thread: 2011-10-19 : Murderous Ghosts for Halloween
On 2011-10-22, Vincent wrote:
So Simon: In a horror flick, there are two possible brave, smart, athletic 23-year-old urban spelunkers who get murdered by ghosts. One of them is kind of shallow and mean, and doesn't deserve it, by any stretch, except as the flick is a glorious, bloody, insane hyperbole of our minor emotions (which it sometimes is: see Heathers or Ginger Snaps). The other is humane, responsible, and sympathetic, not shallow or mean, and suffers because the murderous ghosts, unlike us, have no sympathy and recognize no humanity.
Those are the two, but horror flicks can profitably play around with them, letting any given character slide or quick-reverse from one to the other, or stake out middle ground, or ground more extreme, or whatever else.
By answering those questions as the player, you're putting your character into play in those terms. ARE you shallow and mean? ARE you humane, responsible, and sympathetic? Any answer is fine. Every answer changes our relationship with your character. Even if you're participating naively, answering by gut or whim, we need to know, because it's an essential piece of your character's position.
(In a horror flick, only very rarely will the character turn to the camera and say something she hoped to do before she died. Usually it'll appear in clues, casual mentions, sometimes flashbacks and cut aways. Facts of the medium. A sentence like "Chris always hoped to see the Eiffel Tower before she died," straight from author to reader, doesn't fit into most movies, but it might well appear in a written horror story.)
So, if you want considerations, there they are. That's why those pieces are in the game. They're what we used to call "genre sim," before the Big Model swiped "sim" for something else and folded our genre sim into "exploration."
