I Love Monsters Part n of n +1

Okay, the lead in to this one is bound to be a teal deer, but I'll see what I can do to keep it brief.

Creepers are scarier than Pyramid Head.

Okay, that takes a little explanation.  Mostly about Pyramid Head, becuase if the only time you ever saw him was in Silent Hill 2, where he was, after you thought about it for a little while, the manifest id of the protagonist which you were controlling, then the big guy would be equal to the Creeper in every way, and superior in some.  Taken outside that context, he is a big dude with a big sword and a funny hat.  Creepers exist to hide around corners and the moment you are not paying attention, to hiss and then wreck all your shit.  That's the only context in which they exist.  You could argue that they are also the manifestation of the Minecraft player's id, the little child inside us all that would still build a tower of blocks for the pleasure of knocking that fucker down, but I don't think a) that's what anyone thought about the Creeper at Mojang until after the fact, and b) unlike with P-Head, that realization is not necessary to make Creepers scary.  They are stealthy.  They are implacable.  They are a physical threat to you in a way that precludes revenge, and they can seriously derail your careful plans and arduous progress.  Pyramid head just puts his sword into you when he's not trying to TRIGGER WARNING TRIGGER WARNING TRIGGER WARNING.  Actually, that is a bit fucked up, but in later games and the film, he mostly just chases you (or the protagonist) around.   Still, P-Head is an effective monster in an interactive environment. 

This is where we're going to go long, but there is something here.  Creepers scare me more than P-Head because I can tell you about MY BAD EXPERIENCES with Creepers, while I'm more likely to think about James Sunderland's bad experiences with P-Head (or the film character's).  Pyramid Head has never done anything bad to Erik, but those fucking Creepers...

Still, I can see where, in a narrative, Creepers are not that effective.  In a non-interactive story, they are sneaky critters that blow up.  They would be challenging to use in a story and even more challenging to make effectively scary in a story.  Telling someone who has never had their glass tower shattered and carefully transported lava strewn all over the tracks of their roller-coaster is not going to find what is, by most counts a four-legged, scowling shrub more frightening than a hulking, sword wielding, rapist projection of someone's psyche.  A monster in a narrative is as effective as its place in the narrative, how it relates to protagonist, to story, to theme.  In an interactive environment, you may have variable influence over story (and I find that the less you have the better), a variable degree of influence over theme (but this is almost always hard-coded into the rules that define the interactive space, so it's usually either build it, hack it  or have none), and you have almost no influence over the protagonists.  This makes creating effective, emotionally effective, satisfying monsters a very different art.

And again, I am going to argue that interactivity is not simply for game designing dorks like myself, and I am going to do it by asking you what house did the sorting hat put your eleven-year-old wizard alter ego into?  Interactivity makes Potter.  Putting interactive elements into narrative was Jo Rowling's genius, and those who can, those who will, and those who pull it off, I think these are going to be the people who save our shit when it comes to reading, to literature as a whole and our genre in particular (not that everyone should try, has to try, but I think it's both interesting and potentially important, and I would like to give it a go).  This is not to say I have the first clue about how to make creepers truly effective monsters in a narrative setting, beyond, I suppose the writer's skill.

And that's another Teal Deer in the herd - skill level.  With a narrative, you're concerned with the audience's skill level, but not all that much.  If they can read the words, they can probably get something out of it, and if they hit it too soon or in the wrong frame, they can come back, and they will if you were skilled enough in making it in the first place.  It's your skill that is on the line here.

With an interactive thing, you are teaching your readers how to read and, worse, you are teaching an intermediary (or everyone, if like benlehman , you want ALL THE INTERMEDIARIES) to read and compose narratives in an interactive setting all at the same time.  You are VERY CONCERNED with the skill level of every motherfucker who so much as glances at your work.

So, the point, the thesis statement, my goal in making my monsters, which, actually should be a goal in narrative as well as interactive is this:

I WANT TO MAKE MONSTERS THAT THE AUDIENCE, PLAYER OR READER, DREADS INTERACTING WITH, BUT DARES THEMSELVES TO INTERACT WITH IT ANYWAY.
Actually, with a narrative, I want everything to be like that.  There are people who design interactive things with everything to be like that, but audience-skill and technical hurdles are high and plentiful, and I am lazy and lack a lot of technical skill.  But I think I have enough brain to prove this idea out, one way or another.  Well, okay, I can write quite well, I can paint a little and I have a fair grasp on tabletop rpg mechanics.  I can't code video games, so this is all going to be on paper and in brain meats.  Still.

Going back to the purely interactive for a moment, because sewing interactivity into a narrative without showing seams is going to require a lot more planning and a lot of skill to pull off, and bringing this back to monsters because they are a good handle on the larger idea and I LOVE MONSTERS, let's try to figure out what is effective and what is not.

I warned you this one was going to go long.

Right, so let's talk about Survival-Horror games for a moment.  For narratives, I do try to toe Aunt Beast's line that genre conventions and discussions can just fuck right off.  But with interactive media, there's a greater justification for their existence.  Or, at least, I think there is, because I interact with narrative more as art and interactive more as experience.  Art provokes an experience, and that experience, I think, should be idiosyncratic, whereas even the most avant-garde sort of interactive experience is going to be reined in somewhat by the method by which you interact.  No, that's kind of a weak argument.  I will look for a stronger one as I seek to justify my feelings.  It could just be that I think of genre as being more useful to understanding interactive media than narrative media because 1) more narrative media violates genre conventions, 2) my own view of interactive media as a product, a consumable thing.  Anyway, survival horror is a genre which has a lot of visual cues of horror narratives and the interactivity of action games, tweaked somewhat.  The differences I have noticed are the following:

1) Greater reliance on puzzle solving or exploration.  Action games usually have doors you need to get through and places you need to discover, but survival horror uses these more, simply to take some emphasis off of combat and to give the player greater access to the atmosphere and, hopefully, to build tension between combat sequences.

2) Lower level of protagonist combat effectiveness.  You can get this a lot of ways, whether it is frustrating combat controls (Silent Hill, Resident Evil), special vulnerabilities (Kuon, Eternal Darkness), or just the inability to fight at all (Amnesia: Dark Descent).  Sometimes, there is an extra something that you are required to do in order to effectively fight (Fragile Dreams, Alan Wake or Fatal Frame).  Guan Yu and Kratos are not impressed by zombies, nor, do I think would Ezio Auditore.  There is a fine line to walk with this, though.  On one side is the game ragequit and flung across the room and on the other side is a really gory action title, which is the way survival horror, at least in video games has gone.

3) Resource Management.  Weapon degradation is a particular bugaboo in this one.  Some games do better than that, like Kuon, where you have effective, but limited Ofuda to use on monsters, or Eternal Darkness, where you are forever trading life for sanity for mana for life.  There is always going to be something with this, as scarcity is a good source of tension.

And you want to know what is the best survival horror game I have ever played?  Pre 2nd Edition D&D with a high-skill DM who is not a douche.  Puzzle solving, resource management, harrowing fights and a lot of uncertainty.  Here's the problem with it, though.  1) games tend to creep by very slowly.  Actions require meticulous planning and a lot of player skill.  2) A high-skill, oldschool Dungeon Master who is also not a douche is something I saw once at a table.  And it could have just been an on night for him.  3) Resource management can be really not fun unless said high-skill, non-douche DM has a tried and true method of keeping that stuff moving, and that is a skill not found in any ruleset.

Shit.  This is going longer than I thought.

Okay, so, what makes a monster, in an interactive environment, that an audience dreads but will choose to interact with of their own will?

What are the habits of highly effective monsters?

I'm going to walk on this one a bit and put the nitty-gritty in another post.