Exchange of Realities

For writers and game-masters alike, one of the major objectives is to trigger emotion in the audience, whether they’re players or readers. As writer, reader, player and GM I’ve experienced a lot of vicarious emotions, but the one I’ve had the most fun with would definitely have to be fear.

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Why fear?

First off, being a negative emotion, it’s easier to trigger than the positive emotions, easier to give intensity to, and more memorable; most of the people I’ve known tend to pick up on and remember negative emotions better than positive ones.

Second, it has more flavors. Anger bores me; it comes in two basic varieties, and a lot of people seem to approach it the same way when they’re characterizing it. Sadness is really hard to do right, and for many people it just turns into chasing everyone away and engaging in pity parties. But characters experiencing fear tend to react in different ways—sometimes the same character will have multiple different responses depending on the form the fear takes. It might cause her to freeze up, or push her into a burst of frenetic activity; cloud her mind, or narrow her focus to tunnel-vision; lead to anger, or sadness, or any of a number of secondary emotions depending on her prior associations with it. In the case of games, sometimes in-character fear will lead even the most calculating, rational player to start working by instinct and making mistakes, and that too is fun to watch.

Third, it’s an emotion best experienced vicariously. With some—sadness and anger in particular—most people will at some point have personally experienced the emotion even at an extremely high intensity. As a result, they’re familiar with it. They know how it comes across, and it’s less mysterious. Less intriguing. More likely to just serve as a reminder of things that have already happened. The thing you haven’t tried yet is always the most interesting, isn’t it? On the other hand, many people have not gone through something like total, life-threatened fear, and getting even half a sense of what that’s like becomes an intriguing exercise in its own right—particularly in the game situation, where it is usually within the player’s power to make the decisions that get the character out of the seemingly hopeless situation, thereby providing for that sort of rush as well. Why else do you think horror flicks are so popular? And since there are so many different directions in which fear can go, between source and response, and since the experience is never quite perfect, there’s always something new to come back to. That’s certainly been my experience.

Fourth, it’s a challenge. The more powerful characters you’re writing the scenario for (whether they’re yours or someone else’s), the less likely they are to scare easily. You have to either dig deeply into the character or be a master of description to be able to instill fear in someone who tosses demons or has been outside the world and back unscathed.

But triggering these sorts of emotions is an art in and of itself, and going too far in one direction or another often loses the audience’s interest or pushes them into analyzing what’s going on rather than reacting first and thinking second. How do you bring out fear in an audience? This week, I’m going to show you, and help you understand why.