. Fear is a protective mechanism to further the organism’s survival, whether innate or acquired. Fear allows the potentiation of one’s attention and allows us to orient ourselves toward potential dangers. Fear makes us feel unpleasant as it has to act as survival motivation. Consequently, when the threat is avoided or removed, the feeling of dread is replaced by relief, which creates a rewarding sensation as a signal of safety. The more the negative effect accumulates, the more the positive impact it will result in when the suspense causes a sense of euphoria. For fear to be felt and thus the “rewards” to be obtained, the consumer needs to feel a sense of immersion; hence, the characters need to feel plausible, not necessarily realistic, but understandable both in terms of action and presentation. This ensures that courage is felt as the existence of courage is wholly dependent on the existence of fear. Consequently, the courage to continue allows one to reach a sense of euphoria when the current conflict causing fear resolves. Furthermore, fear and excitement have an overlapping neurobiological basis, like pain and pleasure, which is likely a contributing factor to the popularity of horror as a genre. Although these media evoke a sense of fear due to the human brain’s tendency to inhibit reason to a degree when facing dangerous stimuli, we are still aware that the situation is not actually dangerous or real. This causes a conflict between our midbrain defense circuits trying to push us back vs. our higher-level executive system, which tries to fight back; thus, one can engage in horror media knowing it is not real but can still feel afraid. This conflict not only ensures a certain level of stimulation and appeals to sensation-seeking needs but also fulfills one’s curiosity, which is, of course, one of the most natural “human” sensations without putting one in danger.
Fear Factors and Their Utilization
The utilization of fear in character design relies on the basic components of fear. These can be simplified as familiarity, novelty, disgust, and pain. These all seem to converge on one factor, which is survival or potential harm. One of the most utilized tricks to induce fear in video games is the uncanny valley effect when a creature is almost exactly like a human but not human enough. Thus, it creates an unsettling effect. Realistically, humanoid robots, corpses, and zombies are great examples of this as they are basically humans but differ from us in terms of what we would expect from a human in a minor way. This effect can be applied to physical or psychological differences when designing a character or creature. One example of this can be found in the characters Yuka and Yuuta from the Mermaid Swamp, specifically their designs later in the game. When the game starts off, they are just a standard-loving couple, but as it progresses, they change. Yuka loses her ability to move, her body swells up, her skin cracks and gets moist, she mostly cannot speak nor move, she seems to be in pain constantly, and she slowly turns into a “mermaid,” but she is still herself. Essentially, Yuka is still a human. Whatever you can make up from her speech is human; she is still a character players can relate to, but on the outside, although she resembles a human, she does not look completely human, which is unsettling. Furthermore, the visual cues related to her transformation add another level of fear to her situation. She has irregular skin textures, a sickly greenish color, irregular swelling, and mucosa around her body. All these trigger responses are related to survival, and avoidance of stimuli that are tied to health issues is innate in all of us. Furthermore, it creates an association with textural stimuli acting as another trigger for fears like blennophobia (fear of slime-like substances) as clearly hard to wipe off and unpleasant textural experiences shown with visual cues. Lastly, as all horror media does, the transformation itself creates a bridge to the novel, and neither the consumer nor the characters know what is causing it or its consequences. On the other hand, Yuuta is visually clearly human and familiar, but the way he acts is confusing and, later on, directly dangerous towards the player while also being unreasonable both for him and the player. This creates a non-visual uncanny valley effect where the characters are designed to be completely human visually, yet they are not human enough due to how they act.
Another game that utilizes a similar trick in their character (or creature) design is Corpse Party. Although most human characters in the game are designed to be appealing and lovable, or even tropes to appeal to a certain audience, some characters designed to be morally gray or straight-up antagonists utilize the uncanny valley effect. They are literally all human; they appear to be quite normal high school students, yet some characters like Sakutaro Morishige, Yuuya Kizami, and Naho Saenoki act in ways that unsettle the players. The way they act is completely unreasonable in a way that differs from how a general human would act unreasonably, whether it is due to their interests, abnormalities in the way they behave, their personalities, or irregularity in their personalities. On the other hand, the creatures that are this game’s main “fear factor” are simple corpses/ghosts that minimally benefit from the uncanny valley effect but instead rely on gore. The state of the corpses and the ghosts directly tries to trigger the players’ survival instinct by not only that simply dead people do not normally move but also because they are clearly portrayed as prior victims of something bigger, reminding the player of their mortal nature and that they could be next, while also inducing fear with the triggers of exposed and dismembered body parts, blood, organs that directly relate to the end of these creatures which also prompts the players to imagine further gruesome situations that these creatures could have been in. This gore and blood aspect also directly triggers an innate response that all humans have: injury avoidance, thus instinctive horror. Furthermore, the use of such gore aspects is also effective to a degree as they not only activate a fear response but also disgust, which the literature on phobias suggests is strongly related to phobic objects.
The Protagonists and Their Relationships
Another extremely important factor for horror games is the main character’s design, the protagonist. Of course, when one looks only at the design of a protagonist of a horror game, players are likely only to gather either the context or the art style of the game, and the design of these characters may seem to not contribute to these games as a fear factor. However, these characters are not designed to be just stand-alone designs. When put into the context of the games, these characters become part of a whole and create a complete picture. Essentially, designs of each aspect of the game establish a hierarchy and meaning when put into context, including the protagonist. For instance, in the Little Nightmares series, the main characters of both games, Mono and Six, are visually portrayed as vulnerable, lovable, innocent, and cute characters who require help. Although the art style of the series does set a specific tone, the character design elements of these characters are not particularly creepy, disturbing, or fear-inducing. However, when put into the context of the game, these design choices further improve the designs of other characters that are meant to be creepy, as there is a drastic difference between not only their size but also the detail and portrayal of the protagonists and the other characters. Characters such as the Teacher, the Doctor, the Janitor, etc. They already utilize novel, unknown visual stimuli, bizarre personality traits, and behaviors to unsettle the player through their uncanniness. Furthermore, they also use color palettes and details on the characters as well as the game mechanics to trigger fear responses by signaling that one’s survival is at stake through their sickly, unnatural looks and how they are made to resemble other fear-inducing stimuli or even figures that are associated with horror media or those that represent powerful figures. The contrast between the protagonist, other characters, and the world itself amplifies the fear factor. Moreover, for horror media, including characters with whom the consumer can identify and bond is crucial. This ensures that there is a complete immersion in the experience and that the plausibility illusion is present, which consequently guarantees that the triggers put into the media translate into fear responses and, later, euphoric feelings. The more the consumer feels familiar with and empathizes with a protagonist, the more powerful the fear they experience is because this causes them to be more immersed in the experience, and thus, they are more likely to experience fear responses due to fearing that the protagonist is potentially in danger. Little Nightmares seems to effectively apply this not only through the loveable, vulnerable designs but also through societal cues and comparison with other characters, implying that Six and Mono are children not only trying to survive through the uncanny monsters they face but also fighting with hunger, starvation, and trying to navigate through the world by themselves. All these components of their character ensure the players’ sympathy and raise the game’s stakes just through the context these provide.
Conclusion
Essentially, a horror character design integrates ideas and various factors from life and the human mind. No matter what kind of character one designs for this genre, the image of the characters needs to be one that consumers can find aspects relevant to real life, which need to be detectable immediately. The horror aspect of the characters relies upon the designer’s ability to disassemble, isolate, weave, and reproduce threats and concerns into one whole through design as a part of the character. This can be done by reminding people directly of threats or using association. One thing that will not change is that, independent of what type of character is being designed, referentiality and inclusion of psychological and literal components will appear in good designs and act as context and storytelling devices.
References
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