Last night, I had a dream.

In the dream, I was playing a game in which I was pitched in a fierce boss battle. I was losing, nowhere near putting a dent in my enemy, while my own health bar was dwindling fast. No matter how much I fought or how much I tried to avoid every attack, I was losing the conflict fast. Eventually the inevitable happened, and my character died, though that wasn’t the end either, as the events on-screen quickly rewound themselves back to the battle’s starting point, with the following text message on-screen:

“A strange voice beckons you back from the darkness, compelling time to reverse itself and your limbs to renew their life, giving you a chance to prevent your murder from taking place…”

As I returned to the battle again, the text remained on-screen, and I was impressed by how the gameplay didn’t end even though technically the battle had been lost. Continuing to play, fight, die, rewind and fight more, it wasn’t until I realized that the text message came from the boss itself that the fear set in again, as I realized that this was a boss battle in which the enemy was simply reviving my avatar so it could kill it over and over again, effectively toying with the player. At that point I felt as much loathing, dread and genuine fear as I’ve ever felt in a game, and my whole life, for that matter.

At that point, I woke up. It took a few minutes for me to realize this myself, but when I did I couldn’t help but rush to the computer and write it down so I wouldn’t forget it.

So I just had a dream about playing a game. Big deal. So I had a dream in which I thought I was playing a new kind of innovative gameplay, which I wasn’t– really, all my subconcious was inventing was automatically charging continue options which bypass game-over contingencies, which really isn’t all that impressive after all. The more important thing is this, that I had a nightmare in which I was never in physical risk myself in the context of the dream. I had a nightmare in which I was losing a video game.

Why does that count as a nightmare? Because the game gave me fear. It wasn’t some kind of bullshit fictional fear that I might actually die if I lost the game– it was the same kind of fear I’ve felt playing Metal Gear, dreading the moment a guard might spot me, or Ico, dreading the moment when the inky black smoke monsters try to abduct Yorda. The fact that the feeling of actual fear I had playing video games in the past was enough to be recreated in my dream as opposed to normal nightmare scenarios says something very real and telling about just how deeply games can move us to feel danger– the fear is real, even if the game is not.

Moreover, this is something games can do much better than any other medium, in my opinion. For example, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve never had a dream in which I was reading a scary book or watching a scary movie. The kind of fear those mediums instill is far too remote and distanced from the audience. Games, however, have the immediacy of the player’s active place in the narrative itself, so that the audience effectively merges with the avatar, especially at key moments such as peak fear events like the one I dreamt about. Indeed, we know that a game is working when the player does feel the fear, not just for their avatar, but for themselves. It’s when the player isn’t moved– when you don’t care if Snake gets caught, or if Ico can’t save Yorda from being captured– that you know either the player isn’t taking the game seriously enough, or the game isn’t doing its job.

Fear and danger are probably two of the most essential elements of game design, because they’re more palpable in games than in any other medium. Unless, of course, anybody would like to share nightmares they’ve had about being scared shitless by a book or film…