Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play

Abstract

[...]in Laurie N. Taylor's and Simon Niedenthal's pieces, they individually look at how different traditions of the literary gothic are used by horror games to similar effect:

Bernard Perron, ed., Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (Jefferson: McFarland & Companys, Inc, 2009)

In Clive Barker's forward to Bernard Perron's edited collection Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, the novelist ambitiously proclaims that in the present moment, video games are largely ignored by academic enquiry (1). Though Barker is trying to set the stage, so to speak, for the collection of essays that follows his forward, he is, as people who study video games will know, fortunately wrong. However, though video games in general have gained significant academic interest since 2000, Barker would be right to assume that horror video games have been somewhat left out in the dark. As Perron says in his introduction, though the horror genre in its literary and cinematic forms has attracted strong intellectual interest, no book dedicated to horror video games has yet been published in English (3). Horror Video Games: Essay on the Fusion of Fear and Play attempts to fill that void.

The collection is divided into two parts: "Approaching the Genre" and "Encountering the Games." The first section takes a more theoretical approach and broadly looks at the horror genre in video games, while the second section is dedicated to examining specific games through various methodological approaches. In both sections there is a real sense of interdisciplinary research, with the contributors looking at the horror genre and horror video games through various manifestations of film, horror, cultural, and video game theory. However, the various approaches do not send the collection into an aimless and non-cohesive downward spiral. Instead, the different approaches, and the collection in general, are held together by a central theoretical position: that the horror video game intends to elicit a specific mimicked bodily reaction of horror from the player.

That theory is most explicitly expressed in Bernard Perron's own piece, in which he nicely involves horror video games in discussions of cinematic horror theory put forth by Linda Williams. In Williams' piece "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess," she argues that pornography, the horror film and the melodramatic film are "body genres," or film genres devoted to making viewing bodies experience the same thing that the film bodies experience. Through an engaging discussion of the bodies involved in survival horror video games, namely the body of the monster, the body of the player-character and the body of the gamer, Perron works to show that survival horror video games act in very similar ways to horror films: they draw out bodily responses from the player through the actions of the bodies in the game. Though Perron's article comes at the end of the "Approaching the Genre" section, it constructs the theoretical foundation upon which most of the other articles build their interdisciplinary arguments.

Though, as an edited collection, Horror Video Games: Essay on the Fusion of Fear and Play does not have an intended overall argument, the contributors in both sections of the book, working from Perron's theoretical groundwork, do discuss and explore how player horror is a product of ludic construction as well as of game narratives. For example, in Daniel Pinchbeck's piece, he argues that "horror can be understood as a gameplay device" (80). Pinchbeck points out that in first-person horror video games like Le ft 4 Dead, as compared to third-person horror video games like the Silent Hill games, the player loses a certain amount of movement control. Consequently, when the player loses control, the game gains it. That relinquishing of control in first-person games, Pinchbeck asserts, can lead, through the kind of movement that is allowed in the game, to a player's experience of horror (80). In another example, where Pinchbeck views horror as being manifested in the player through the ludic interface, Inger Ekman and Petri Lankoski more specifically see player horror as derived from game sound and ludological goals in Silent Hill 2 and Fatal Frame (197). The authors argue that, as players of horror games, "we fear for the character, because we empathize with the character, but also because we need to keep the character in good health in order to pursue game goals" (197).

Finally, in Laurie N. Taylor's and Simon Niedenthal's pieces, they individually look at how different traditions of the literary gothic are used by horror games to similar effect: Taylor agues that player horror comes from the usage of gothic structural traditions in horror video games, while Niedenthal examines how gothic atmospheres create horror in Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2. Though most of the articles do tend to examine the ludological relationship between game and horror, Ewan Kirkland, while acknowledging the ludological and narratological debate over video games, suggests that because the narrative structure of survival horror video games often controls what the payer is allowed to do and where the player is allowed to go, player horror ultimately comes from an understanding that "we are not masters of our own fate" (77) Kirkland's point is a valid and useful one. It not only contextualises horror video games in the continuing and pertinent debates of video game studies, but it nicely counters the work of others in the collection who attribute player horror to game construction and not narrative structure. Though player horror is ultimately probably a product of both narrative and ludologcial aspects, Kirkland's piece is nonetheless insightful and important to the collection's balance.

In other articles from the "Encountering the Games" section, Matthew Weise explores Ian Bogost's notion of "procedural translation," arguing that horror games constantly borrow from their cinematic cousins. Michael Nistche looks at player horror through the Fatal Frame franchise as a result of the franchise's use of the photographic image; Christian McCrea interestingly applies Derrida's idea of "hauntology" to Dead Rising, Siren, and Michigan: Report from Hell, and, through a formalist approach, Guillaume Roux-Girard shows how the seminal Alone in the Dark franchise has continually evolved to deepen the gamer's emotional horror in each new manifestation of the game.While the collection largely addresses how horror is related to the player, it also does a good job of interrogating why the horror genre has been successful in video games (Richard Rouse III), of providing an historical account of the horror video game (Carl Themen), and of looking at the issues of transnationality in horror video games (Martin Picard). The collection ends with Tanya Krzywinska's exploration of how H.P. Lovecraft's fiction has been translated into Call of Cthulhu: Corners of the Earth. Krzywinska's piece is an appropriate ending to the collection as it additionally asks a number of important questions about the horror genre in general, the video game industry, game design, and ludic and participatory-driven player experiences in horror video games.

Ultimately, though some readers may desire a more explicit discussion of how horror video games complicate the narratological and ludological debate in video game studies, as well as a more overt definitional and critical consideration of player agency and perspective, the collection is a solid introduction to the topic. Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play more than adequately gives readers who might be interested in video games, horror studies or cultural studies a number of critical, engaging and theoretically involved articles to think about, draw from and ultimately, evolve and further complicate.

TIMHETLAND