When I'm not writing or trying to make living wages, I am an aficionado of Survival Horror games. In my wee years, I was introduced to the classic Resident Evil series, at which point my desire to play FPS' and RPG's vanished, to be replaced by the thrill of zombie invasions and ghostly terrors. Resident Evil stunned me with the most unique monsters (the first Hunter in the game still gives me nightmares, with its glowing eyes and lurching gait) and the puzzle solving elements tickled my intellectual side without overtaxing me. But what really interested me were the stories integrated into game-play, something that no other genre managed to capture. FPS' at that time tended to be pure gameplay with minimal plot to create motivation, whereas RPG's tended to be nothing but a story that you occasionally got to press a button or two (and while FPS' have made significant strides forward, Square is still marketing 40 hour movies).
Now the Resident Evil storyline was never very complex, every game essentially amounted to "Who's the bad-guy? Oh, it's Wesker;" or "Wesker's done something evil again, go screw his plans up;" but what made the games unique were a mixture of intense action and characters who you might actually care about doing the action. It makes a zombie all the more frightening if you're invested in who it bites - unlike Doom, where the cardboard Flynn Taggart is just an excuse to have you running around a martian space station. Which is not to say Doom is a bad game, though if it hadn't been first to make FPS accessible, it may have been forgettable.
After Resident Evil, my entry drug, I switched over to the more addictive substances, like Silent Hill and System Shock, grittier in tone but infinitely more rewarding. In fact recently I had returned to Resident Evil II, my favorite of the original trilogy, and found it to be nearly unplayable. It has not aged well, I'm afraid, with the pixelated zombies, 16-bit sound and the wax paper-thin story that doesn't well back up the terribly paced gameplay. Silent Hill II, however, despite massive improvements to the genre over the years still manages to stop the heart cold - when you're running down a staircase that grows as you run, and suddenly you hear a low blast on an ethereal horn and moans from what is increasingly looking to be a prison beneath you, you ask why am I going down this way, but you can't turn back because the need to discover how your wife died drives you deeper into hell and your own subconscious...
And so on - but the point is that the atmospheric and gloomy story pushes you down this corridor, and it is strong enough to force you through things that you'd rather not encounter. This is a perfect metaphor for the art of story in general - any story is essentially a staircase (or a dark labyrinth, if you're Danielewski) which you, the reader, are being forced to walk down. When you begin to hear the moans at the bottom, you have to ask yourself why you ought to continue onward, and the answer depends on whether or not the driving force is strong enough. The beauty of the staircase itself is secondary to the need to reach the end of it.
Here's an idea: When you play Silent Hill II, and reach the Historical Society, and 
Melodramatic? Perhaps. But in the writing trade this is called the "hook," a vicious and bloody image for a vicious and bloody concept. You, the reader, are caught like a fish, your mouth punctured, and dragged along until you are deep within the fisherman's net, where the hook is pried from your gasping mouth and you are dropped to your inevitable fate. Perhaps this fate is an aquarium with other lovely fish, like a love story, or perhaps it's a terrible grinding realization that it was you who killed your wife, after all, the bottom dropping out of the false world you had constructed for yourself, where you find all the memories you had dammed in to a subconscious you had tricked yourself into believing did not exist. And suddenly you're the fish on the way to the butcher, realizing that the control, grace and dignity you thought you had is suddenly evaporated like water turning to ice, and then it is too late, you are encased in IT, the sail of darkness, the mathematical necessity of it all, and your last breath quivers in fear -
The hook need not be complicated. In Silent Hill II, your character James finds a letter in his mailbox one day signed by his wife that says come meet me in Silent Hill. Only thing is, his wife is already dead. So what the hell, you think, I'll bite. James only goes to reclaim his honeymoon, driven by nostalgia into the fog of his past, not even really seeming to care that his wife is already dead, only trying to reconstruct his best years. And so the letter may be allegorical as well, perhaps there was no letter, and it's more a message from James's memory to mourn his wife once more, a calling from a past place to return. This is Identifying: we pour ourselves into James because he is like us, he is like anyone who has loved and lost, who is aging and weary of the new, who wants stability and finds it in his memories.
This identifying lets us communicate with James mentally. He need not express himself, and so when he is dragged forward, so is the player. When he starts seeing the signs of insidious trouble, we ignore it, James and us both, because what is ahead is vital.
Then there is the disconnect: James is different from us too, or else he would not be captivating. He is on the fence of sanity, teetering back and forth like a drunk trying to prove his sobriety. His mind is the other staircase in the story, and progressing forward uncovers not just the physical landscape but the mental one as well. We associate with him, enter his mind, but then find this box labeled DO NOT OPEN, and we must give into the pressure because we are hooked, because we like James and are concerned for his well-being, and because we are like James and worry about the same box in ourselves. It is surely no accident that Like and Are Like are the same verb - we appreciate those to whom we are similar, but it is that unequal sign that interests us, the knowledge that 1+1=2--and a bit, our minds must account for that bit.
So we are driven to the climax of the story in spite of our better judgment, or now because of our better judgment, because we care about James, and then the staircase bottoms out, and the true horror of the moans is made evident. And here is where the story either becomes memorable or forgettable - in the reveal - whether the bottom of the staircase merits the journey down it, whether we feel we have eaten a worm only to get suckered onto a hook that can't be removed, or whether we're in the hands of a skilled fisherman. And as the curtain drops down on the story, the question is whether the curtain really fell? Whether at the end, we are joined by a ghost as we sit down later for a midnight snack, and we shiver because we identified with James, and it went so horribly wrong for us. We asked, what is it about James that doesn't add up? and we found that it wasn't so easy as an X in an equation, that the X = 0 all along, and that when the story breathed its last it promised that we too would be next, it would see to that.
If a hallway within a story can mirror the story, then it's not so farfetched that a story can mirror life itself, and not as a commentary but a true mirror: when it opens, the story is born, and the characters addict themselves to life, to the hook, which drags them, viciously to their own fatal end, and that end is the only suitable one, the masterstroke from the great being that created all - the absolute nothing, darkness without blackness, death? - the only meaningful story, the only meaningful life, is the one that looks towards Nothing, races towards it, and drops its content into it, like James's Revelation, spiraling into the abyss, making a parabolic arch, into infinity, into nothing, and then - ends.
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