I love horror games. I can say why I do love them. I like exploring the haunted house or town, wherever it's located, I always find it comfortable to immerse myself in the atmosphere they provide. I would say horror game is the most "personal" type of gaming. While in the scary gameplay - if it's successful as a horror game - I feel more "connected" to myself. As I play, as I feel distressed or annoyed, I confirm my existence in a weird way. I found this while playing Silent Hill 2, the most iconic horror game ever made. To think about horror games, you first need to ask yourself: Why do I feel fear? As I played a bunch of horror games in the last couple of months (I got obsessed with horror games the last summer), I’ve found that there are two types of fear. Therefore, roughly speaking, there are two types of horror games. First, you fear something because you need to save your life from it. Imagine you face a monster. There should be strong (and quick) feelings that can stop you from going further. Otherwise, you just get killed. That’s the type of fear that is implemented within your system. Some horror games use this type of fear. Think about the games like Resident Evil, or Clock Tower, where enemies' attacks are lethal and you sweat on your controller. You gotta survive the dangerous situation. You need to feel fear immediately to save your (well, the character's) life. A monster, mutated human, or crazy chain-saw guy, whatever it is, these threats trigger your so-called fight or flight response in milliseconds, and the game gets exciting if the game is made well enough to trigger your response. On the other hand, you also feel fear because you need to save your "self". You don't wanna go crazy. You always have to keep your sanity. Well, how can you say you're okay? How can you say you're not crazy? In other words, how can you say you still have CONTROL of yourself? What's controlling you? You might assume your "self" that controls or decides what you do. If that's the source of your sanity, it can be more fragile than you might think. This is what's threatened in the second type of horror game. Now let's talk about Silent Hill 2. Anyway, this is what made me write this essay. I honestly got surprised by how well this game is designed on giving you a certain kind of fear. Once you play SH2, you’ll notice that it's devastatingly lonely and constantly distressing. SH2 is basically a quiet game. There are no jumpscares. But this game gradually exhausts you. It drains your beliefs on your "self", the source of your sanity. It does exhaust you. Like your own life does to you. SH2 knows how to convey the story via the gameplay itself. And this story is the most devastating one. The player is going to explore the foggy ghost town from the early stage of the game, where you'll eventually find lots of disgusting creatures. Actually, they're not threatening that much. They are easy to beat or evade. There's no point in fearing them. Then what's fearful? It's this overall atmosphere and redundant gameplay. In Silent Hill, you can hardly see the thing from a distance (because of the fog and darkness), which means you can't always know what's gonna appear in a few seconds. You're forced to be cautious every second while you're playing. And it constantly stresses you out. It's like...feeling slightly blamed all the time. Or maybe it's yourself that's blaming you. You'll eventually notice that this is how James (the protagonist) is feeling in this foggy town, looking for his lost (and dead) wife. If you think about it, it's not reasonable to wander around in this haunted ghost town. There must be a really strong motivation in him. Besides, the wife he's looking for is (supposed to be) dead. In the first few hours of gameplay, I noticed this and found the storytelling very personal. Why is he so desperate? Hey, get out of this creepy town and find your next life. Or is he already crazy? No, he’s not. He’s just trying not to be crazy. To him, it doesn’t matter even if he finds those creepy monsters and fresh corpses, because there are much more devastating things in him. If you don't wanna get eaten by "monsters" in your psyche, you need to go further even in the dangerous ghost town. The gameplay feels quite lonely. I assume 93 % of the gameplay is filled with the lonely wandering of the town. But still, there always is a strong feeling of a story. Because you always control it. Via every command you send through the controller, James walks, runs, kills, and sometimes gets killed. At the same time, you're developing the idea that YOU are the controller of the story. Gradually, you'll find yourself in the story. Because now you’re sharing the constant distress with this protagonist. Now it's exactly you that's feeling, acting, and looking for the truth. Once you find yourself as a controller of the story, now you are the story. Because you have to assume yourself as the controller of the game. There's you. You can think, decide, and act. That's the beginning of every sort of story. And as the story goes on, it can go wrong. Because you can decide and act, which means you can make...mistakes. It's fine to make mistakes, but what's devastating is that you might end up blaming yourself. And it can seriously damage your sanity. If you’re gonna live with this kind of "original sins", then every kind of horror thing is no longer a matter. You can at least try to evade monsters or ghosts. But you can never escape from yourself. The real threat is living inside you. Not outside. Not those creepy monsters. Not those harmful people. It's your "self", your self-image as an individual, the entity as a controller of your life. Ironically, the more you try to control your life, the more likely you feel guilty. And I do think this is the darkest side of individualism. If I were to give individualism a definition, that's to believe in your own story. That's to give yourself the absolute power to make decisions. That’s the very implicit story of SH2. Again, the gameplay is so lonely that it almost feels redundant. There are really few interactions with other characters (I mean, human beings, you can flirt with those monsters all the time). When James meets someone in the cutscene, the conversation usually goes awkward. But it’s not the point. Because this story doesn’t involve other people. It’s the story about yourself alone. To make up a story, you just need to give characters the ability. If you take a look at the holy bible, you’ll notice the decision (taking an apple) initiated the entire story. People began from the decision. And people suffer because of their sins, as punishment by God. Today, we suffer from our own punishments. We once believed in God, then threw it away, then we started believing in ourselves, our own stories. The result is endless suffering for your existence. It might sound like only applies to Western society, where Christianity is under the hood of every kind of story, but I think it's more universal. Let me talk about an Asian country I'm in, where I've grown up. Japan. It's also the country that gave birth to Silent Hill. I think they also lost a certain kind of story at some point, about 30 years ago. In Japan, they’ve seen massive economic growth in the 50s-80s, which made this country one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They shared a common story. Work hard, and you'll get successful, get wealthy, have a family, and thus get happy. They don't say it anymore. At the end of the 80s, the growth they were expecting had seen an end. There was no such growth anymore. They got stuck in the story without any hopeful direction. It is said that Japan has lost these 30 years (in the economic context). I do think what’s really lost was the beliefs in the story they once had. Japanese people had been adopting Western scenarios since the end of the Edo era (-1867), expecting growth to be the hope. At the end of the 1980s, they finally lost faith in it. The appearance of Sekai-Kei (セカイ系) in Japanese subculture around 2000 is linked with the beginning of “lost 30 years”. Those works’ stories are basically centered around the character’s inner psyche, which is deluded as if it's affecting the entire world's fate. It’s actually not the story that involves the world (even if 世界 Sekai means world), it’s the story about yourself. However the situation is, you can hardly change the story you’ve been believing in. Japanese people had lost their faith in their stories. The story's plot is this: You take action. You take responsibility. You get the result. But they saw the final part stopped working. What's to be blamed? It's you. You can never escape from this story, because you are the story, so if it gets wrong, you're wrong. And if you're not going anywhere in your life - even if you tried - you're committing sins because you're supposed to decide, act, and thus take responsibility in this story. And sins are followed by punishments. Silent Hill 2 is a story about sins and punishments that occurs within your psyche. And this hell is something you can experience throughout the gameplay. And when I was playing it, I could not ignore that somewhere in my mind, there was a portion of my psyche that believes the story of "I". When I feel fear, I see myself trying to save it. Why, if I'm not an individual person, then what's the point in fearing things? I would say the catharsis in playing horror games is to overcome fear. There, you find that there's not much of "you" that must be saved. Maybe you feel physically dangerous, but "you" are not actually in danger. Once you can forget about yourself, you no longer have to feel fear. Overcoming fear means overcoming your story. You need to face your story. You need to face your horror. And horror games are the most intense field where you can find yourself immersed in the story. The atmosphere, soundscape, and gameplay. They always care about these aspects, rather than how smooth it is to play. In Buddhism, there's no suffering in the state called Nirvana. Because you're not obsessed with anything. That includes yourself. You don't care about yourself anymore. In Nirvana, horror games wouldn't make sense. But I like horror games. Because I still believe in my own story. By throwing myself into fear, I might be trying to examine how "I" am built up. The true objective of horror games is to forgive. Forgive your sins, and forget about the excessive story about yourself. Maybe "I" don't necessarily have to survive.