6 Reasons Why Horror Is Gaming's Most Important Genre

6. Maturity

This one is quite obvious on the face of it, but the implications were more far-reaching than might be expected.

As gaming developed, so too did the graphic content of titles, with horror games usually finding themselves at the forefront of visceral gore and other ostensibly unsavoury elements. The result was simple: whether or not critics of gaming felt this graphic content was puerile or not, still it was conceded that such titles were not for children.

But if they weren't for kids, who were they for? Horror was one of the key players in this gradual shift of thinking, pushing the boundaries (sometimes of taste) and making space for the idea of mature games for mature audiences.

Though more obvious than how horror contributed to gaming's legitimacy (a point for later), mature content and particularly horror content helped create a space in the market for purely adult experiences, broadening the horizons of gaming in terms of themes and subject matter.

This shift also incurred the sort of technical innovations (again, we will get to that) that could render this mature content more realistically, and therefore more effectively.