Yesterday, after a long effort I finally finished playing Dead Space, a survival horror third-person shooter video game after about 12 hours of total game play. This game was unquestionably the scariest video game I have ever played, even scarier than Half life 2 or Bio Shock. The grim mood of the surroundings, the eerie music and the claustrophobic feeling of trapped inside a space shuttle all added up to the overall scare factor of the game. And the polymorphic, virus-like, alien infestation zombies called necromorphs were no beauties either.
Anyway, I completed the game and it got me thinking. "Why do we tend to do things that scare us?"
True, nothing can match the feeling of adrenaline pumping through the veins while we frantically escape an advancing alien or the satisfaction of dismembering a zombie with a single shot. But why do we like to be scared?
I think that people like to be scared, for a single reason. When people are scared, they feel alive. And feeling alive is very important indeed. It is due to the same reason that people go skydiving, wind surfing and possibly monster trucking. Anyway, in our boringly cluttered life we want to spice things a bit. But we are always too scared as our actions have a way of making consequences in our way of life. One bad step, and we would be screwed. So we content ourselves with undertaking challenges in the gaming world and killing the demons rather than fighting our own internal demons.
And in other news, I have started playing another game, 'Prototype' which is an open world action video game, where the villains are infected undead. The game is promisingly brutal and the protagonist, Alex Mercer is just awesome. More on that later...
