Learning Nerdspeak: "Jump Scares"

"HI WATCHA DOIN' WANNA BE FRIENDS IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE BACK OF MY THROAT WHY DON'T YOU LOOK REALLY GET IN THERE YEAH RIGHT THERE IN THE BACK"

Try this: hide in a cupboard or a closet with a bunch of sliced ham covering your face. Lie there, in that dark space, and wait for someone to approach. When they do, launch yourself from you hiding place and scream at the top of your lungs, shaking them violently by the shoulders.

You have just created a “Jump Scare” experience. It’s a lot more fun when it happens in a video game.

“Jump Scares” are moments in a video game in which the game’s designers try very hard to scare the player by combining sudden, loud noises accompanied by jarring images, usually with no warning or indication that they’re about to happen.

“Jump Scares” are considered “cheap” because they don’t take a ton of finesse to execute. While the “Jump” in itself may be inelegant, “Jump Scares” are, I feel, a misunderstood and often mishandled tactic in game design.

When used well, a “Jump Scare” can be an effective tool for adding to a game’s experience in a larger sense. It helps build tension within the game’s atmosphere.

Anticipating a “Jump Scare” is to the “Jump” itself as anticipating a shark attack in “Jaws” is to seeing the actual shark. The worst part isn’t seeing the monster – it’s knowing that it’s there, and you can’t see it, and there is nothing you can do about it.

The best example I can think of for this concept was utilized brilliantly by the creators of legendary Silent Hills trailer/game, P.T. For those of you uninitiated in the phenomenon that was P.T., it was a short puzzle-based horror game that came out on the PSN some years back. It is considered by many to be one of the scariest horror games ever made. More importantly, it was minimalist horror done right.

"GIVE KISS"

P.T. wasn’t scary because the game’s antagonist, a horrifying one-eyed ghost lady, spent the whole game all up in your face. It was scary because, most of the time, she wasn’t there…but you constantly expected her to jump out. That’s why there was the unavoidable player death so early in the game. Jump Scares aren’t a substitute for genuinely scary moments or good writing, but they can be a valuable asset when building tension in a game’s atmosphere.

The art of horror involves bringing the fantastical, the illusory, into the real world. Technically, the characters of a horror book, movie, game etc. are the ones being harmed or killed by the antagonistic entity…but, they aren’t real. Their pain isn’t real. What’s real is the fear that the audience feels. By a sort of transitive effect, the person or people telling the story create genuine fear out of something that doesn’t exist, and is therefore basically harmless.

Video games can create an immersive experience unlike that which movies and books are capable. They can create the experience of being displaced in an entirely different world, a different universe. This depends on one’s ability to create a place that feels real.

While a derelict space station infested with carnivorous alien parasites may not be, in essence, a real thing, the spikes in one’s heartrate that result from a well-paced “Jump Scare” are real. Wishing to avoid them (or, one shudders to think, seek them out) is also real. The more real things that are brought about due to the fake space station and its cacophony of theoretical, digital horrors, the more the fake derelict space station starts to feel like a real place.