Do you think it's the competence of the gamer i.e. newbie vs veteran or more to the fact that a veteran has played a lot of games and most of the shock-tactics are old hat?
Hmm. A little of each - I can think of a few people who have been playing games for years and
still get confused about the controls, so the aspect of running away in the right direction (rather than twirling on the spot) is part of it. I would get slapped silly if I revealed some of the more embarrassing moments though.
Having played lots of scary games and seeing the same things crop up again and again is a major part of it for me, so that is definitely a concern when picking up games. There are still moments where I find myself having to pause the game and sit back, but it isn't for the monsters (which, lets be fair, aren't in and of themselves scary), nor the moments where something jumps out of a shadow. The truly scary elements of gaming comes mostly from the psychological elements, or the
Fridge Horror of dialogue.
One of the most powerful moments in modern gaming, for me, was the bench scene at the end of The Darkness. Nothing scary, nothing moving around which shouldn't be, but the emotions involved in that scene had something in there which pushed it into lingering uneasiness. Earlier in the game there were (obviously dead) people getting up from the ground and fighting on, but the simple, calm scene carried a much more powerful and profound weight to it.
Actually, one of the creepiest things was the blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment in a cutscene from Hostile Waters, which had people stuck on poles like something out of Cannibal Holocaust - though I have a feeling that the shivers I got from that were linked to knowing where the imagery had been taken from, and the graphics were *just* clunky enough to require replaying the scene to get the full effect.