This article was downloaded by: 10.3.97.

143
On: 30 Oct 2023
Access details: subscription number
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK

The Gothic World

Glennis Byron, Dale Townshend

Gothic and Survival Horror Videogames

Publication details
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203490013.ch38
Ewan Kirkland
Published online on: 04 Oct 2013

How to cite :- Ewan Kirkland. 04 Oct 2013, Gothic and Survival Horror Videogames from: The Gothic
World Routledge
Accessed on: 30 Oct 2023
https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT

Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms

This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions,
re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or
accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

G O T H I C A N D S U RV I VA L H O R R O R
VIDEOGAMES

Ewan Kirkland

THE PORTAL AND THE PENDULUM

T he protagonist wakes to find herself alone in a small cell, to be greeted by a

strangely inhuman disembodied voice which echoes across the walls of her
confinement. A mystical portal opens up, allowing her to exit, whereupon she finds
herself forced to negotiate a series of dungeon chambers. Each presents her with a
puzzle that must be solved, employing a mysterious device which allows her to
manipulate the space of her environment. Throughout her progress, the voice
continues to accompany her, providing instructions, advice and the occasionally
disquieting statement. If the challenges are successfully completed, the voice prom-
ises, there will be cake. As the puzzles increase in their complexity, so does the sense
that there is something sinister in the protagonist’s situation, personified in the omni-
present omniscient voice which follows her activities. While not actually malicious,
the voice seems to have a disconcertingly casual attitude toward the protagonist’s
safety. The puzzles involve navigating pools of toxic water and sentry-patrolled
corridors. A hidden alcove, accessible through a gap in the wall, is scrawled with
graffiti left by a previous prisoner. “The cake,” one victim warns “is a lie.” Eventually
the lie is revealed, the subject must escape the torture chamber in which she is
trapped, and proceed on a different quest: to find and destroy her tormentor. Except,
upon defeating the adversary and escaping her confinement, the embattled heroine
is taunted with the discovery that the owner of the voice lives on in spectral form,
and will continue to do so long after she is dead and buried.
Familiar to anyone with a knowledge of contemporary videogame culture, this is
the narrative of Portal, a puzzle game published by Valve which achieved computer-
game cult status following its release in 2007. Portal’s high-tech world of white
featureless test chambers, artificially intelligent super computers, laser-targeting
security robots and the portal gun itself, an elegant device allowing the player to pass
through one flat surface to another, has none of the imagery commonly associated
with Gothic culture. Nevertheless, with its persecuted protagonist buried alive in the
Aperture Science test center, its increasingly twisted series of puzzles and the enig-
matic figure of deranged AI GLaDOS – who, following her defeat in the game’s

454
 — chapter 38: Gothic and survival horror videogames —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

closing boss battle, famously sings of how she is still alive, downloaded into another
terminal prior to her defeat by the player – this game has something distinctly Gothic
in theme and tone. While the contemporary culture of digital games seems consider-
ably removed from a mode rooted in classic literature, the Gothic mode, as Catherine
Spooner asserts, has never been solely restricted to books. Magic-lantern shows,
sensationalist theater, television, comics and digital media are included amongst the
range of popular forms which the sub-genre has influenced (Spooner 2007: 195).
Other contemporary Gothic forms and cultures include radio (Andrew Smith 2007:
132–40), graphic novels (Punter 1996: 146–49), and celebrity culture (Armitt 2011:
10–11). Science fiction, horror and fantasy are amongst the staple videogame genres,
all existing in close proximity on library bookshelves to fiction which might be
labeled as “Gothic.” The horror genre, Richard Rouse suggests (2009), has proven
particularly useful as a source for videogame designers, so it should come as no
surprise that the Gothic sub-genre should have a strong presence in the medium. The
neo-medieval fantasy which Eddo Stern (2002) regards as a recurring presence in
online computer games, functioning to mystify the technological basis of the medium,
parallels the evocation of an imagined past in Gothic literature as reflecting
nineteenth-century ambivalences toward processes of modernization and industriali-
zation. Gillian Skirrow’s (1986) discussion of videogame play as the symbolic explor-
ation of the mother’s body resonates with the sense of the uncanny frequently
associated with Gothic architecture and storytelling. Full of explosive scenes of
violence and carnage, baroque fantasy landscapes, cyborgian hybrids and ambiva-
lences of narrative and identity, Gothic themes resonate throughout videogame
cultures.
This continuity is evident in Fred Botting’s chapter on the contemporary Gothic,
which incorporates discussion of the first person shooter DOOM (1993), the Tomb
Raider (1996–) adventure series and the zombie videogame franchise, Resident Evil
(1996–). Homologies between computer games and Gothic traditions, Botting
suggests, include the ways in which the reader of Gothic fiction participates in the
narrative and the active participation of the player in a digital game: the emphasis on
excitement and emotion produced through Gothic prose and the visceral adrenalin-
pumping videogame experience of running along virtual labyrinths shooting mutant
soldiers; eighteenth-century aesthetics and the “artificial sublimity” of digital worlds
“designed to evoke horror and terror”; the uncanny nature of automata, ghostly
doubles, and the digital avatar (Botting 2004: 277–78). Just as eighteenth-century
aesthetes criticized Romantic fiction, videogames are attached as sensationalist,
violent and over-stimulating. Videogame scholar James Newman (2008) notes the
ways in which the medium is frequently dismissed as a trivial and worthless distrac-
tion from more improving activities, the guilty pleasure with which playing video-
games is associated, (unsubstantiated) claims concerning their negative impact on
players’ psychology and behavior, and criticism amongst high-ranking establishment
figures attacking the “immediate gratification” and “hedonistic” nature of computer
games. Boris Johnson’s pejorative description of children “bleeping and zapping in
speechless rapture, their passive faces washed in explosions and gore” whose “souls
seem to have been sucked down the cathode ray tube” (Johnson 2006) evokes a
particularly Gothic image of the adolescent game player transfixed by violent images,
merging with the machine and possessed and dehumanized by ghastly external

455
 — Ewan Kirkland —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

forces. Perversely, many games can be seen in their content and marketing to
capitalize upon expectations that videogames will shock middle-class sensibilities.
Postal (1997), State of Emergency (2002) and Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001) present
themselves as deliberately controversial, incorporating hyper-violent gameplay,
dark social satire and conspicuous political incorrectness as part of their implied
pleasures. Games such as OneeChanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers (2008), House of
the Dead: Overkill (2009) and Lollipop Chainsaw (2012) combine soft-core
porn aesthetics, extreme violence and foul language in a gleefully trash-cultural
experience.
Emerging as a cultural presence in the later quarter of the twentieth century,
videogames might be considered an extraordinarily postmodern cultural form.
Aspects of the postmodern in videogames cultures considered by Garry Crawford
and Jason Rutter (2006) include the celebrity status of virtual superstar Lara Croft,
the consumerist imperative across The Sims series (2000–), and the perception that
sports simulations might replace real-world sporting activity amongst young people.
Given the habitual blurring of boundaries in Gothic culture, Skirrow’s observation
that videogames constitute a site of confusion “between fantasy and science, between
high-tech and primitivism, and between play and real life” (Skirrow 1986: 118)
indicates communality between preoccupations of postmodernity and the Gothic in
videogame cultures. Andrew Smith is amongst many authors to argue that post-
modernism appears “peculiarly suited to the Gothic” (Smith 2007: 141), aspects of
which include exaggerated, excessive and anti-realist aesthetics, the muddying of
high/low cultural distinctions (Becker 1999: 7), a “certain sliding of location,” the
“divisions and doublings of the self” and “threatened subjectivity” (Punter and
Byron: 2006: 51). Such aspects can be seen in Dante’s Inferno (2010), a hack-n-slash
videogame which concludes in hyperbolic images of the player’s gruesome death
with quotes from the epic poem, in the effortless manner in which the plumber
protagonist of Super Mario Galaxy (2007) leaps from planet to planet, or in the
ways in which Lego Star Wars’ (1999) freeplay mode allows the user to switch
between an eclectic range of characters from different episodes of the series at the
touch of a button. Allan Lloyd Smith’s (1996) discussion of the postmodern Gothic
provides further parallels. The indeterminacy of the Gothic novel, and of the post-
modern in general, is reflected in the variability of the videogame narrative.
Interactive elements and randomly generated content mean that each player experi-
ences a videogame text slightly differently. More significantly, many narrative-based
videogames incorporate a variety of endings that are dependent on the particular
player’s performance. The emphasis on surface and depthless images in postmodern
culture and Gothic fiction, be it in the form of a concentration on external detail or
two-dimensional characters lacking in psychological complexity, is appropriate for a
visual medium where, unlike photography, cinema or television, there is no referent
behind the image. Postmodern writing and Gothic literature’s fascination with the
criminal and the perverted can be seen in series like Hitman (2000), Saints Row
(2006) and the notorious Manhunt (2003), in which the player is encouraged to
perform a series of brutal virtual attacks on villains located in a space of urban
dereliction.
Elements of the Gothic, then, exist variously across videogame cultures: in the
uncanny photorealism of sports-game avatars whose appearance mirrors the visual

456
 — chapter 38: Gothic and survival horror videogames —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

characteristics and physical capabilities of real-world celebrities; in the exaggerated

physics and excessive spectacle of driving games where crashes are replayed in fetish-
istic slow motion; in the cycle of death and rebirth which constitutes the majority of
videogame play. The “natural images, architectural ruins, and courtly customs”
which Botting observes in his consideration of the Gothic sublime aesthetic (Botting
2004: 278) are part of videogaming’s visual repertoire. Platform games like Prince of
Persia (1989–) frequently take ruined architectural spaces as their setting, a collapsed
temple with its fractured balconies, broken columns and incomplete stairways
providing the perfect challenge for players to navigate. Discussing the sprawling
online environment of World of Warcraft (1994–), Tanya Krzywinska identifies in
the Night Elf homelands “ruins of once splendid temples and cities . . . in memoriam
signifiers of past glory, representing in romanticized terms a lost object of desire”
(2008: 130–31). In Shadow of the Colossus (2006), the player explores a mournful
yet picturesque landscape, a vast, deserted space scattered with ruined temples, over-
grown gardens and abandoned fortresses through which he or she moves in a quest
to restore the life of a young woman. Devoid of human characters, the only beings
encountered by the player are a series of immense creatures whose awe-inspiring
size – together with the impressive technical skill inherent in their realization – is
implied in the dramatic cinematic cut-scenes which introduce each battle following
the monsters’ location. If there is something distinctly Gothic about the videogame
as a medium, this becomes more evident in games which explicitly adopt Gothic
narrative themes or aesthetics as their point of departure.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF (GOTHIC) HORROR

The protagonist of Capcom’s successful Devil May Cry (2001–) franchise is Dante:
part-human, part-demon, a private detective and rogue monster-hunter. Levels in
this series are notable for their elaborate and highly Gothic settings – castles, cathe-
drals, mansions – introduced through extravagant cut-scenes which revel in the
spectacle of these virtual spaces and seem designed to evoke an experience of the
sublime. Adversaries across the games include animated marionettes, giant spiders,
golems and winged serpents. In addition to such narrative and visual elements, there
is something distinctly Gothic in the excessive and extravagant gameplay. This
involves pummeling joypad buttons in a series of sequences designed to make Dante
perform increasingly elaborate moves, or combos, on the creatures which attack
him. Armed with a sword and twin revolvers, Dante can suspend himself in mid-fall
by repeatedly shooting his guns, fling enemies into the air, slicing them as they land,
and leap from wall to wall. Depending on the sustained ferocity of the player’s
performance, the words “cool!” “brutal!” and “showtime!” appear on the screen,
or, if the swordplay is particularly lackluster, “dull!” The accompanying heavy-rock
soundtrack is quite at odds with the game’s medieval Gothic aesthetic, and yet quite
compatible with its overblown Gothic sensibility.
Dead Space (2008) is set in a derelict spaceship where the entire crew has been
murdered or mutated into terrifying monsters. With “strategic dismemberment”
being a key theme of the game’s development, gameplay involves shooting the limbs
from these gangly “necromorphs” as they lope, crawl or charge toward the player,
using a series of mining tools scattered throughout the ship. The backstory

457
 — Ewan Kirkland —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

uncovered throughout play is one involving an obscure religious object, an alien

virus which reanimates human corpses, mass hysteria and insanity. While this narra-
tive, unfolding within a dark shadowy gamespace littered with dead bodies and
dismembered limbs, combines many thematic elements of Gothic fiction, the means
by which the story is uncovered has further parallels with the mode. Illustrative of
what Henry Jenkins calls “embedded narrative” (2004: 126), details are revealed
through fragments: audio and video logs, text reports and details of the environ-
ment. Just as Gothic stories are frequently pieced together from diaries, letters and
manuscripts, so the story of the Ishimura mining ship is determined by the player
from a patchwork of documents. A similar storytelling technique is employed by the
first person shooter Bioshock (2007), set in the underwater city of Rapture, where
players collect audio recordings left by the city’s former and remaining residents.
These tell the story of a utopian city established by a megalomaniac entrepreneur,
which collapsed into decadence, class division and civil warfare. Like the audio
recordings the player discovers, the space of the leaking city is a reflection of events
preceding its fall into anarchy. Peeling posters advertise dehumanizing surgical
procedures, grizzly shrines have been erected to Rapture cults, bloody graffiti
expresses deranged sentiments of hysterical survivors. Even the genetically modified
Rapture residents who patrol the space, dressed in party masks, commemorate the
1959 New Year celebrations which marked the turning point in the city’s fortunes.
The history of Rapture is expressed through these fragments, embedded in the archi-
tecture and inhabitants of the place. If the Gothic, as Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd
Smith suggest, constitutes “the perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwill-
ingness of the past to go away” (Sage and Lloyd-Smith 1996: 4), then the storytelling
technique of embedded narratives which inscribes past events on objects, spaces and
characters seems extremely fitting for the mode. Furthermore, the game culminates
in a narrative twist which throws into question the free will and self-determination
of the protagonist throughout the game, provided with more resonance given the
player’s interactive role in seemingly choosing their actions. In this, the hero is
revealed to be a tragic Gothic figure, controlled and manipulated by unseen forces,
the ironic foreshadowing of which, in the form of tattooed chains on the protago-
nist’s wrists, has been visible throughout the game.
While Gothic resonances might be identified across horror videogames, such
aspects become increasingly evident in those known as “survival horror.” Within the
field of videogame scholarship this sub-genre of videogame has attracted a high level
of critical attention, reflected in the range of academic and popular definitions of the
cycle. In its purest form, survival horror combines a range of aesthetic, narrative and
gameplay characteristics, some clearly paralleling and reflecting the themes of Gothic
fiction, others representing translations of Gothic tropes in a manner specific to the
videogame form. These games have been succinctly defined as those in which “the
player controls a character who has to get out of some enclosed place solving puzzles
and destroying horrific monsters along the way” (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith and
Tosca 2008: 184). Examples include such series as Resident Evil (1996–), Silent Hill
(1999–), Clock Tower (1995–), Fatal Frame (2001–), Forbidden Siren (2004–) and
The Suffering (2004). The term was first coined in the original Resident Evil game,
which opened with the warning, “Welcome to the world of survival horror.” In a
move that is indicative of the imperfect nature of all generic definitions and

458
 — chapter 38: Gothic and survival horror videogames —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

historicization, Capcom’s original, like its subsequent sequels, not only fails to
conform to many of the accepted qualities of the genre, but also excludes previous
games, such as Sweet Home (1989) and Alone in the Dark (1992), which critics have
identified as retrospectively belonging to this cycle.
These games’ locations are notably consistent with those of Gothic fiction. Fatal
Frame (2001) takes place in a haunted house where the heroine, armed only with a
supernatural camera, must take photographs that capture and disperse vengeful
spirits’ psychic energy. In Haunting Ground (2005), the heroine must find her way
out of a large castle, patrolled by a maniacal hunchback caretaker, a deranged cyborg
housemaid and a mad monk. Clock Tower 3 (2003) features a gloomy house, a
deserted concert hall, a graveyard, a hospital, and the eponymous clock tower, as
well as the heroine’s spooky family home. The setting of The Suffering is a prison
which the convicted protagonist must escape, doing battle with various grotesque
creatures representing types of capital punishment – hanging, firing squad, death by
lethal injection – suffered by previous inmates. Laurie N. Taylor (2009) uses the term
“ludic-Gothic” to describe processes at work within such games. Like the Gothic
itself, survival horror is a hybrid genre, combining, as Taylor observes, adventure,
action and horror game elements. Critical of authors who consider only the audio-
visual aspects of videogames, Taylor argues that while the “horror” element refers to
the narrative or aesthetic qualities, the “survival” component refers crucially to the
particular form of gameplay that these titles employ. This entails “limited ammuni-
tion and the need to run from enemies, forced backtracking over the same areas in
new game contexts, and limited carrying space” (Taylor 2009: 50). The first of these
elements seems crucial in placing the emphasis on “surviving instead of thriving”
(Taylor 2009: 46). Hence, the protagonists of these games tend to be unremarkable
individuals with no particular skills, powers or supernatural abilities, trapped in
environments crawling with monstrous creatures from which they must escape.
Typically the heroes and heroines of survival horror are poorly equipped to deal with
the horrors they encounter, having to rely on makeshift weapons, limited ammuni-
tion and the less confrontational strategy of running away and hiding. Simon
Niedenthal (2009) identifies player vulnerability as a core component of the survival
horror genre. Resulting in a painstaking and often stressful gaming experience,
survival horror games produce the same “dialectic of persecution” which David
Punter identifies in Gothic literature (1996), while the enclosed space of survival
horror games, be it a castle, prison or subterranean maze, evokes the Gothic sense of
being buried alive.
Other generic components include restrictive camera angles which make naviga-
tion of the gameworld particularly tricky, counter-intuitive control mechanics which
subvert gaming conventions, and the disruption of the relationship between gamer
and game (Taylor 2009: 51–52). The abrupt jumps in perspective involved in
exploring Resident Evil’s Raccoon City, the sanity meter of Eternal Darkness:
Sanity’s Requiem (2002) (which causes players to share protagonist’s fear-induced
hallucinations), and the “panic mode” of Haunting Ground (where the avatar, if
scared by too-close an encounter with one of the many monstrous antagonists, runs
erratically, knocking into walls and stumbling down stairs), are all examples of how,
unlike other games which “try to ease players into a level of mastery or control,”
survival horror games “attempt to prevent mastery following the traditions of the

459
 — Ewan Kirkland —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

Gothic to increase the power of horror” (Taylor 2009: 52). Other aspects of Gothic
fiction incorporated into survival horror structures include the textual fragments
through which Gothic and game stories are constructed, the sense of lost histories
uncovered through paintings, sculptures and letters uncovered by survival horror
heroes and heroines, and the presence of anachronistic media technologies – Silent
Hill’s radio, Fatal Frame’s camera, Resident Evil’s typewriter – which foreground a
preoccupation with language, representation, and textuality within both literary and
videogame genres. Niedenthal observes the emphasis on puzzle-solving in survival
horror videogames and Gothic literature (Niedenthal 2009: 170). Puzzles in these
games are typically arcane, involving such artifacts as grandfather clocks, revolving
stone statues, the manipulation of creaking mechanical devices, and the location of
numerous keys to open various mysterious locked doors. Although often taking
place in the present day, there is a sense of Stern’s neo-medievalism in these games’
settings and aesthetics; consistent with the traditional Gothic, they are accompanied
by the presence of magical or supernatural elements. Distinguishable from more
frenetic horror games, such as the first person shooter Quake (1996), the lightgun
game House of the Dead (1996), or the comical tower defense game Plants vs
Zombies (2009), which simply incorporate horror aesthetics into pre-existing video-
game genres, survival horror produces a sense of anxiety, disquiet, tension and fear,
leading Bernard Perron to suggest “these kinds of games would be more aptly called
survival terror” (Perron 2004). It is this distinction between horror and terror which
locates the gameplay and experience of these games in the realm of the Gothic.

SHATTERED STORIES, SHATTERED SPACES, SHATTERED

PSYCHES: SILENT HILL
A game series which clearly exemplifies the Gothic nature of survival horror videog-
ames is Konami’s long running franchise Silent Hill. A recurring title in academic
and popular discussions of the sub-genre, the series, in its narrative structure, game-
play and themes, underlines the relationship between the videogame form and a
particularly contemporary version of the Gothic. The story of this game, unfolding
unevenly across several titles, is a distinctly Gothic one. In the small American town
of Silent Hill, a young girl named Alessa Gillespie is brought into being by an ancient
cult, and is destined to become the vessel for the order’s dark god. As she matures,
Alessa starts to exhibit strange powers, eventually rebelling against the cult and
refusing to do their bidding. In anger at the young girl’s defiance, her adoptive
mother, Dalia, sets fire to the family home in an attempt to burn her alive, destroying
part of the town in the process. Faced with death, Alessa uses her mystical powers to
split herself. Part of her is reborn as an infant found at a roadside by a childless
couple, while the rest continues to live in a burned and blackened body that refuses
to die, kept in the basement of the local hospital.
This story of secret societies, bizarre religions, abusive families and split person-
alities also exhibits, in typically Gothic form, an ambiguous, inconsistent and frag-
mented structure. Not only are the details of Silent Hill’s story told, in traditional
survival horror style, through a combination of game spaces, found objects, docu-
ments, paintings and inscriptions, but the narrative unfolds across different titles, in
different ways, following different protagonists. Unlike many game franchises in

460
 — chapter 38: Gothic and survival horror videogames —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

which the main character is consistent across sequels, each installment of Silent Hill
features a different playable character at its center. The hero of the first game, set
some years after the events described above, is Harry Mason, the man who found
Alessa’s infant split self, and whose adopted daughter, Cheryl, is trying to unite with
her other half. Silent Hill 3 (2003) centers on Heather, a further splitting of Alessa,
who comes to the town to avenge her father’s death at the hands of the religious cult.
Silent Hill: Origins (2007) starts with truck driver Travis rescuing the young Alessa
from her burning home. In some games, such as Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
(2009), the story being told seems radically inconsistent with the rest of the games,
while in others, such as Silent Hill 2 (2002) or Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008),
events are only tangentially related to this master narrative. The presence of multiple
endings is central to this ambiguity. Some conclusions to the first game have Harry
leaving with an infant – the protagonist of Silent Hill 3 – while others have him leave
alone, a conclusion which precludes events in the third sequel. Another more
dramatic ending sees Harry dead at the wheel of his car, suggesting the entire game,
and presumably each subsequent installment, is a posthumous hallucination.
Multiple endings in videogames traditionally all tell a single story consistent with the
historical events unfolding within the diagesis of the gamespace. In Silent Hill,
different endings draw radically different conclusions concerning the events of the
town. Throughout the franchise, the exact nature of Silent Hill, the reason that
the town is all but deserted, full of grotesque monsters and haunted by events
from the past, is never entirely made clear. This ambivalence, along with the
disjointed, multi-narrative, multi-perspectival way in which its narrative unfolds,
makes Silent Hill an extremely Gothic text.
With few exceptions, the Silent Hill games exhibit all the characteristics of classic
survival horror. Protagonists are ordinary people – a journalist, a truck driver, a
teenage girl – forced to battle grotesque creatures armed with wooden planks, span-
ners, bottles and other improvised weaponry. Puzzles are typically baroque or
grotesque – arranging hospital gurneys, organizing fairytale music boxes, placing
masks on corpses – while locations across the series include hospitals, prisons, a
graveyard, a corrupted funfair and an insane asylum. The sense of entrapment is also
palpably felt in Silent Hill. Traditionally, play starts with the discovery of a map
showing the extensive streets of the town. Soon after exploration begins, players
become aware that their movement is restricted by barriers and broken roads,
resulting in the various routes around Silent Hill being crossed out on the map.
Eventually, a single pathway through the space is all that remains, inevitably leading
to the entrance of one of Silent Hill’s unpleasant residential areas, businesses or
public buildings. This Gothic sense of unseen supernatural forces working to manip-
ulate the protagonist is brutally underlined in the opening moments of the Silent Hill
franchise. The first game starts with the protagonist waking behind the wheel of his
crashed car. The player then controls Harry around a small section of the town,
guided by fleeting images of his lost daughter running away into the fog. Night
suddenly falls and he finds himself locked in a dead alleyway. Throughout this level,
the player is pulled in a single direction, unable to deviate from the direction of
Cheryl’s flight. Once trapped, the protagonist is immediately surrounded by shuf-
fling monsters and, armed only with a lit match, is abruptly slain; the character then
wakes as if from a dream, lying in a Silent Hill diner, and the “real” game begins.

461
 — Ewan Kirkland —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

This particularly shocking start to the videogame underlines the confusion between
reality and fantasy, waking and dreaming, sanity and madness that permeates the
series and the spaces it features.
This blurring is exemplified by the Otherworld which periodically intrudes into
the gamespace, often heralded by the sound of sirens, transforming the town into a
grotesque doppelgänger of itself. This is a place of darkness and dereliction, where
walls and floors appear smeared with blood and excrement, architecture dissolves
into rusty grills and rotating fan blades, corridors are filled with soiled mattresses,
discarded medical equipment and upturned wheelchairs. This is the world of “dehu-
manised environments, machinic doubles and violent, psychotic fragmentation,” all
of which, for Botting, reflects a further homology between the postmodern and the
Gothic (Botting 1999: 157). A common reading of the series is that the Otherword
represents a physical expression of mystical Alessa’s turmoil, contaminating the
spaces of Silent Hill with images inspired by her incarceration as she lies in agony in
the basement of the Alchemella Hospital. Characteristic of the obscurity that
Niedenthal observes in Gothic videogames, Otherworld spaces are both visually
obscured – frequently cloaked in darkness beyond the protagonist’s flashlight – and
ontologically obscure, a profound ambivalence surrounding their nature or origin.
Across the Silent Hill series the Otherworld frequently reflects the psychology of the
protagonist, to the point where, as Marc C. Santos and Sarah E. White demonstrate,
it is unclear whether the grotesque worlds the player negotiates are the result of
supernatural forces or the character’s own psychosis (Santos and White 2005). In
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories the Otherworld is characterized by ice, suggesting
the protagonist’s sense of being frozen in the past. In the alternative hospital level of
Silent Hill 3, in a literal rendering of Skirrow’s claims concerning videogame spaces,
the walls pulse a womb-like, bloody red, signifying the heroine’s journey toward her
mother. In Silent Hill 2 a hotel level alternates between the building as remembered
by the protagonist from a past visit, and its actual state as a derelict site.
While survival horror videogames reflect many characteristics of the Gothic,
Silent Hill bears many parallels with a particularly American Gothic sensibility.
Although Japanese in origin, the series is clearly informed by American horror
culture, something self-reflexively evident in the naming of Silent Hill streets after
American horror and suspense writers. Significantly, the traumatic historical event
around which the series circulates is one of child abuse, reflecting what Lucie Armitt
sees as a recurring theme in Gothic fiction in the latter decades of the twentieth
century: concerns surrounding perceived threats to children (Armitt 2011: 3). Silent
Hill also embodies what Bernice M. Murphy calls “the suburban Gothic”: fiction
which reflects and vindicates “the niggling suspicion that something dark lurks
below suburbia’s peaceful facade” (Murphy 2009: 1). Before it transforms, Silent
Hill is all white picket fences, well-kept lawns, diners and burger bars. In his consid-
eration of a nationally specific articulation of Gothic themes, Eric Savoy identifies a
literary tradition which “expresses a profound anxiety about historical crimes . . .
that cast their shadow over what many would like to be the sunny American
republic” (Savoy 2004: 168). This is the darkness which consumes the seemingly
banal town of Silent Hill in its transformation by the Otherworld, while Alessa is the
embodiment of the return of a ghostly, uncanny repressed which, as Savoy in his
psychoanalytically-informed reading argues, haunts the pages of American Gothic

462
 — chapter 38: Gothic and survival horror videogames —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

fiction. The traumatic historical Real, both attractive and repulsive, entailing a
simultaneous desire to know and a flight from that knowledge, is symbolized by the
“monstrous history” of Alessa’s abuse, the horrific nature of which can only unfold
in a fragmented, non-linear, indirect manner, via characters not directly related to
the girl and her story. In line with Savoy’s claims that American Gothic writers
critiqued notions of America as “land of the free” through narratives in which
protagonists find themselves compelled to repeat the mistakes of the past, Silent Hill,
the quintessential small American town, controls the movement of the player through
roads ripped apart by unseen forces, with corridors blocked with rusted hospital
machinery, and spatial organization which draws players toward psychologically
significant buildings, rooms and spaces. The transformative power of the Otherworld
irrupts like a primeval irrational force, symbolizing the abuses suffered by the young
girl Alessa, Silent Hill’s tragic mad woman in the basement.

REFERENCES
Armitt, L. (2011) Twentieth-Century Gothic, Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Becker, S. (1999) Gothic Forms of Feminine Fictions, Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Botting, F. (1999) Gothic. London: Routledge.
—— (2004) “AfterGothic: Consumption, Machines, and Black Holes,” in J.E. Hogle
(ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 277–300.
Crawford, G. and Rutter, J. (2006) “Digital Games and Cultural Studies,” in J. Rutter
and J. Bryce (eds) Understanding Digital Games, London: Sage, 148–65.
Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S., Smith, J.H., and Tosca, S.P. (2008) Understanding Video Games:
The Essential Introduction, London: Routledge.
Jenkins, H. (2004) “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” in N. Wardrip-Fruin
and P. Harrigan (eds) First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game,
London: MIT Press, 118–30.
Johnson, B. (2006) “The writing is on the wall: computer games rot the brain,”
Telegraph, December 28. Online. Available HTTP: <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
comment/personal-view/3635699/The-writing-is-on-the-wall-computer-games-rot-
the-brain.html> (accessed November 21, 2012).
Krzywinska, T. (2008) “World Creation and Lore: World of Warcraft As Rich Text,”
in H.G. Comeliussen and J.W. Rettberg (eds) Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A
World of Warcraft Reader, London: MIT Press, 123–41.
Lloyd-Smith, A. (1996) “Postmodernism/Gothicism,” in V. Sage and A. Lloyd Smith
(eds) Modern Gothic: A Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 7–19.
Murphy, B.M. (2009) The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Newman, J. (2008) Playing With Videogame, London: Routledge.
Niedenthal, S. (2009) “Patterns of Obscurity: Gothic Setting and Light in Resident
Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2,” in B. Perron (ed.) Horror Video Games: Essays on the
Fusion of Fear and Play, London: McFarland, 168–79.
Perron, B. (2004) “Sign of a Threat: The Effects of Warning Systems in Survival Horror
Games.” Online. Available HTTP: <http://ludicine.ca/sites/ludicine.ca/files/Perron_
Cosign_2004.pdf > (accessed September 29, 2012).
Punter, D. (1996) The Literature of Terror, Volume 1: The Gothic Tradition, London:
Longman.

463
 — Ewan Kirkland —
Downloaded By: 10.3.97.143 At: 04:56 30 Oct 2023; For: 9780203490013, chapter38, 10.4324/9780203490013.ch38

Punter, D. and Byron, G. (2006) The Gothic, Oxford: Blackwell.

Rouse III, R. (2009) “Match Made in Hell: The Inevitable Success of the Horror Genre
in Video Games,” in B. Perron (ed.) Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of
Fear and Play, London: McFarland, 15–25.
Sage, V. and Lloyd-Smith, A. (1996) “Introduction,” in V. Sage and A. Lloyd-Smith
(eds) Modern Gothic: A Reader, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1–5.
Santos, M.C. and White, S.E. (2005) “Playing with Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic
Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill,” in N. Garrelts (ed.) Digital Gameplay:
Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 69–79.
Savoy, E. (2004) “The Rise of American Gothic,” in J.E. Hogle (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 167–88.
Skirrow, G. (1986) “Hellivision: An Analysis of Video Games,” in C. MacCabe (ed.)
High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 115–42.
Smith, A. (2007) Gothic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Spooner, C. (2007) “Gothic Media,” in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy (eds) The Routledge
Companion to Gothic, London: Routledge 195–97.
Stern, E. (2002) “A Touch of the Medieval: Narrative, Magic, and Computer
Technology in Massively Multiplayer Computer Role-Playing Games,” in F. Mayra
(ed.) Computer Games and Digital Cultures: Conference Proceedings, Tampere:
Tampere University Press. Online. Availible HTTP: <http://www.eddostern.com/
texts/Stern_TOME.html.> (accessed September 29, 2012).
Taylor, L.N. (2009) “Gothic Bloodlines in Suvival Horror Gaming,” in B. Perron (ed.)
Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play, London: McFarland,
46–61.

FURTHER READING
Carr, D. (2006) “Space, Navigation and Affect,” in D. Carr, et al. (eds) Computer
Games: Text, Narrative and Play, Cambridge: Open University Press, 59–71. (An
engaging exploration of the use of gamespace in generating horror affect.)
Kirkland, E. (2009) “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and its Remediations,”
Games and Culture 4.2: 115–26. (Discusses further the use of uncanny media in
horror videogames.)
King, G. and Krzywinska, T. (2002) Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces,
London: Wallflower Press. (A collection considering the relationship between games
and cinema, notable particularly for Krzywinska’s own “Hands-on horror”
206–23.)
Whittaker, J. (2007) “Gothic and New Media,” in C. Spooner and E. McEvoy (eds)
The Routledge Companion to Gothic, London: Routledge, 270–79. (Presents an
engaging argument for the Gothic nature of new media reading practices.)

464