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I remember pre-ordering “Bioshock” as soon as I could. “System Shock II” was one of my favorite games. It was a rare and weird game adding the RPG sauce into the first person shooter dish. It also used clever ideas to overcome visual shortcomings. The result was one of the most effective survival horror games ever created. “Bioshock, its normal shaded, Unreal 3.0 powered spiritual successor could only be better” I thought, not remembering the fact that whenever I thought, it always got me in trouble.

In theory “Bioshock” is great. Instead of the sci-fi story of “System Shock 2”, it has a story which takes place in the past, in 1960. It features realistic physics simulation, allowing you to exploit the conductivity of water, or to simply throw things at enemies. Unlike “System Shock 2” it has no weapon durability stat or no character classes. The player is able to make use of every single action in the game at any time giving him a much wider palette of choices. And isn’t that the whole point of a non linear story? Hell, the game has three possible endings you can reach depending on the moral choices you make. Like “Silent Hill 2” I thought. In theory it is great.

Silly me. Being the Pisces I am, it is hard to tear myself from the land of dreams and remember the horrifying difference between theory and practice.

In practice the story of Bioshock is–shall we say–patchy.

We follow the exploits of one Jack, a passenger on a non-descript airplane, which suddenly decides to fall into the ocean. Being the sole survivor of the accident, our hero discovers a light house in the middle of the ocean and naturally swims for it. It appears there is a huge underwater city underneath that light house. This underground city was constructed by an idealist maniac called Ryan. In order to create a perfect society Ryan gathered all the most brilliant but misunderstood people in the world and made them part of his project. But as legions of B Movies taught us: “You can’t contain super science.” Things have gone horribly wrong in a horribly short time. Now Jack is trapped in this nightmare and the only way out seems to be through following the instructions of a kindred soul, one Atlas, who also wants to get out.

Of course things are never that simple. There are at least two big plot twists and several homicidal crew members approaching you with murderous intent, not to mention an abundance of fetch quests. The unnerving part for someone who remembers “System Shock 2” is that underneath all the polish very few things have changed.

The template and the general narrative flow of both games are astonishingly similar. Our hero whose body was modified by nanomachines or their 20th century equivalent genetics (frankly, I think for 1960, nuclear radiation would be more appropriate due to its well known Spiderman producing properties) finds himself in an isolated environment in which something has gone horribly wrong. He has only one ally with whom he only has radio contact. Of course it turns out in the end that this ally is the main villain. Everyone else is gone zombie. Those who have not are about to, or else they will attack our hero for no logical reason at all. On top of that, the entire security system (the incredible high tech security of the 60s) is against him and the whole location will soon be destroyed, so he’d better get out quickly.

Besides this template, the method of conveying the story is similar too. We listen to many voice recordings and/or read through endless paragraphs of diaries. It seems both in the future and past everyone loves keeping diaries. Direct interaction between characters is mostly restricted to beating the shit out of crazy inhabitants of the place. Furthermore we see reenactments of previous events in form of ghostly apparitions acting out the event. This does seem a bit too similar for two entirely stories taking place in entirely different settings.

The whole thing may be due to the fact that according to Ken Levine, game play always comes first; story presumably second, or maybe last. He says that during the development, the story of “Bioshock” changed entirely, several times. It is clear that Levine wanted to make a new “System Shock” game. Sadly “System Shock” belongs to Electronic Arts. So he did the next best thing. He made a new “System Shock” which is not really “System Shock”. The result is like trying to fit a star shaped block into a circle shaped hole. It doesn’t work. So Levine takes his hammer and pounds on the story until it fits.

The main difference between the two stories is that in “Bioshock” the already shaky suspension of disbelief goes out of the window. One of the unique elements of “System Shock 2” was that the villain was also the setting. SHODAN, the antagonist, was an AI with a God complex and she controlled every single part of the brightly lit and sterile looking environment you had to walk around. She was everywhere, watching your every move. In “Bioshock”, though, the villain is pretty much human. The environment is still against you, but there is no concrete reason for that.

We also have all the elements from System Shock’s game play, without any rational explanation: Automatic sentry turrets, security cameras, and killer robots, all of which you can hack. Remember it’s still the ‘60s. We know that Ryan hired rather clever people and brilliant scientists for his utopia project, but the audience has no idea as to how these contraptions work. We get a vague explanation about some miracle element and advanced genetics, but that’s about it. Mind you, this is not like “Fallout”, where the microchip is a lamp based circuit. “Fallout” was a story taking place in the future, seen through 1950s style goggles. Conceptually, that was a brilliant idea. But “Bioshock” is still in the ‘60s. Levine expects his audience to accept that in mere 4 or 5 years incredible advances were made in all fields of science but he still doesn’t explain how security cameras using 35mm films ended up with that incredible face recognition software so that they can instantly recognize you as foe and lock onto you. What can I say? As a PhD student in Cinema, I DO want their film development lab.

With the believability of the setting murdered, all you have is the art deco style environments and the story; of which, frankly, there isn’t much. The game assumes that the main hero will either be a power hungry psychopath or an angel clad in human skin.

Even without prior “System Shock 2” knowledge, the twists and turns of the story are rather obvious. There is next to no character development, no conflicts to resolve, nothing. All you have is recountings of previous events and a final twist. And what a twist that is.

The “Would you kindly” twist is, I must admit, a very good one. It reveals that the choices and the actions of our protagonist weren’t really his own. This not only makes sense, but also patches up many holes in the narrative and the irrationality of the protagonist’s actions. However, it could have been much more.

The main plot twist has further implications just like the plot twist in “Haze” does. The protagonist doesn’t really have a choice. He does what he’s been told, much like a character in a video game, which Bioshock happens to be. This could have been a great narrative on the nature of choice and the alternative lives we live in video games. Or it could have been something entirely different. A moderately talented author would have taken this concept and turned it into gold.

What you end up with in “Bioshock”, however, is a classic example of a story consisting only of a nice twist. Even with the twist, there are a hundred holes. How did they send Jack out? How did he live out there? How did Fontaine communicate with him? What kind of stupid plan is crashing the plane? What if Jack didn’t survive (and he almost does drown)?

And why would anyone surviving a plane crash, upon finding a huge syringe filled with a suspicious blue fluid, be instantly overwhelmed by the desire to stick it into his arm? (There is no “would you kindly” dialog there.)

It seems Levine, like most so called intellectual game designers, hates cinematic cut scenes and says the story should be conveyed through game play, without ever taking control from the player. But if this means I’ll have to listen to hours of voice recordings and read endless lines of text, I’d much rather read a proper book or listen to a radio play.

Levine may or may not be right. Game play may or may not be king. But surely the narrative in “Bioshock” doesn’t hold any noble titles, even if it does look quite enlightened compared to other games.

There is no such thing as an RPG. Really. It might be a surprise to the legions of RPG fans around the world, but what can I say? I’m sorry. I share your pain.

Of course I am not talking about that nerdy table top game, which these computer games are trying unsuccessfully to emulate. There is also the Rocket Propelled Grenade, which as we all know, is a sort of device that allows you to jump up to great heights, ignoring a significant amount of gravity, providing you are healthy enough. I am not talking about that either. At least not directly.

I am talking about RPGs as video games. The sort of game in which you kill dramatis personae, get their stuff, level up, and kill even more powerful dramatis personae or failing that exterminate the wild life until you can. Apparently I am talking about those, since I understand this is the definition of RPG if you look at things through video game style goggles.

Originally, RPG as a table top game is a pretty interesting cooperative affair which pretends to be competitive sometimes. There are two asymmetrical teams: One team is made up of several players, the other usually has only one person in it: The Game Master or shortly GM. Players try to overcome the challenges presented to them by the GM. However, rather than being the goal of the game, this is just a tool to achieve the objective, the objective being telling a story interactively.

It’s a bit akin to musical duels by folk musicians or a poetry showdown. It requires creativity from both sides. What the GM is doing is creating conflicts without being able to determine how the main characters would respond to or resolve them. The main characters, created and played by players, in return, resolve the conflict in their own way, creating for the GM a new problem about the story. This process of back and forth slowly builds a story in a very unique and organic kind of way. It’s a very peaceful, new, hippie game. No wonder it was invented at the beginning of the 70s.

When it works well, it is a fascinating process. However, most of the time it doesn’t work well. The main reason for this is that the game, due to its nature, requires creative and intelligent people on both teams. This is a prerequisite not easily fulfilled in any kind of social activity.

Computers are stupid. They may act as if they were clever, but they are not. The term Artificial Intelligence is misleading. There is no intelligence involved there. It is just a bunch of scripts trying to give the impression of being intelligent. The computer can neither play an RPG with you nor assist you in playing an RPG with other people, because to do that, you’d need a computer you can code with your thoughts alone, or failing that, a real AI. Some kind of artificial device which is capable of thinking creatively. I’m not saying this can never be done. I just think there is still some time until we invent Skynet.

As computer games, RPGs are basically trying to do the same thing: Telling a story with the help of the players. But because we aren’t dealing with an intelligent person in real time, the scope is limited to pre-programmed stuff. You end up playing a computer game and being told a story you cannot really influence much. Pretty much all computer games fall into this category.

It doesn’t matter how dumb the story is. There is no difference between Eye of the Beholder from Westwood and Project X from Team 17 in that regard. In the former you have descent into the earth to find a bad guy ruling an army of fanatics and in the latter your task is—and I am quoting from the game box—“to penetrate deep into the planet Ryxx, destroy the aliens’ base, and escape with your ship intact.” Both games let you choose from a variety of classes with different abilities for your on screen alter ego. In both games enemies killed by you drop some kind of power ups in form of blue bubbles or points. In both games you have the option to arm yourself differently depending on your play style. One game is called RPG, the other is called shoot’em up. In both games you play the role of a character.

In regards to video games, an RPG is similar to the games we used to call Movie Games in the past. That is saying that RPG is not a genre but rather an amalgam of genres, a series of different games connected to form a cohesive whole in order to tell a story. The difference between classic games like Pool of the Radiance and Pirates! is that one of them tries to or claims to be like a table top RPG game, and the other doesn’t.

Of course today many complex games are made up of a variety of game mechanics. But these game mechanics themselves are smaller games. A typical RPG makes use of the point and click adventure’s dialog system for character interaction, an experience based power up system based on table top RPGs, item based puzzles of—again—adventure games, and some sort of other system to resolve the combat.

Naturally one of the most important and relatively easy to develop parts of those games are combat. It is much harder to make a realistic dialog tree or a game which would invent random story elements based on the pacing, the characters and past player choices etc. Therefore in most RPGs, combat is the defining and dominating aspect.

Essentially most of Fallout is a tactical combat game not that much different from X-Com. The Elder Scrolls series is a variation of the first person shooter. Diablo is a beat’em up fundamentally not much different from Final Fight. Sure there are other game mechanics there to make them more complicated, more cerebral or more storytelling-friendly if you will, but at heart all these games are called RPGs just because there are experience points and some exploration are involved.

The problem here is that most western developers don’t really get that there is no such genre as RPG. They are blindly flailing around trying to do what table top RPGs are doing. In contrast, the eastern developers, who probably have seen the RPG genre for the first time as a video game, are busy perfecting the twisted vision they got from western developers.

There is no RPG. The sooner you realize that, the cleaner your design will be. It is stupid to praise Bioware for its innovative and original “action combat system” on Mass Effect. It will make you sound like a moron and will twist your vision of design. Because that “action combat system” is neither innovative nor original. The shocking reality is that Mass Effect is a third person shooter. And that’s it. Plain and simple.

In their wisdom, Bioware decided they have made enough real time strategy games now and they should switch you another mechanic for combat. Because as you can easily realize the dominant mechanic of Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate was real time strategy, as it was beat’em up with Jade Empire. Now it’s third person shooter for Mass Effect.

It is nothing revolutionary. In fact it’s probably not the best third person shooter around, if you compare it to heavy weights such as Gears of War and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. But such is the way of those amalgam games. Mass Effect is more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the storytelling parts and the character progress mechanics which complement the third person shooter parts of the game.

As previously mentioned, an RPG is a genre made up of several different games. The way to make a good RPG goes through making all these individual games good. Each little part of the RPG should ideally be good enough to be a game worth releasing by itself. If the game itself is not fun, it becomes an obstacle in the way of the story.

If there is any praise Bioware should receive for their flawed but relatively nice Mass Effect, it should be for realizing the nature of RPGs.

Let’s hope others, too, will realize this fact soon.

DANIEL: You know Fasih, we’ve recently pointed out how the PC is a far superior platform to any console when it comes to first person shooters…

FASIH: We have?

DANIEL: … and so I thought that in the interest of fairness we should also mention other types of games where the two platforms see eye to eye. Like racing games.

FASIH: Right. Are you sure you…

DANIEL: I thought we could take the PC’s biggest racing franchise, Need for Speed, and compare it to…

FASIH: Burnout.

DANIEL: I was going to say to its console version…

FASIH: Nah, that wouldn’t be fun.

DANIEL: Okay. Burnout. Now in the new Need for Speed…

FASIH: Did you know that they removed the crash mode in Burnout? There is something called stunt mode instead, in which you drive around the city freely and smash into cars, jump from ramps, roll in the air, smash through billboards, and drive on the wrong side of the street very fast to reach a target score in a time limit. If you’re fast enough, you can chain these stunts together into combos, and the best thing is that you can do this cooperatively in multiplayer for maximum mayhem.

DANIEL: That sounds… pretty cool. I mean, for, uh, illegal racing, which Need for Speed no longer features. In the new ProStreet we are completely legal…

FASIH: Oh, Burnout is very legal too. You have to have a driver’s license in order to play the game. You can even put your own photo onto it. I totally endorse the usage of the driver’s license. In Burnout, whenever you commit some kind of horrible traffic crime it gets recorded on your driver’s license so that you can show it to everyone and brag about it. Did I also tell you when someone takes you out, you are practically able to send them a photo of you telling them your personal opinion about the incident in universal sign language?

DANIEL: Uh… that does sound pretty cool. But I was talking about Need for Speed: ProStreet. We’re off the streets now, racing in closed circuits…

FASIH: Ah. Now I understand. It’s professional racing. Yeah. Like Gran Turismo. Did you know Gran Turismo 4 on the PS2 had 721 different cars from 80 different manifacturers racing on 51 different real life tracks? That is, if you don’t count the reverse versions of the same track. And the driving model is so realistic that Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear had almost the same time in game with a Honda NSX on Lacuna Seca as in real world. By the way, the Top Gear test track will be featured in the new Gran Turismo game along with Top Gear episodes as downloadable content. So you’re saying Need For Speed is THIS kind of game?

DANIEL: Hmm. Not really, no. I mean, we have, uhm, 55 cars, but most of them seem to be Mazdas or Nissans. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Uhm. You race in what the game calls “Race Days”, typically on airports or some such. Most of the tracks are made up.

FASIH: So it’s professional racing then?

DANIEL: Well, no, not really. There are all these kids in hip hop clothes and this constantly talking DJ who really, really likes you.

FASIH: I don’t like DJs in any game. In Burnout he tries to give you useful zen advice like: “They say speed isn’t everything… they are wrong”.

DANIEL: Well, there’s this cool, uh, AI in the announcer in Need for Speed ProStreet, where he comments on the race depending on what just happened. It almost really gives you the impression that he understands what’s happening. Like, for instance, when you’re last in the race, he will say “Where’s my man Ryan Cooper? He must be having a bad day!”, and, like, when you’re first place, he says, “There’s my man Ryan Cooper! Watch him go!” So it’s like, uh, yeah, context-sensitive. I think.

FASIH: Oh, that’s very cool. Sort of like a friend inside the game huh? Very nice. So even if you don’t have any friends, you can just talk to the announcer. Good. Burnout doesn’t have anything like that. Instead you can call your friends to your city with just one button press and they will arrive without any delay or change of interface or anything. Sometimes my friends join and I don’t realize they did until one of them lands on me with his car. It’s a sort of Burnout hug we have. So I guess… this is bad… sort of. It breaks your car. When someone lands on you, you see your roof slowly bending downwards and your windows exploding outside. It’s horrible. You have to go to the repair shop again.

DANIEL: Speaking of which, Need for Speed ProStreet now features a damage model! When you brush along the rail on the side for instance your hood cover will sometimes stand up, or the trunk will open. Also, you’re kind of going slower, and between races you have to pay money to repair the damage.

FASIH: Money? You have to pay money? This is horrible. The only money in Burnout is the money THEY have to pay because of the damage you cause. You do go to the repair shop but it repairs your car instantly even if you fly through at full speed. Which is very useful because you crash all the time, and when you crash your car sheds parts and twists in slow motion, turning into an accordion on wheels.

DANIEL: Sometimes I land on my roof.

FASIH: Yeah. But don’t worry. Crashes are part of racing. It isn’t fun if you don’t crash. And you will crash because you never feel your hand leaving the accelerate button. And when it’s not fast enough, which is almost all the time, you push the turbo button, or nitro button, or whatever it is that makes the screen shake and the the car shoot giant blue flames out of the exhaust ports and go so fast you get tears in your eyes just looking at the screen. Right?

DANIEL: Uh… right. We have that too! It’s nitrous oxide which you can, uh, inject and then the camera goes a little bit farther away from your car and I guess you go faster. In the last Need for Speed, NO2 was recharging over time. Now you have two charges and that’s that. I, uh, I guess that’s realistic. I mean, it isn’t like in Gran Turismo where nitrous usage wears out your engine, or in Burnout where I guess you still get burnout points for driving on the wrong side of the street…

FASIH: I don’t think it’s Nitro in Burnout. It’s more like mana. For the uninitiated, mana is a sort of blue liquid which allows you to throw fireballs. And appearently in Burnout it is produced by doing extremely dangerous things while driving. Like smashing through objects or launching your car into the air towards oncoming traffic and flipping it. This way your burnout meter fills up and you can go very fast for an eternity. You can even steal your opponents’ burnout bar by rubbing your car against theirs or by bumping into them, which makes them flip out of the road and crash in flames.

DANIEL: Yeah, or that. So if you want realistic nitrous, I guess you’re better off with Gran Turismo, and if you want completely unrealistic fun, I guess you should go for Burnout, but if you don’t want EITHER of those, uh, yeah. I guess that’s the general theme here, then. Need for Speed fills that gap in between absolute realism and arcade racing fun. I mean, it’s a logical thing to do, filling that gap, right?

FASIH: Hm? What? Sorry I wasn’t paying attention. I was trying to complete some cooperative racing challanges with a few of my friends here. We have to jump over each other’s cars for at least 10 times in 2 minutes. Then maybe we will try the cooperative drifting challenge. I don’t know. I might just go for a marked man too, in which you have to go from one point to another in the city and evil cars are trying to take you out no matter what. Or maybe just plain PvP with some people. I really don’t know. It is hard to decide. Burnout is a horrible game.

DANIEL: That sounds… fun. Need for Speed has this… this racing mode where… where you go in a circle, and the first to finish the circle, uh, wins. Also, there’s a rhythm game called drag racing, where you have to hit a certain key to shift gear whenever your rpm is just right.

FASIH: Oh… So it’s just like Rock Band. Only without the guitar and Highway Star from Deep Purple…

DANIEL: Uh. Yeah. So… maybe racing wasn’t such a good idea. Let’s start over. Let’s talk about…

FASIH: Beat ‘em ups?

DANIEL: Uh…

FASIH: 3rd person action games?

DANIEL: Uhm…

FASIH: Survival horror?

DANIEL: Well…

FASIH: Japanese rpgs?

DANIEL: Maybe…

FASIH: Take your pick!

DANIEL: Fuck this! I’ll go play Civilization!

FASIH: Revolution?

There is a game called football. Unless you are living in the US you probably know it. They have a game called football too, but you play it with your hands. They are confused. And maybe so am I.

Cultural differences aside, let me introduce the game for the uninitiated.

Football, also known as soccer, is a sort of team based, PvP, capture the flag game. Officially each team is made up of eleven players but private games may feature smaller teams, in which case usually the map is smaller too. At the opposite edges of the symmetrical map, each team has its base. The goal is to carry the small, spherical flag into the base of the enemy team but there is a catch: there is only one flag and you cannot touch it with your hands or arms. Therefore the best way of moving the flag is kicking it with your foot, hence the name of the game. There are a few special rules I didn’t mention but I’m sure most of you have at least seen the game once. Oh and under no circumstance are you allowed to shoot people.

Now imagine you are playing football. But we are introducing another inconvenient catch. This time we say you are allowed to touch the ball with your head only, even if the ball is on the ground.

Are we insane? Would you want to play this game? More importantly, would it be the same game?

No. It would be broken. I’m sure in time people would adapt and play the game similar to the football we know and love. I have seen people in wheelchairs play basketball very well too. And I have seen people play first person shooters with a gamepad…

You cannot attempt murder with a rubber duck. You cannot drive a car with your feet. You cannot drink water through your nose. You cannot sleep on razor wires. You also cannot play first person shooters with a game pad. This is plain and simple.

If you absolutely had to, given enough time and training, you could do all those things of course. You could even become so good at killing people with a rubber duck that people might think it’s awesome, and at one point you could reach a level of proficiency at which you can kill people more effectively with a rubber duck than you could with a machine gun, because at that point you are a rubber duck expert. No one kills people quicker than you using a rubber duck. Perhaps you are a more effective killer than many people with a machine gun. This still doesn’t change the irrefutable fact that a machine gun is a better instrument of death than a rubber duck.

I have yet to see a proper real time strategy game succeed on game consoles. This is because the funnily named genre called real time strategy was invented with keyboard and mouse in mind. It doesn’t work any other way. If you want to make it work you have to improvise. You have to change the game in some way so that it is playable. And it is open to debate if the game is still the same or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.

First person shooters have been on consoles for a long time now. Until “Medal of Honor”, they did not work. And the thing that made “Medal of Honor” work was simply superior production values. We all know that the series reached its summit with “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault” which was coincidently the first PC spin-off of the series. First person shooters are really at home with the PC, specifically with its keyboard and mouse. For a long while everyone knew that first person shooters didn’t really work on consoles. Then came “Halo”.

“Halo” is such an interesting subject that it deserves its own article. Suffice to say that, one way or another, “Halo” made people believe that First Person Shooters work on consoles. [ed: by “people” he means frat boys.] So people started producing more first person shooters for consoles than for the PC.

By now it is a well known fact that “Unreal Tournament III” on PS3 is supporting keyboard and mouse controls, a move I applaud. For years I could find absolutely no reason why developers did not support keyboard and mouse controls for console FPS games.

Actually the reason is very simple. It is the same reason why the PS2 port of a 4-player Dreamcast game only supported 2-players on the PS2. It has only 2 gamepad ports out of the box. Sure you can plug 8 game pads to it using a couple of multi-taps (and play 8 player Winning Eleven, a fine football simulation by the way) but still, the standard equipment supports 2 players.

And even though the PS3, for instance, supports Bluetooth and/or USB keyboards and mice out of the box, it is not the standard equipment a PS3 user has, for these things don’t come out of the box. In fact regardless of how much Sony is trying to say “Hey! It is not a games machine, it is a computer”, many people still have their consoles in their living room, underneath their TV set, a place the device was designed to sit at in the first place. How many of you really have a table in front of your games console? Have you tried using your mouse without a table?

That is probably why Mark Rein says he doesn’t understand why on earth a PS3 user would need keyboard and mouse support on their game. He says they added the function because their fans asked for it in the forums, but he doesn’t get why they asked for it.

Well, it is a simple matter of “can do, will do”. The previous paragraphs detailing how FPS games are best played with keyboard and mouse were probably unnecessary because this is a well known fact for any person with a functioning brain. And we all know developers produce games for the installed base of the hardware they chose.

Yes, many people will play those games with a game pad because they are either used to doing so or they simply don’t have a keyboard, a mouse or even a table. But quite some people would want to use their mice and keyboards. After all, if you are not going to support it in the games why do you put the support into the game console in the first place.

I am not saying developers should now start making proper FPS games which can only be played with keyboards and mice on the consoles. This would be stupid. I’m just saying that it should be an option. It is not a great mystery, Mr. Rein.

Many people play “Gran Turismo” with a game pad. But everyone knows it is best played with a “GT Force” wheel controller. Imagine the game not supporting that. It would be plain stupid.

Sure, finding a machine gun is not easy, and not many people have one. Still, next time I see a console FPS without keyboard and mouse support, I at least want a rubber duck as an in-game weapon.

“Clive Barker’s Jericho” didn’t scare me. Of course everyone knows it is my psychiatric problem that no horror movie ever scares me, but that wasn’t the deal here. I think there is something genuinely wrong with this new breed of horror games. And that’s “wrong” in the wrong way.

The main attraction of horror movies comes from extraordinary events happening to ordinary people in mundane settings. The settings and the people should be ordinary because the audience itself is ordinary. We, as the viewers, identify ourselves with the protagonists and instinctively imagine ourselves having the same experience. That is why “Jaws” is so frightening. It’s not the giant shark. It’s the fact that it attacks you when you are swimming. And anyone could be swimming really. “A Nightmare On Elm Street” is great because Freddy attacks only when you are asleep. It is something we all do at least once a day.

In a regular horror movie there is usually an ensemble of these ordinary people, in order to keep us guessing which one will die first (and optionally how that person will die). Counter intuitively, the alpha of that group usually dies before the end of the story. This is necessary because if there was only one main character in the movie (see Silent Hill) it would stop being exciting. Whenever the main character is in trouble you’d only have to look at your watch. If it’s not the end of the movie there is no way she can die, because the movie cannot go on without her.

Video games, though, are different. You don’t need that many characters in video games because of their non-linear and/or interactive nature. The main character is usually the character you control and can easily identify with. Unlike the movie character, a video game character goes exactly where you want him to go and consequently commits her mistakes because of you. A video game character is essentially you. And unlike a movie protagonist, a video game protagonist can die even if she is the only protagonist of the story.

Now, the problem with “Jericho” is not its story. In fact Mr. Barker’s story is one of the more video game friendly and coherent stories lately written in this medium. Sure it has cliché dialog, run off the mill characters and an unnecessary amount of blood. And there is the fact that the game does not really have an ending. It doesn’t end, it just stops. But all this doesn’t change the fact that it has a logically progressing story, unlike its recent brethren “Bioshock” or “F.E.A.R.”. The problem is something else entirely. And that problem is shared by “Bioshock” and “F.E.A.R.” too.

In “Clive Barker’s Jericho”, you play a 7 man team, a special supernatural task force. Your protagonists are Ross, who is a spirit, able to possess his friends, making them regenerate their wounds and bringing others back from death. Sweet, eh? There is also Father Rawlings. He is a priest who carries not one but two modified .50 caliber automatic pistols and can suck the life out of his enemies to invigorate his friends, not to mention the resurrecting thing which can be performed from afar. There is a ninja with an Uzi, and she can burn people who get close to her. There is a sniper who can guide her bullets in slow motion and blow up the skulls of a potentially infinite number of enemies. Hell, there is even a kid who can slow down time, or rewind it just at the ammo belts so that the squad never runs out of ammo. That’s good because there is also a huge guy who has a chain-gun in one hand and a huge pistol in the other, due to the unfortunate fact that his right arm is possessed by a fire demon who can fly in the air to incinerate people. Clearly, these are not ordinary people.

In contrast, Alyssa in “Clock Tower 3″ is a 15 year old girl, who is slower than most of the psychotic murderers chasing her, cannot wield any weapons, and has to keep the panic bar low or else she freaks out.

Here is the question: Would you be afraid for Team Jericho, or little poor Alyssa?

Did “Bioshock” really made you experience fear as your protagonist was shooting around with six different heavily modified guns, hacking security bots and all sorts of murderous devices and launching tornadoes, thunderbolts, fireballs, ice spikes and killer bees from his hand? Killer bees! For God’s sake…

Let me answer the rhetorical question: No. I didn’t experience any fear. I didn’t feel any fear when “F.E.A.R.” teased me with the evil things that may be just around the corner, simply because my character is a super commando who can shoot several targets at the same time with a variety of different guns, healing himself with instant med packs, while drop kicking people to death. And the best thing is that he doesn’t have to do all these very quickly because he can… wait for it… that’s right: slow down time.

In every single dark corner of the repetitive, grey levels of “F.E.A.R.” you are supposed to say “Oh my God, what am I going to do now?” Instead I ended up saying “Bring it on bitch!” That is not exactly horror material.

Of course the shock value of the gruesome visuals should help with the horror the developers want to create. The monster and environment design in “Jericho” are appropriately sick. There is blood, flesh, skin and vomit all over the place. Even a single enemy is a horrifying sight when viewed separately. And precisely that is another problem.

Gore is a very common tool in horror. But when it’s gore everywhere your senses become dull. It is okay when you see a gory scene every now and then. It contrasts with the world you see all the time and is therefore shocking because of its abnormality and the implications contained within that perversity. But the walls of “Jericho” are literally made of gore. It is shocking the first time you see it. But then, after a while, all you see is red wallpaper. It is no different than the dull, grey textures of “F.E.A.R.” They are both boring. And horror isn’t supposed to be boring.

I am not saying the aforementioned games are not good games in their own right. That’s an entirely different story. My problem is with the lack of horror in these stories. That is assuming these games have “horror” as theme of course.

On the other hand, who am I to teach Mr. Barker, whose job is writing horror stories , how to write one? I’m not trying to do that. My problem is simply this:

If these games are supposed to be horror games, then I have to say they are not scary at all.

And I think there should be something seriously wrong with the world if horror is not scary.