Here's an idea.
Our fascination with the macabre reaches
far beyond just horror films.
If you live in the United States and you've been to a Walmart
recently, you've probably noticed
that Christmas decorations are up
on the shelves which can only mean one thing-- Halloween
is almost here.
That time of year where it is culturally acceptable to binge
on orange candy, decorative gourds, and terrifying movies.
There's been lots of talk by lots of very smart people,
including Michael from VSauce in not one but two awesome videos
about why certain people enjoy scary and creepy things
like horror films.
Do you wanna play a game?
This question is endlessly fascinating
because, as philosopher Noel Carrol points out,
it is a paradox.
The paradox amounts, he writes, to the question
of how people can be attracted by what is repulsive.
The long and short of it is a long not short list
implicating everything from biology to philosophy
to psychology.
Adrenaline, dopamine, catharsis, genre satisfaction,
schadenfreude, power fantasies, feelings
of omniscience or superiority over characters facing danger.
I'll put a list for sources that talk
about this stuff in the doobly doo.
What we're going to do is take most of it as given.
And instead of talking about why people are attracted
by the repulsive, we're going to talk about one example of what
happens when that is the case.
First, and most obviously, when lots of people
enjoy the same thing, they will do it together.
Huh duh doy.
Yeah.
Duh doy.
Less duh doy though is the encouragement
to share the experience of scary things especially.
I mean, sure you always want to go
to the movies with your friends, but I think even more so
when it comes to horror genres.
Horror demonizes, sometimes literally,
isolation and in so doing destroys it.
The worst thing you can do in the starting premise
of so many examples of the horror genre
is the solo-tude of some character.
You think you're alone?
Well, guess what?
No you are not.
And so we watch with friends.
And maybe you're a tough customer
who is perfectly fine watching "The Descent" alone,
but you know who's not?
Lots of people, OK?
Let's not make a big deal of it.
Implicit in the construction of so many horror films
and explicit in much of their advertising
is the expectation that the audience is not
a viewer but rather the viewers.
With horror movies, especially in comparison
to horror genres in other mediums,
there is safety in numbers.
Both in its viewing and the story,
we are encouraged to stick together.
And so its consumption becomes significantly social.
Now, I know what you're thinking and I completely agree.
The consumption of all kinds of images, horrific or otherwise,
is significantly social, but horrific ones more
and distinctly so, I think.
Capital H Horror, not just of the genre of media,
but the experience of Horror itself, is very social.
It is as a social group that we develop, identify,
and grimace at the set of things which comprise the Horrific.
French philosopher George Bataille
wrote about the horror of war and that
quote "organized transgression together with the taboo
make social life what it is."
When the experience of horrific things through horror films
becomes common, all kinds of social dynamics
are illustrated.
Horror is constructed almost entirely out of our inability
to know some aspect of something for certain-- a who, a where,
a why, a when.
Watching horror films in a group gives us something to know,
some stable and knowable thing.
Watching horror films together is less about protection
I think-- because what is there to be protected from-- and more
about having an anchor to something that is certain.
And if you don't scare easily then
horror movies become a way for you
to experience or support this effect in others.
There is, in other words, a fascination
with having uncertain, distressing feelings
or experiencing them in others.
There is a fascination with media
that can cause those uncertain, distressing feelings.
Bataille wrote of horror that it is not synonymous with
fascination but rather quote, "if horror cannot suppress
or destroy the element of fascination,
it will reinforce it."
In other words, whatever doesn't repulse
us completely draws us in.
We see this relationship between horrific images,
the ideas they represent, and our fascination with them
in another very important and, I think,
telling place-- the cable news.
I'm not saying that horror movies
are responsible for the editorial edict "if it bleeds,
it leads," which is the strategy of airing
more violent or salacious stories because they are always
a ratings win.
I am neither saying that horror movies have generally taken
some cues from the cable news.
What I mean is that for whatever reason audiences are fascinated
by horror when that fascination is widely held, compelling,
and a social, it only makes sense
that horrific images and practices
will begin to find their way to places other than just horror
films.
One of the most visible of those places
is the 24-hour news cycle, or perhaps more
appropriately, the 24-horror news cycle.
I'm here every Wednesday.
Don't forget to subscribe and tip your server.
It's not that bad stuff doesn't happen
or the news should never be allowed to show bad things
and so CNN, FOX, HLN, and the rest
of the cadre of spectacle-slinging story
mongers are lying or need to be stopped.
But it's pretty clear, especially
in the wake of Malaysian Airlines flight 370
and now the Ebola outbreak in West Africa,
that the competitors in the gladiator battle that
is the 24-hour news cycle understand
that horrific fascination gathers and maintains attention
and is therefore profitable.
Except there is a huge difference between the horror
genre of entertainment and the horror proper
that cable news has tasked itself with reporting on.
If the horror genre is the tip of the iceberg,
then horror proper is the rest of it--
the 90% that's underwater, hinted at by the existence
of the former.
Horror proper is the real deal, the real threat,
and what cable news aims to show,
but it's mostly packaged paradoxically
like the horror genre to make it palatable, understandable,
convenient, and entertaining.
All of the same moving parts seem
to be present in both cable news and horror films-- fascination
which if not suppressed or destroyed
grows stronger, elements of no ability and authority.
But most importantly, they are both social.
The audience for cable news is never a viewer, but rather
the viewers.
We even popularly understand cable news networks
to organize themselves around literal party lines.
And so the cable news audience, like the horror movie audience
and the horror movie character, is never alone.
There might be some element of stability, some knowable thing,
but there is also always something to be afraid of.
REPORTER: They've likely [INAUDIBLE] preparations
to launch.
What do you guys think?
Is there some stylistic or tonal similarity
between the horror genre and cable news?
Let us know in the comments.
And what are the worst five things
that could happen if you don't subscribe to Idea Channel?
Tune in at 11 to find out.
[CABLE NEWS CLOSING MUSIC]
Do the mechanics ever get in the way of the Idea Channel story?
Let's see what you guys had to say about game mechanics.
Josh Closs talks about a couple games
that successfully use mechanics to reinforce the story.
He mentions "Gone Home" and "Braid."
And, yeah, there are a bunch of these.
I would also say like "Papers, Please" and "The Walking Dead"
game, and a bunch of others.
But Josh also talks about how one issue
with trying to use the mechanics to reinforce story
is that in many big budget games,
the main way to interact with the story
is by firing a weapon of some kind.
And so there are only so many stories that fit with that.
And I don't know that I've mentioned it on Idea Channel
before, but Campster made this really great video
about the mechanic of shooting in big budget, AAA games
and why it is so prevalent, why it is so popular.
And it's just-- it's such a good video.
I can't recommend it highly enough.
I'll put a link to that in the doobly doo.
You should definitely watch it.
Kansoku from the Idea Channel subreddit
talks about how interactivity is the central feature of games
and so not privileging that over other elements
is thinking about games in the wrong way.
And talks about how games that have
great mechanics but terrible story
are still great games, whereas the reverse is not true.
And I can-- I'm picking up what you're putting down.
I'm not ready to say that this is like law,
but I can absolutely see this point of view.
I think the thing I'm trying to say
is that if the mechanics of a game are great,
and the story of a game is great,
and those two things only ever work to reinforce each other,
isn't that always good?
Why not aim for it?
I think that's what-- I think that's the meat
of the question.
Elrognol, Ophidimancer, and a couple other people
extended this conversation to include tabletop role playing
games.
Ophidimancer put it in really awesome terms,
calling it fluff versus crunch, where
crunch is the mechanics that are supported by the game system
and fluff is the story.
And Elrognol sort of talks about how, you know,
does the fluff always have to be supported by the crunch?
And this is a thing that I think about all the time coz
I'm currently leading a Shadow Run game,
and I really feel like there is a tension between the two.
And I want my players to feel like they're
able to act impulsively and freely in the world.
That they have agency, but that they're also playing
a game that has rules.
And, yeah, I just-- this tension is so interesting, especially
when you have to work it out in real time with human beings.
That there isn't-- there isn't a literally codified system that
you are interacting with.
So, yeah, these were great comments.
Onlyplastik writes a really interesting comment
about urgency and mechanics supporting or working
against the sense of urgency that a lot of games
try to create.
They talk about "Lightning Returns"
as one side of the spectrum where the mechanics
are actually set inside of a system
where the world is decaying and so you
have a finite amount of time where you are
able to take certain actions.
And then on the other side of the spectrum
is "Skyrim," which, yeah, I mean has-- it
has a certain aspects of urgency to it.
There are things that you have to accomplish with,
you know-- soon.
But you can-- as onlyplastik says--
you could just go and pick flowers all day if you want.
That the mechanics don't reinforce that urgency at all.
And, yeah, that's-- I actually didn't think about
the time-related aspect of mechanics.
And, yeah, this is a really great comment.
Dango Unchained asks how this idea applies
to games with minimal gameplay.
And AiSard actually responds in a way that I would,
which is that minimal gameplay doesn't necessarily
mean inconsequential or bad gameplay.
And to stick with Dango Unchained's example
of "Heavy Rain," I felt that "Heavy Rain"
was a really great combination of mechanic reinforcing story
because as a player you have to take with your controller
actions that are very clearly mirrored on the screen.
So I think that, you know, even though there's
not-- you're not taking many, many actions per minute,
the actions that you are taking are very meaningful.
So, yeah I think it stands.
MidnightSt talks about how the tension between mechanic
and story is not a problem of the player,
but a problem of the way we tend to design games
in that trying to convey practical narrative story
information through scripted elements in a game
is just actually the wrong approach.
And that, you know, we've kind of maybe
been seduced by what MidnightSt calls the "cinematic game
craze" to think that games are for telling stories when
in fact they are not, at least not in the way
that other mediums are for.
And that all of those things need
to be told-- all of those story elements
need to come from the way the game is played,
and provides "Antechamber" as an example of this game which
I-- yes, I very much like.
This is a great comment.
Links to this one and all the others in the doobly doo.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these fear mongers.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
Links in the doobly doo.
And the Tweet of the week comes from Taylor Flynn,
who tweeted a picture of her class watching
our recent fallacies video which always blows my mind.
If you guys are watching Idea Channel in class,
would it be too much to ask if you'd let me know about it?
I also want to know like what class they're in
and, like, what-- if there's a thing that the videos are
in support of, coz I'm so curious and a little terrified.