Violence
It is dark outside and a pair of headphones wrap around my head. I can’t hear my family, but I can see them standing next to me. On screen, I watch as my gloved fingers sink into the top of a demon’s skull and split it in half like an apple. My brother laughs, my mother gasps. I had gotten him DOOM for Christmas, and he insisted that I try it out on his new TV. My dad used to play the original with us when we were kids until our mom made him stop after one of us got too enthusiastic about the usage of a chainsaw.
Living Life Down the Barrel of a Gun
For all of the broad range of experiences that games can offer to us, the actual ways in which we are allowed to interact with them is rather limited. Most game screens look remarkably similar from a UI point of view. There is some sort of health bar, possibly a map or objective indicator in one corner, maybe a crosshair in the center of the screen, but invariably, the bottom right corner of the screen is almost always taken up by a gun. There are a few games that don’t follow this, but in the mainstream, first-person games that don’t shove a gun into your hands are the vast minority. And if your hands are filled with a gun, they have a knife, or a sword, or a bow, your weapon is offscreen, waiting to be pulled up with a single button press, aching to strike out at someone.
Atmosphere
When we discuss games, especially those within the horror genre, this idea of “atmosphere” comes up again and again. I reference it rather frequently in my own writing, but one thing that we commonly neglect to do is actually say what we mean when we use it.
As it is right now, it exists as one of those, oft-used game review buzzwords, sitting alongside other repeat offenders: “visceral”, “moody”, “tight”, and countless others. We use it because it is easy, a simple way to get across a complex idea about the situations a game puts a player in, and the wide array of emotions that it evokes within you, and it would greatly benefit us all if we took the time to examine this sense to see what we really mean when we talk about atmosphere in a game.