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A Moment of Silence

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There Will Be Games
silenthill.jpgFor reasons I can no longer remember, I became fascinated by the world of Silent Hill long before I'd ever actually played one of the games. There's something terribly compelling and haunting about it: a father motivated by love for a lost little girl against a mother who'd condemn her daughter to a living hell in the name of a sinister religious cult. Compelling enough to have released six games in the series so far, with another in development, and a spin-off film franchise as well.

But all that stuff is pretty much par for the course when it comes to successful video games nowadays. What's interesting about Silent Hill is what else has come out of the franchise, revealing that I'm not the only one whose imagination has been captured by the setting: multi-media DVD presentations, music soundtracks, comic books, even novels. It gets more extreme - the team behind the game took the unusual step of releasing their thoughts behind the plot, artwork and psychological twists in the games in the form of a book, Lost Memories. Perhaps most bizarrely of all I discovered that one fan had actually written a detailed essay on the metaphysics of the setting and the religion that underpins the series. It's very long and I've only skimmed through it, but it certainly seems to be much better-written, more intelligent and in-depth than these sorts of fanboy-blabberings tend to manage.

I'm not sure I can pinpoint what it is about the setting and the games that causes someone to want to sit down and write a 130,000 word essay on an entirely fictional series of video games, or indeed someone like me to want to read parts of it.  But aside from the appeal of the setting, it's relatively easy to spot what it is about the games themselves that makes them so successful. Every other survival horror game ever written anywhere has relied almost entirely on shocks to generate atmosphere: shocks of both the graphic variety and the "leaping out of dark corners" variety. Silent Hill does that as well, of course, but it does something very different. It plays with your perceptions in a way that previously only the very best horror stories and films had managed to do. The next paragraph discusses this in detail for Silent Hill 2, and contains plot spoilers you may wish to avoid if you ever plan on playing the game.

The apex of this approach can be found in the second game where the player gradually discovers during the course of the game that the seemingly normal character he controls is in fact guilty of a terrible crime of which he has repressed the memory, and the haunting of the town is mirroring aspects of his guilt and fear in a very personal manner. He can only escape the town by facing up to his actions and, in the end, by casting aside without sympathy others who have been drawn to Silent Hill at the same time for the same reason. The motivation behind his crime is readily understandable: the player is, in other words, forced into the role of a fundamentally flawed, slightly unlikeable and yet fundamentally very human protagonist. As you might imagine, that's not a very nice role to find yourself cast in, all the more so because of his readily understandable motivation: you are at once repelled and sympathetic and made uncomfortable by the realisation that in the same situation, you might do the same thing.

I bring this up for a good reason, and this is where the column starts talking about board games. You see, and many others, have long lamented the fundamental problem with horror board games which is that they're just not scary. To make a good boardgame the players require some sort of control over their fate, and in the process of exercising that control any potential scary aspects of the game are diminished. The game can pull very little in the way of surprises or tricks or shock value on the people playing it. Fundamentally you're just too divorced from the setting in a board game for these sorts of tactics to work.

The best solution I'd imagined to this problem in the past was something which has shades of the original GW edition of The Fury of Dracula. Put a group of players on the same side as a co-operative of puny humans and face them off against another player in control of a hideously powerful monster, whom they can only defeat by co-operating. I thought that approach might bring out an element of Lovecraft style horror in which the human players got to feel just how small and feeble they were in the face of an impenetrable and uncaring cosmos. But then, of course, one of them gets a turn at being the monster and the illusion is shattered. It might make an interesting game, and it might have a teeny-tiny element of psychological horror, but it wouldn't really solve the basic problem.

Spending all that time thinking about Silent Hill I almost inevitably was eventually drawn to thinking about how well the setting might translate into a board game. At first I thought not very well. Then I had some interesting but ultimately unworkable ideas around the idea of each player having a deck of cards each of which they could choose to either stymie an opponent or advance their own position, with the worry being that if they spent too many cards against their enemies they might not have enough left to get themselves into a winning position. I liked the psychological angle of a player being forced into playing nasty cards on their opponents but at the same time reducing their own chances of winning. And this, in turn, lead me back to considering that old chestnut of how to inject some actual horror into horror games. 

You see, I think that amongst the mysteries of Silent Hill there is an answer to this question. The answer is to do what the game did to differentiate itself from its peers: take the angle of psychological horror. That's still a tall order to achieve given the fundamental disconnect that exists between the players and their avatars down on the board, but unlike the shock value approach, or the powerlessness approach, there seems no basic reason that I can see why it shouldn't work to some extent if implemented well.

And so my current model for a potential Silent Hill game runs on these lines. Imagine a co-operative game where the players are struggling to escape the horrors of a haunted town. Each player has a deck of cards which represents the manifestations of their psyche as projected by the malevolent influence of the town in the form of monsters, weird strangers, and terrible events. But in order to progress toward salvation each player has to rid himself of his guilt by playing these cards - mechanically speaking, laying down a card would have a bad effect but would be a pre-requisite for the player achieving something in the game, possibly even something as fundamental as moving his player piece or performing an action. So, each turn, the player faces a dilemma - he has to pick one of his fellow players to hit with the bad effect, but all the players need to co-operate to win. Players hit by too many negative effects will die and either be out of the game (and no longer contributing to the win) or become vengeful shades who can no longer win themselves but can try and stop all the others from winning. Who does the player choose for his bad effect? Why? What repercussions does that set up for later interaction? Perhaps most importantly, how will a player feel about the necessity of endangering a comrade in order to advance his own chances of winning?

It's a very rough sketch for a game idea. But it seems to me to contain the germs of a way in which to involve the players in the game in a manner guaranteed to make them uncomfortable. If it worked well, that aspect might actually work against the game as gamers might prefer to play something obviously "fun" than something which is vaguely creepy. Perhaps that, in fact, is the fundamental stumbling block here. But even if they only played it once, I don't imagine it would be an experience many of the players would forget in a hurry.

There Will Be Games
Matt Thrower (He/Him)
Head Writer

Matt has been writing about tabletop games professional since 2012, blogging since 2006 and playing them since he could talk.

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