Fact or fiction?

I’ve always been a fan of horror films and I’ve watched more than my share. It’s a rather masochistic experience, a similar kind of thrill to that experienced by people who ride on rollercoasters, although I haven’t seen a horror film that genuinely scared me for a very long time.

This was brought home to me recently whilst playing on my PS3. I’m not a very big fan of games – my experience is normally restricted to racing games or the excellent Lego Star Wars and Batman games – but as I had some free time, I thought I’d invest in an RPG, something I could get my teeth into. I’d read a couple of things about Dead Space and so, being a fan of the films Event Horizon and Alien, which seemed to be inspirations for the game, I bought a copy.

I couldn’t play it.

I mean, of course I could play it – I could read the instructions, operate the controller, and move the character around. What I mean is, I had to stop playing it because it was just too scary!

As sophisticated as we are on the outside, sometimes it’s difficult for our brains to distinguish fact from fiction. For whatever reason, playing Dead Space circumvented all those layers of intelligence and sophistication – all the bits that knew, on a theoretical level, that it was just a game – and put me fairly and squarely in a dark corridor, on a deserted spaceship with only about a million nasty things for company!

The idea that what we see, the kind of information we take in from our environment, affects the way we feel is not new. In the middle ages, people believed that our eyes worked by absorbing tiny particles of what we saw and that, the eyes being the windows of the soul, what we saw would affect us profoundly. To take care of our souls we should nourish them by looking at wholesome and beautiful things. While we can dismiss the idea nowadays, there is a germ of truth here. What we see does affect the way we feel – we experience that every time we cry at a film, or feel happy when the hero and heroine get together or feel tense when a character walks into a darkened room. We know we're safe in a cinema; we know that the people on the screen are actors, following a script, enhanced by CGI or special effects - none of which stops us feeling scared or excited or anxious.

The biggest reason for this is our capacity for empathy and I’ll talk more about that next week. In the meantime, does anyone want to buy a barely-used copy of Dead Space...?