All kids are scared of something, but I found myself sweating with fear as a child at even the most tame horror media. Even a trailer for a terrible horror film like The Tooth Fairy was enough to keep me up all night with the lights on. Even going down to the basement by myself during the day was a daunting task. Needless to say, horror games were about the last thing I was interested in. It was hard enough getting through the Shadow Temple in Ocarina of Time, so a game designed to scare me from top to bottom? Not a chance.
That all changed when I played an Xbox 360 demo of the horror shooter F.E.A.R. That game didn’t cure my fears, but it showed me that they can be a safe place to practice going outside my comfort zone in life.
Fear itself
Before entering high school, I couldn’t understand what possible pleasure people got out of horror. Exaggerated stories of people not sleeping for days after watching The Ring or throwing the controller out of fright playing Resident Evil sounded about as far from an enjoyable experience as I could think of. To me, it appeared like people were willingly torturing themselves.
So I stuck to what was familiar — comfortable. I didn’t make the connection then, but see now that it wasn’t horror I was really afraid of, it was change.
Change can only be avoided for so long, of course. After my parents’ divorce and starting high school, almost everything in my life had changed. But not my avoidance of horror. I dug deeper into whatever routines I could control until they eventually controlled me. Because I was so reluctant to try anything new, I quickly became isolated. Deep down, I knew it was irrational, but I got to the point where even speaking to new classmates was overwhelming. Granted, I was never a social butterfly before, but being with the same group of kids from kindergarten through middle school almost forces friendships. With those gone, I didn’t have the skills to make new ones. What’s worse, though, was that I was too afraid to learn them.
One of the best features of the Xbox 360 for me was the demos. I loved the old demo discs I got with magazines in the PS2 era, but now I could download and play them anytime I wanted. For a kid with limited access to new games, it was invaluable. I don’t know what made me stop on the demo for F.E.A.R. that day, much less what drove me to download it, but I will never forget playing it.
The demo picks up in a vertical slice of an early mission where I moved my silent protagonist soldier through some dark and shadowy industrial parks. The lighting and sound made even the firefights startling, but being able to shoot back and trigger slo-mo let me push through like it was a regular FPS.
And then I went into the sewer.
Faced with a pitch-black tunnel, the game instructed me on how to turn on my flashlight, which somehow made the darkness only feel deeper and more menacing. I crawled forward, completely falling for the fakeout of a rat scurrying from a fallen barrel across the path, only to fall even harder when my light started to flicker and the shadow of a little girl slowly walked across my field of view. I paused, heart racing, but for some reason didn’t want to stop. The sun was out, my sister was in the next room, and nothing could stop me from shutting the console off if it became too much.
I had to walk away twice during that short demo to collect myself, but both times came back. There was something satisfying in feeling something so intensely, letting my body process it, and then going back for more. I eventually rented and purchased the full game, plus eased into more horror games and films to feel that discomfort — and overcome it — on my own terms. From there, very slowly, I was able to apply that same thinking into pushing out of my comfort zone in other areas of my life.
Am I a social butterfly now? Far from it. Am I still routine-oriented? Extremely. But I’m not trapped by those things. I know I can deal with the discomfort of breaking out of the familiar and safe because, like in games, the fear itself is worse than any bad outcome. I will survive if I don’t have lunch at exactly the same time as always, and when the person at Costco asks if I need to windows and doors and I reply “Only if it comes with a house,” the worst they can do is not laugh (which they didn’t). As an adult living by myself, if I don’t push myself to do these things then no one will. Horror games give me that room to practice getting comfortable with the uncomfortable so I can at least fight to not end up a recluse.
