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Chaos Theory: The Secret World's scare factor
There's a subgenre of horror video games that sometimes falls within "survival horror," where the developers design an experience where you're limited in some fashion to make you feel more vulnerable. Alone in the Dark, Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, Amnesia -- all of these give you characters that move slowly, fight poorly, get freaked out easily, or have to cower in the shadows because they can't fight at all. This feeling of vulnerability amps up the fear because whatever is going bump in the night is much more powerful than we are. The game trains us to avoid confrontations as much as possible, which triggers a second scare technique: keeping the monsters more in your imagination than on the screen. There is nothing more terrifying than what our minds can conjure up, at least in video games, and a good dev knows this and uses it against us. Yet for all of its horror trappings, The Secret World takes a polar opposite approach. We are the super-powered, heavily-armed, nimble-footed, nigh-immortal hunters. We come, we see, and we shoot to kill. On top of that, we're almost always surrounded by other players to give us psychological and physical support. So that makes me think: Is The Secret World scary? If so, how does it accomplish this without an inherent feeling of vulnerability that's present in the other games I listed above?
