Videogames and the Gothic 9781032073989, 9780367460228, 9781003026501

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Videogames and the Gothic

This book explores the many ways Gothic literature and media have informed videogame design. Through a series of detailed case studies, Videogames and the Gothic illustrates the extent to which particular tropes of Gothic culture – neomedieval aesthetics, secret-filled labyrinthine spaces, the sense of a dark past impacting upon the present – have been appropriated by and transformed within digital games. Moving beyond the study of the generic influences of horror on digital gaming, Ewan Kirkland focuses in on the Gothic, a less visceral mode tending towards the unsettling, the uncertain and the uncanny. He explores the extent to which imagery, storylines and narrative preoccupations taken from Gothic fiction facilitate the affordances and limitations of the videogame medium. A core contention of this book is that videogames have developed as an inherently Gothic form of popular entertainment. Arguing for close proximity between Gothic culture and the videogame medium itself, this book will be a key contribution to both Gothic and digital game scholarship; as such, it will have resonance with scholars and students in both fields, as well as those interested in Gothic novels, media and popular culture, digital games and interactive fiction. Ewan Kirkland is Principal Lecturer in Animation and Games Art & Design at the University of Brighton, UK.

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Videogames and the Gothic

Ewan Kirkland

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Ewan Kirkland The right of Ewan Kirkland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kirkland, Ewan, author. Title: Videogames and the gothic / Ewan Kirkland. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Routledge advances in game studies | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021015391 (print) | LCCN 2021015392 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367460228 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032073989 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003026501 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Video games--Design. | Video games--Design--Case studies. | Gothic literature. | Gothic literature--Case studies. | Goth culture (Subculture) | Goth culture (Subculture)--Case studies. Classification: LCC GV1469.37 .K57 2022 (print) | LCC GV1469.37 (ebook) | DDC 794.8/1525--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015391 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015392 ISBN: 978-0-367-46022-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07398-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02650-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501 Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

To Grandma Betty (1920–)

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii 1

1

Haunting Ground

26

2

BioShock

46

3

Gone Home

66

4

What Remains of Edith Finch

84

5

Night in the Woods

Conclusion Bibliography Index

103 122 128 137

Acknowledgements

To Emily Marlow and Lauren Nixon whose 2018 conference, ‘Gaming the Gothic’, kickstarted this project. Had it not been for your kind invitation, none of this would have happened. Also to Dawn Stobbart, and all the reviewers who contributed to the development of this project. To C for accompanying me on my first trip to Possum Springs. To B for the gift of Tetris Effect and Bendy and the Ink Machine. And to my darkling L. Your love, support and shared fascination with dark fiction are an eternal source of strength and inspiration.

Introduction

The Gothic spectrum Jet Set Willy is the 1984 sequel to Manic Miner (1983), a flip-screen platform game synonymous with early British home computers. The game unfolds within a labyrinthine mansion, the recent purchase of nouveau riche playboy Miner Willy. Following a particularly wild party, Willy’s overbearing housekeeper, Maria, has refused her employer rest until every glittering piece of revelry-related rubbish scattered around the house has been collected. Exploring the mansion uncovers a procession of increasingly archaic locations, such as a chapel, battlements, a watchtower, a forgotten abbey and a priest’s hole. Grizzly monsters patrol these arcane spaces, including fork-wielding devils, armoured guards, gnashing skulls and Cthulhu-styled floating jellyfish. Colliding with any one of these macabre creatures results in loss of a life. Adding to the horrors are a nightmare room where the protagonist momentarily transforms into a winged pig, and the entrance to Hades which lies beneath the house’s front door. Willy’s home is literally built on hell. The game’s inlay card obliquely references strange activities in the deepest recesses of the house, the mysterious disappearance of the mansion’s previous owner while working in his laboratory, and a warning not to go into the attic. With good reason. In a peculiar twist, a bug in the original code for Jet Set Willy meant after visiting the attic, entering particular screens led to unavoidable repeated death and the game’s termination. This glitch persisted even after the game restarted, requiring the lengthy process of rebooting and reloading the cassette to be effectively replayed. Aside from this peculiar digital haunting, various elements imply onscreen events might actually be projections of the beleaguered hero’s addled senses, suffering a hallucinogenic post-party come-down. Willy begins the game fully clothed in the bath, a possible attempt to sober up. There are clear implications that the playboy is seeking treatment for alcohol dependency in the room entitled ‘Dr Jones will never believe this’ with a giant pink elephant in its centre. The off-licence at the end of Willy’s driveway, affording players a dozen objects for collection, all within relatively easy reach, implicates dipsomania in the very mechanics of gameplay. A trip to the wine merchants’ is amply rewarded by the game’s point system. Despite its cartoon aesthetic, and early computer game culture’s associations with juvenile gamers, Jet Set Willy is far from innocent. DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-1

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Introduction

Failure to complete the game results in the spectacle of Willy, deliberately positioned on a whisky barrel, being squashed by a giant foot in a cruel and ritualistic display of public humiliation. There are sexual, even Freudian, overtones to Maria blocking entry to the master bedroom with its four-poster bed. Tapping her foot and wagging her finger, the housekeeper’s performance of matronly severity approximates that of a comic-strip ‘battleaxe’ wife, or, in the eyes of a youngster playing the game in the 1980s, a strict mother. No evidence indicates the bedroom coder of Jet Set Willy, a fittingly obscure and mythic figure in the history of early British videogames, was influenced by Gothic fiction or criticism. Neither, it seems, was the coder designing a horror videogame. With its colourful palate and cutesy aesthetics, Willy’s mansion is far removed from the shadowy gloom of traditional Gothic settings. Grotesque monsters exist alongside more humorous obstacles: ice-skating penguins, rolling eggs and pirouetting mice. The game combines comedy and surrealism, together with a British cultural sensibility specific to games of this era, seen in the descending Pythonesque foot which concludes every unsuccessful attempt to tidy Willy’s mansion. Nevertheless, the ease with which Gothic tropes emerge from this relatively simple 48K game, with its mysterious mansion, malevolent animated objects, biblical and cosmic monstrosities, and unreliable protagonist, points to a Gothic haunting of the medium, conscious or otherwise, since its early years. A historical overview of digital games evidences how frequently designers drew on traditions of Gothic fiction, in titles featuring labyrinthine spaces, ghostly adversaries, uncanny artefacts and bedevilled heroes. Viewing games from a Gothic perspective allows dark analytical insights to emerge. Returning to Jet Set Willy, the protagonist’s starting point in the bathtub, rather than reflecting efforts to sober himself up, might instead indicate a failed attempt to end his life. As Dan Whitehead points out, in a brief analysis of the game, the first room players enter features an animated pen knife, a razor blade and a barrel of alcohol, suggesting the house is trying to kill its owner and frame the death as self-inflicted (2012, 16). Darker still, Willy’s watery start might indicate not a failed but successful suicide attempt. Such an interpretation would render the entire game a ghastly afterlife, comprising twisted features of the protagonist’s hedonistic lifestyle, returning to torment him for his decadent excesses. No wonder the game’s rumoured sequel, Miner Willy Meets the Taxman, failed to materialise. As Graeme Pedlingham observes: ‘The videogame has a long-standing and largely unwritten history of entanglement with the Gothic’ (2015, 151). This study intends to explore this tangled history. Before embarking upon this project, a definition of the term ‘Gothic’ is required. However, quantifying this term proves characteristically tricky. Complications surrounding attempts to pin down any generic category are exacerbated by uncertainty as to whether the Gothic represents a genre in the traditional sense. It might be variously regarded as a cycle, a trend, a collection of narrative tropes and traditions, an aesthetic and thematic disposition, a cluster of stock characters, settings and situations, or a descriptive and analytic tool. Various telling images have been used to express the

Introduction 3 partial, tonal, indistinct nature of these elements. In a frequently cited introduction to an edited collection of Gothic stories, Chris Baldick describes the Gothic ‘colouring’ of Victorian novels by Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens (2009, xviii). David Stevens points to advantages in considering the Gothic more a ‘tendency’ than a clear and consistent movement (2008, 31), while David Punter and Glennis Byron make the point that novels which might not be considered Gothic could nevertheless feature ‘Gothic moments’ (2010, 295). Like ‘fantasy’ as defined by Neil Cornwell, the Gothic resembles a ‘mode’, an ‘impulse’, a ‘transgeneric literary quality’ (1990, 31). Rather than a genre, the Gothic might be understood as a shade, a shadow which darkens some texts to lesser or greater degrees, without assuming a solid presence in its own right. Some cultural products are so dark they appear overwhelmed by Gothic tones, to the point where nothing else seems visible. In other cases, the Gothic exists as accents or highlights, throwing more cheery aspects into relief, or providing an outline that allows other qualities to stand out. To this extent, the Gothic operates not as a definitive quality, but on a spectrum. Even the brightest of media might be touched by Gothic inflections, affording the form a pervasive yet simultaneously elusive quality. The Gothic covers a wide range of texts, media and experiences across different historical periods. But one defining theme of Gothic fiction remains constant: a scenario in which the past returns to haunt the present. This simple formula affords considerable variation, dependent on the character of its components and their different relationships. The location of this past might be centuries, decades, years ago, or merely a matter of hours. The past might be characterised by the medieval iconography of the Dark Ages, it may assume Victorian aesthetics and locations, or could adopt the styles of previous decades from the modern era. The returning past is frequently characterised by horror, violence or death, and with few exceptions imposes a disruptive influence upon the present. But it can be benign, a force for truth and justice, righting wrongs and ensuring everyone gets their just deserts. The past exists in dialogue with the present, and this conversation also assumes various accents within the Gothic scenario. In some situations, the present is analogous to enlightenment, security, or complacency, which the past threatens to compromise. In others, the present is characterised by oppression, injustice, a sense of misalignment, imbalance or incompleteness, which the past attempts to reconcile. Some Gothic narratives draw proximities between past and present, as though one reflects, echoes or repeats the other. This relationship constitutes one of the Gothic’s greatest sources of tension and creativity. The nature of Gothic haunting also varies considerably from tale to tale. Hauntings might be literal, in the form of ghosts or supernatural entities, connected not only with historical pasts but originating in the beliefs of previous cultures and societies. Hauntings may be documentary, involving recently discovered information concerning forgotten deeds which come to light through rational methods of investigation and research. Hauntings may assume the form of uncovered objects pointing to some hidden injustice, a dusty skeleton evidencing violent crimes, or secret rooms revealing clandestine activities. A key lesson of Gothic narratives is

4

Introduction

that the past is never entirely consigned to history but exerts an ambivalent influence on the present. For this reason, Gothic stories are frequently characterised by a sense of darkness, menace, uncertainty and mystery. This study draw upon scholars of Gothic media and culture in illustrating the extent videogames employ tropes and traditions associated with this pervading and persistent brand of popular entertainment. The work of videogame academics, focussing on horror games, as well as authors with a broader non-generic remit, will be productively employed to explore the Gothic nature of specific titles, and the videogame medium in general. Although organised around a series of chapterlength case studies, containing detailed analyses of Haunting Ground (2005), BioShock (2007), Gone Home (2013), What Remains of Edith Finch (2017) and Night in the Woods (2017), this publication intends to argue there is something inherently Gothic about the videogame medium, which these exemplary titles foreground. Videogames have always featured labyrinthine spaces, patrolling ghouls, locked doors, secret rooms, hidden passageways, arcane puzzles, and death. Games designers working across different series, cycles and genres have incorporated dungeons and dragons, neo-medieval fantasy, spooky houses, dark industrial spaces, detective protagonists and narratives of traumatic pasts into their work. The prominence of these tropes, all traceable back to traditions within Gothic fiction, shows how the Gothic mode suits the particular requirements of the videogame format, just as war and science fiction genres have proven useful for games designers. This study explores intersections between the Gothic and the videogame, aiming to shed light, if such a metaphor is appropriate, on the closely tangled relationship between the two.

Gothic histories Broadly speaking, the Gothic refers to various branches of popular culture which emerged in the eighteenth century, exhibiting a complex engagement with the spooky, the ambivalent, the unsettling, and the uncanny. Given the moment of its emergence, and its continuous revival and resurgence throughout the modern period, many critics consider Gothic fiction a response to contemporary concerns regarding industrialisation, urbanisation, massification and the displacement of religion, spiritualism and superstition by scientific rationality. Anxieties circulating the very processes of history itself are implicated in fiction concerned with ongoing relationships between past and present. Preoccupations with modernity seem at odds with the pervasive presence of neo-medieval imagery across the genre, particularly in early incarnations, which assumed an uneven source of melancholy, nostalgia and malevolence. Some Gothic media, particularly of the Romantic period, regard the medieval past a lost period of beauty, coherence and harmony. Others see it as a world of darkness, violence and oppression. Later fiction transposes the architecture, archetypes and anxieties of earlier Gothic work onto urban, industrial, suburban and post-industrialised settings. The Gothic is heavily associated with well-known novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll

Introduction 5 and Mr Hyde (1886), and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898). From a literary perspective, significant lesser-known eighteenth-century Gothic novels, predating these famous examples, include Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a publication commonly considered to be ‘the inaugural Gothic romance’ (Luckhurst, 2019, 261), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The Romantic poetry of Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Shelley and classic fiction authored by Austen, Dickens, Wilde and the Brontës feature heavily in histories of Gothic fiction. Gothic qualities have also been identified in the most revered works of English literature. ‘Scratch the surface of any Gothic fiction,’ E. J. Clery asserts, in a chapter exploring the genesis of the mode, ‘and the debt to Shakespeare will be there.’ Ghastly witches, ghostly apparitions, fevered visions and supernatural imagery feature across the playwright’s tragedies and histories (2010, 30). Pre-dating print media, Gothic culture can also be found in folk and fairy tales, such as Bluebeard, Cinderella, Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood. At the other chronological extreme, celebrated twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury authors of the Gothic include Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates, Octavia E. Butler, James Herbert, V. C. Andrews and Poppy Z. Bright. More contemporary publications include Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory (1984), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Iain Sinclair’s Landor’s Tower (2001). As this range makes clear, to identify a literary text as Gothic indicates certain aesthetic, narrative and thematic elements, overriding stark differences in genre, tone, style and origin. Although closely connected with horror, not all horror fiction is Gothic, and Gothic fiction does not necessarily have to be horrifying. Many examples, including the case studies considered in this publication, contain no monsters or supernatural elements, only a sense of suspense, a preoccupation with the criminal and the perverse, and an uncertainty as to whether unsettling entities are real or emerge from their narrator’s overwrought imagination. The leaky body of work considered Gothic is made more problematic by the fluidity of its tropes and conventions. A review of Gothic critical scholarship reveals significant discussion and dispute concerning the status of some seemingly canonical texts. Having spent much time exploring Wuthering Heights (1847), Andrew Smith admits the novel is not conventionally Gothic, while undeniably exhibiting the extent to which Gothic components were infiltrating fiction of the period (2008, 72). By contrast, Ellen Moers, in an earlier exploration of female Gothic, more forcefully identifies qualities of the genre throughout the novel, including ‘the graveyard lusts and wandering ghosts; the mysterious foundling and tyrannical father; the family doom, repeated generation after generation; the revenge motif; and the aroma of incest’ (1978, 100). Gina Wisker argues it is possible to re-read the work of modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Edith Wharton, as featuring Gothic elements (2016, 25). In such contexts, the Gothic is less a genre and more a critical perspective. Texts are not so much Gothic in a categorical sense but are instead more or less open to Gothic interpretation, and the fruitful exploration of Gothic perspectives by critics, readers and writers.

6

Introduction

Gothic fiction is characterised by contradictions, ambivalence and incongruities. Inconsistencies exist within Gothic texts themselves, throughout the history of the genre’s development, and across the Gothic canon. All generic boundaries and points of origins have necessary arbitrary qualities. The Gothic, a mode frequently taking the confusion of boundary and uncertainty of origin stories as its narrative theme, is no exception. The precise moment of the Gothic’s genesis is open to debate (Russell, 2016, 55). Many scholars demonstrate how contemporary understandings of ‘Gothic’, as associated with narratives of terror and the supernatural, only emerged in the twentieth century (Townshend and Wright, 2016, 15). According to Markman Ellis, not until the 1920s did the Gothic novel became recognised, or defined, as a distinct literary form (2000, 12). Punter and Byron observe the word originates in the name given to a Germanic people blamed for the destruction of the Roman Empire. Indicative of the word’s mobility, ‘Gothic’ was subsequently applied to anything associated with medievalism, between the Roman Empire’s collapse and the Renaissance. It encapsulated all the classical past and modern present was considered not to be: primitive, irrational, uncivilised, superstitious, uncultured (2010, 3–4). When Walpole’s novel was first published, the term implied a period of anarchy and barbarism, the obsolete and the outlandish (Clery, 2010, 21). Insofar as modern usage refers to this largely mythologised era, the Gothic is inherently manufactured. As Jerrold E. Hogle bluntly states, in the first sentence introducing an edited collection on the subject, ‘Gothic fiction is hardly “Gothic” at all. It is an entirely post-medieval and even postRenaissance phenomenon’ (2010, 1). Historically situating the genre, and its criticism, Maggie Kilgour notes how the ‘Gothic novel’ is a contradiction in terms. While the former refers to the past, the latter implies something new, original, novel (2006, 17–18). Walpole’s book, the first to coin the term, if not the first publication to employ a Gothic style, acknowledged its own mission was to bring together two elements from different historical traditions. In this respect, Gothic culture is inherently at odds with itself. Subsequent Gothic publications persisted in combining often disparate elements, contributing to the complications of categorical definition. Cornwell (1990, 79) lists the numerous genres written by E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose works contribute to the early canon, including a fairy tale, myths, ghost stories and various forms of fantasy. Jacqueline Howard, in a Bakhtinian study of the genre, notes how Gothic texts combine multiple registers, including the supernatural, the sublime and the uncanny, but also different written formats, such as folk tales, letters and poems (1994, 13). The ‘plural form’ of the Gothic incorporates discursive structures from literary and non-literary registers of communication, including modern modes of ‘professional jargon’ from pedagogic, medical, legal and theological sources (ibid., 16). Despite originating in European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Gothic has subsequently found expression across different historical periods, national and geographical regions, leading to multiple sub-genres of the sub-genre. Prolific Gothic scholar Fred Botting identifies branches aligned with specific historical periods, regimes and movements, including eighteenth-century Gothic, Victorian, modern and

Introduction 7 post-modern Gothics (2001, 1). In studying contemporary Gothic culture, Mark Edmundson distinguishes between ‘terror Gothic’, exemplified by the early work of Radcliffe and Lewis, ‘apocalyptic Gothic’ represented by Shelley’s science fiction, and ‘internalized Gothic’ influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis (1997, 7). Observing the many sub-categories related to gender and sexuality, Wisker identifies women’s Gothic, feminist Gothic and lesbian Gothic (2016, 7–9). Howard refers to ‘Pseudo-Scientific Gothic’ within early nineteenth-century writing, which moved away from the ‘explained’ or ‘accepted’ supernatural of previous iterations (1994, 9). Monographs and edited collections reveal the multiple iterations of the style within academic circles. Irish (Sage, 2012), Japanese (Inouye, 2012) and Australian (Gelder, 2007) Gothics exist as critical categories, alongside many other national strands. American Gothic is a much-explored branch, and Charles L. Crow identifies further sub-genres within this literary tradition. These include Southern Gothic, New England Gothic (2009, 134–5) and California noir (ibid., 143) associated with Tennessee Williams, Shirley Jackson and Raymond Chandler respectively. Botting offers the term ‘Girly-girly Gothic’, referencing a romanticised New Orleanscentred Southern American brand, exemplified by Anne Rice’s vampire series (2007a, 207–8). Shifting from a regional to historic register, Matthew Wynn Sivils (2014) writes of an American Frontier Gothic, entailing fear of the ‘New World’ wilderness and the imagined hostile intentions of those living beyond European settled communities. For other scholars, geographical and political factors are significant in distinguishing different forms of Gothic media. At odds with its neomedieval origins, Robert Mighall identifies an early nineteenth-century ‘Urban Gothic’ which transcribed earlier tropes from the neo-medieval to the city space (2007, 54, 78–9). Roger Luckhurst identifies a specific ‘London Gothic’ in recent literary fiction, resulting from the ‘creative destruction’ inherent in the city’s historic embodiment of modernity, qualities persisting in the contemporary architecture and organisation of the metropolis (2002, 531). Other brands of Gothic include suburban Gothic (Murphy, 2009), postmodern Gothic (Beville, 2009), queer Gothic (Haggerty, 2006), and imperial Gothic (Brantlinger, 1988). In Victorian publishing, Alison Milbank suggests the ‘Tory Gothic’ of contemporary Conservative periodicals (2010, 150), with Punter tentatively proposing a kind of ‘proletarian Gothic’ in bestselling novels of the 1830s and 1840s (1996a, 144–5). Gothic is itself known by many names. Baldick acknowledges alternative generic terms by which their edited anthology might be categorised, as ghost stories, horror stories, stories of the uncanny, the macabre and tales of terror (2009, xi). The Gothic is a potential sub-genre of romantic, horror or suspense fiction, while romance, horror and suspense fiction might exist as a sub-genre of the Gothic.

Multimedia Gothic Applying concepts drawn from Gothic studies to the analysis of videogames has the potential to cause consternation among scholars of literature and digital games alike. Such efforts may appear, to literary scholars, to constitute a

8

Introduction

wilfully confrontational attempt to apply high theory to low culture. Conversely, from the perspective of game studies, this endeavour may resemble a reductive effort to explore digital games using inappropriate concepts designed to analyse very different media. In an early collection exploring relationships between videogames and cinema, Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska address concerns that their publication resembles an ‘“imperialist” enterprise’ intended to claim game studies for film scholarship. Such a pre-emptive manoeuvre engages with an early school of game academics, who criticised the application of literary theory paradigms to text-based adventure games (2002, 3). Since the emergence of game studies as a field, many have rightfully expressed concern regarding the inappropriate imposition of frameworks derived from other disciplines, particularly those focussed around narrative culture, upon a medium with its own unique mode of operation. But discussing videogames as Gothic culture is not as radical an intervention as first appears. The majority of scholars within both disciplines would not be at all offended by claims, as this study asserts, that videogames can be situated within traditions of Gothic culture. Most critics acknowledge that the Gothic frequently transcends boundaries of taste, media and consumption practices. Gothic culture exists across multiple historical periods and formats, while occupying precarious positions in hierarchies of value. Always a popular mode, Gothic culture is commonly associated with mass audiences, unrefined sensibilities, cheap thrills and pleasures. Clive Bloom goes so far as to argue that ‘the gothic is the genre against which critics attempted to separate serious fiction from such popular entertainment and escapism’ (2007, 2). Gothic literature, in the 1790s and early 1800s, was considered by many commentators to be ‘overwritten, lacking propriety, even subversive’ (Howard, 1994, 238). The genre, as Botting argues, has historically being considered ‘overly sensational, improper and morally offensive’, not to mention ‘useless, indulgent, fanciful, monstrous and unedifying’. Playfully inverting Matthew Arnold’s famous description of improving literature, Botting describes Gothic scholarship as concerned with ‘the worst that has been thought and said’ (2001, 2–3). However, as Punter observes, despite its dubious reputation, many renowned poets and novelists expressed an interest in Gothic excess (1996a, 11), even if, as Dale Townshend and Angela Wright detail, in an assertion of taste hierarchies, these ‘Romantic’ writers participated in degrading contemporary ‘Gothic’ literature as ‘sickly and stupid’, ‘frantic’, both ‘idle and extravagant’ (2016, 5–6). Such perceptions may have shifted significantly over the years. Robert Miles comments upon how works by Radcliffe and Lewis have, since their publication, ‘moved inwards from the literary margins’ (2012, 94). Critical perspectives that Gothic culture is, or always was, necessarily subversive or countercultural are challenged, in the same volume as Botting’s introduction, by Punter and Elisabeth Bronfen. Their claim that ‘Gothic is now canonical in many different ways’ (2001, 7) is evident in the respected status of numerous novels mentioned above, many of which would be perfectly at home on undergraduate literature lists of recommended reading.

Introduction 9 Videogames occupy a similar precarious position as Gothic literature. In the opening chapter to a study of the medium, James Newman (2008) details suspicion surrounding digital gaming, commonly regarded as pacifying, stupefying, dangerous and corrupting, particularly for young people. Botting notes parallels between discourses circulating the social and psychological effects of computer games, and eighteenth-century concerns about the ‘idle indulgence’ of Romantic fiction and its impact on vulnerable readers (2010, 280–1). For significant periods of its history, as Punter points out, Gothic fiction was considered crude, sensationalist, sadistic and exploitative. In contrast to contemporary assertions that literature should elevate its readership intellectually and morally, ‘the Gothic writers appeared to give themselves no such tasks and to be quite content to pander to the minds and morals of their readers as they found them, and to portray unnaturalness in all its most lurid colours’ (1996a, 7–8). For games academics frustrated by the recurring controversy surrounding games, and the industry’s apparent complicity in generating self-publicising moral panics, this assessment will sound uncomfortably familiar. Since their emergence as a popular pastime, videogames have caused concern. Despite the revenue the industry generates, the broad range of games available on the market, and the medium’s longevity, videogames still occupy a position very much on the periphery of respectable culture. In many ways the form represents an exemplary brand of popular entertainment. For this reason, Henry Jenkins (2011) considers the computer game within the ‘lively art’ cultural tradition identified by Gilbert Seldes. Written in the 1920s, Seldes’ list included then-contemporary media such as jazz, Broadway musicals, comic strips and Hollywood cinema as part of this continuity. Like Gothic fiction, these emerging art forms challenge middle-brow tastes and values. Like Gothic media, pejoratively associated with mass entertainment of the machine age (Townshend and Wright, 2016, 8–9), these lively forms are an inexorable expression of modern social, technological and cultural developments. Like Gothic entertainment, their intended affect is more corporeal than cerebral, their aesthetics more extravagant than restrained, their pleasures more low-brow than high-brow. Yet videogames increasingly garner serious academic and critical attention. While in 2002 King and Krzywinska observed games to be ‘a relatively new and unstudied part of the global audio-visual entertainment industry’ (1), the subsequent decades have witnessed a considerable expansion of game studies within the academy. Writing in 2008, Steven E. Jones, an English professor of the Romantic period, points to the growing number of academic game scholars, courses and programmes across disciplines, busily interrogating cultural meanings within the medium (2008, 1). It is over ten years since Jones made such an observation, and two decades since Espen Aarseth declared 2001 ‘year zero’ in game scholarship. Publications in the field include studies exploring videogames and literature (Atkins, 2003), art (Tavinor, 2009) and philosophy (Cogburn and Silcox, 2009). Many titles considered in this volume have attracted serious critical attention from academics, journalists and gamers. One, BioShock, has been the focus of an edited collection on the title’s philosophical dimensions, containing chapters on morality, free will and phenomenology (Cuddy, 2015).

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In certain circles, certain games are becoming recognised as worthy cultural artefacts, a shift in status evidenced in a 2019 exhibition at London’s prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum (Foulston and Volsing, 2018). It would be no challenge to argue many videogames’ aesthetic, thematic and narrative borrowings from Gothic fiction contribute to the medium’s dubious cultural regard. Paradoxically, the proximities more celebrated titles share with Gothic literature simultaneously contribute to the respectability they enjoy. As demonstrated, the Gothic is nothing if not contradictory. That videogames have variously incorporated the Gothic into their generic field of influences is not surprising. Exploring women’s cinema, Helen Hanson describes the Gothic, in peculiarly sexual, female terms, as ‘an extremely promiscuous and fertile aesthetic and affective category which has proliferated across different media and cultural forms for over 200 years’. Throughout this period, practically every format has explored this mode, defined by ‘stylistic excess’, ‘the transgression of boundaries and values’ and ‘its ability to express, evoke and produce fear and anxiety’ (2007, 33–4). Across history, the Gothic, described by Bloom as ‘one of the most influential artistic styles and artistic genres of the last four centuries’ (2010, 2), has found a home within an array of cultural texts. To this extent, every format casts its own Gothic shadow. The style might even be defined by its non-monogamous cross-fertilisation between different media. Adaptation, plagiarism and parody have characterised the mode’s development, a convincing explanation for its persistence and longevity. The Gothic has its aesthetic origins in art and architecture (Punter and Byron, 2010, 32), but also ballads (Punter, 1996a, 10) and graveyard poetry (2007, 29–30). Hogle identifies Gothic elements throughout the nineteenth century, across plays, opera, stories in magazines and newspapers, poetry, paintings and novels. Into the twentieth century the tradition extends into emerging genres and forms of entertainment, including feature films, musical theatre and music videos (2010, 1–2). Sian MacArthur identifies Gothic influences in twenty-first-century serial drama, reality television, blockbuster cinema and bestselling novels (2011, 2), while, for Wisker, the Gothic influences advertising, clothes and tourism, together with contemporary literary genres, such as crime, romance and dystopian fantasy (2016, 5). The Gothic, albeit with a contracted name, was also a term associated with punk-orientated popular music which emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Cavallaro, 2002, 12). As many studies identify historically and nationally specific sub-genres of Gothic literature, similar multiplicity emerges from scholarly collections concerning the media implicated in Gothic traditions. These include studies of Gothic cinema (Kaye, 2012), music (van Elferen, 2012) and graphic novels (Round, 2012). In a recent publication on ‘happy Gothic’, Catherine Spooner (2017) observes self-conscious Gothic influences throughout mainstream culture, including popular films, children’s book illustrations, high street fashion, cookery shows, animation toy ranges and stand-up comedy performers. Botting even argues for the Gothic flavour of certain processed snacks (2008, 70–1). If, in the often-playful realm of Gothic scholarship, a packet of crisps displays

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such potential, Gothic videogames represent a comparatively commonplace proposition. Strands of Gothic culture frequently develop across different formats. For example, Bloom’s ‘Gothic orientalism’ appears throughout the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, the poetry and practices of Romantic artists, and the architectural style defining the stately pleasure dome of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion (2010, 37–9). The history of Gothic fiction is one of adaptation, translation and appropriation. Gothic culture has frequently entailed significant interplay across works, as one medium bleeds into another. Punter and Byron point to the art of John Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya, coinciding with Gothic fiction in depicting distorted psychological states (2010, 36–7). In theatre, many classic Gothic authors such as Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis either wrote for the stage or had novels translated into plays (Saglia, 2016, 73–4). Bloom writes of the Gothic exchange of techniques and technologies between nineteenth-century phantasmagoria, diorama and more traditional theatrical performances, themselves foreshadowing practices in cinema and theme park attractions (2010, 130–1). The Gothic novel Dracula, the author argues, received little attention until it was adapted for stage and screen (ibid., 166). Heidi Kaye concurs that Gothic cinema was based not on source novels, but on their theatrical adaptations, with performers reprising roles they played on stage (2012, 242). Julia Round argues Gothic culture and the graphic novel have a long relationship dating back to early woodcuttings of executions and nineteenth-century Penny Dreadfuls (2012, 335). Botting gestures towards the impact of cover illustrations on the adaptation of a Gothic novel into film (2008, 5), adding a further exchange between graphic interpretations across visual media. The Gothic is a profoundly transmedia genre, constantly assimilating, mutating, appropriating, and blurring boundaries between cultures and formats. This tendency towards cross-pollination makes videogames a fertile environment for Gothic adaptation. Echoing Bloom’s claim for the ubiquity of the Gothic, Jones states videogames represent arguably ‘the most influential form of popular expression and entertainment in today’s broader culture’. As with historical and contemporary incarnations of the Gothic, the videogame continues to be treated with suspicion as either a juvenile pastime, a medium dependent on generic narrative clichés, or a potential training ground for sexism, militarism and violence (2008, 1–2), Introducing the first scholarly journal exploring digital games, Aarseth (2001) asserts ‘computer games are not one medium, but many different media’. Here the author refers to the multitude of experiences which the term incorporates, including children’s electronic toys, mobile games and expansive online worlds. Such diversity, Aarseth argues, challenges any attempt to produce an all-encompassing critical approach to digital games which adequately accommodates the heterogeneity of the form. At the same time, Aarseth’s claim could equally be applied to videogame textuality. Consistent with many forms of contemporary digital culture, games are a broad combination of different media, including many impacted by Gothic shadows. To employ Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s (2000) term for the relationship between established and new digital culture, videogames have in various ways ‘remediated’ Gothic storytelling, architecture,

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costumes, dialogue and theatrical performance, animation, music, paintings, photography, posters and other examples of audio-visual art, design and popular culture. The multiple potential experiences generated by the format, and the multiple forms contained within the videogame, seem eminently suited to a mode notable for the fluid interplay between different texts and traditions. Of course, the porting of Gothic qualities from one medium to another is not straightforward. A format’s peculiar affordances and limitations necessarily inflect the ways these tropes are translated. A key argument articulated by Aarseth’s school of computer game scholarship, alluded to by King and Krzywinska (2002, 3), is that critical approaches relevant to one art form such as film, literature or drama are not necessarily applicable to another, such as digital games. Critical studies of videogames, as with any other discipline, must appreciate the contexts in which such content is framed. The most insightful studies contribute not only to an appreciation of the particular titles under investigation, but also illuminate the operation of the media and cultures in which they are situated. For example, Diego Saglia illustrates how Gothic theatre capitalised upon aspects unique to stage, such as the verbal and gestural features of performance. Even when content remained consistent, changes in contexts and technologies, such as the expansion of auditorium sizes, improvements in lighting and mechanised effects, resulted in increasing emphasis on Gothic theatrical components (2016, 88–90). Also exploring a visual medium, Kaye speculates how Gothic cinema might potentially limit the ambiguity or sympathy audiences feel towards a monster once visibly depicted on screen. The author also notes aspects such as complicity or voyeurism might be emphasised through the cinematic point of view shot (2012, 250). Hanson analyses how Hollywood’s female Gothic cycle, one demonstrably drawing upon traditions of women’s literature, foregrounds processes and negotiations surrounding female grooming, glamour and make-up (2007, 77). Implicit in such observations is the extent to which visual aspects of cinema, coupled with practices of film production and promotion, afford an extra dimension to the cycle’s engagement with the construction of women’s appearance. Round also considers the active experience of graphic novel consumption as effecting a particular haunting of the text. Readers fill in gaps between panels, adding sometimes violent motion to otherwise static images (2012, 336–7). The implication is that there is something inherently Gothic about the graphic novel form, brought to the fore when graphic novels tell Gothic stories. Live performance, optical perspective, discourses of glamour and stardom, panel gutters are all unique features of theatre, cinema and sequential art, and through Gothic adaptations and translations, we see these functions exploited for Gothic effect. Similarly, within videogames, Gothic experiences are transformed by the qualities of the format, impacted by successive developments in digital technologies, and the emergence of certain traditions, conventions and sub-genres. Medium-specific tensions between interactive agency and ludic control, the construction of vastly elaborate spaces, the generation of mechanical, inhuman, uncanny digital monsters, the transportation of players into different bodies and subjectivities, are qualities all potentially put to service in generating the Gothic videogame experience.

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Welcome to the world of ludic-Gothic Many literary and cultural scholars identify Gothic qualities in digital games. Among music videos, online publications, clothing and toys for children and adults, Punter considers the neo-Gothic interactive novel, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, a point-and-click adventure game released in 1993 (1996b, 145). Botting identifies Doom (1993) as representing contemporary Gothic, arguing the first-person shooter mobilises aspects of early novels in ‘continuing to play with patterns of anticipation, expectation, and uncertainty’ (2010, 277–8). Andrew Cutting discusses Matches & Matrimony: A Pride and Prejudice Tale (2009), a visual novel version of three Jane Austen novels intended for the ‘casual market’ (2011, 170). Other adaptations from book to digital media include puzzle games featuring Sherlock Holmes, American McGee’s Alice (2000) and Dante’s Inferno (2010), although Cutting notes the necessary translation of literary protagonists into videogame action heroes (ibid., 171–2). Scholars of current Gothic incarnations frequently note videogames’ assimilation of the form. Bloom mentions Resident Evil (1996), Diablo (1997), Silent Hill (1999) and Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (2002) as Gothic computer games (2010, 189). Amid references to O. J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey and Freddy Krueger, in a study of 1990s Gothic popular culture, Edmundson quotes a computer games company executive who remarks how hard it is to think of a best-selling CD game uninflected by the Gothic (1997, 46). Jason Whittaker lists Gothic videogame titles, such as The 7th Guest (1993), Planescape: Torment (1999) and, unsurprisingly, Gothic (2001). While largely concerned with online technologies’ facilitation of goth subcultures, Whittaker argues for a fit between the ‘disjunctive readings’ of new media and the ‘fractured and dismembered’ nature of the Gothic genre (2007, 271–2). Exploring Gothic music, Isabella van Elferen identifies unmistakable Gothic qualities in digital games, associated with the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the Salem witch trials. Gothic games include ghostly figures and medieval aesthetics, together with audio effects such as wind, leaking water, creaking floorboards and ‘floating female voices’ (2012, 112–13). From the ‘old dark house’ films of the 1930s, to stage illusions and Gothic novels, to computer games and the internet, Barry Curtis argues, the haunted space persists across visual culture. Of the videogame, the author writes: The portals, levels and prohibitions are frequently cast in forms that share a generic awareness of the archetypal oneiric house, castle or institution. The dreamlike way in which ‘games’ create space on demand relates to the uneasy relation between the filmic exploration of a ‘house’ and its plausible physical coordinates. (2008, 18–19) Many games take place in houses, and many are distinctly Gothic in tone, scenario and characters. Exploring adaptation and contemporary board games,

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Paul Booth devotes an entire chapter to Lovecraft. Booth identifies a looseness to Lovecraft’s writing, something referred to as ‘unstructure’, whereby stories are thematically connected, while having no overarching organisation (2015, 31–2). Such a loose and incoherent world seems at odds with the necessary consistency of a rule-based board game. But Booth illustrates how the unstructure of Lovecraft’s work is integrated into tabletop gameplay, for example, through variations in the players and characters on the board, and the way difficulty levels rise to match the number of participants (ibid., 34–5). The turnbased system, resulting in significant uncertainty, ambiguity and randomness (ibid., 39–40), Booth argues, corresponds with the chaotic unfathomability of the Lovecraft universe. Among scholars of contemporary Gothic media, a corpus of videogame titles emerges, including Doom, Quake, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill. Game academics, for whom these titles enjoy similar significance, have also considered Gothic adaptations. While the author does not pursue this avenue, in a booklength study of horror videogames, Bernard Perron identifies numerous critics who have sought to locate the cycle within such a tradition. Other illustrative titles include the Fatal Frame (2001–) series and Eternal Darkness (2018, 59–60). The Silent Hill franchise has featured as the case study in a substantial exploration of the Gothic in digital games (Kirkland, 2012a). Horror scholar Dawn Stobbart considers Resident Evil 7 (2017) alongside Crow’s concept of a ‘Louisiana Gothic’ (2019, 81–2), together with the haunted houses trope contained within the inaugural Gothic novel (ibid., 78–9). Krzywinska identifies many board, card and tabletop role-playing games which draw on Gothic themes, or take source material directly from Gothic texts (2014, 506). Writing at length on the Lovecraft adaptation Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2005), Krzywinska draws attention to Gothic tropes’ expression through game mechanics. A particularly difficult, repetitive and ultimately frustrating sequence of gameplay reproduces the Cthulhu universe logic, conveying ‘the very tangible sense that powers far greater than me affect my sphere of action’ (2009, 284). Although rarely a generic term in popular or academic discussion, this author echoes the sentiments of Edmundson’s executive in asserting ‘the Gothic remains rife in digital games, finding its way into every gaming genre’ (2014, 503–4). Krzywinska’s list of Gothic-influenced titles includes the multiplayer action series, Left 4 Dead (2008), the online role-playing game, The Secret World (2012) and the twinstick shooter, The Binding of Isaac (2011) (ibid., 507). These are relatively recent titles, yet as the opening description of Jet Set Willy implies, Gothic dimensions feature in even the earliest games. The aliens of Space Invaders (1978), a game Stobbart locates within horror, rather than science fiction, videogame history (2019, 13), include antenna-headed extra-terrestrials alongside creatures resembling jelly fish or octopi, suggesting a more Lovecraftian interpretation of cosmic monstrosity. Pac Man’s fate, trapped in a ghost-infested maze, is easily analogous to the persecuted protagonist of Gothic fiction, and Perron critically points to one author who identifies the title as pre-shadowing the survival horror cycle (2018, 144–5). Donkey Kong (1981) is a game of chivalrous adventure, its damsel in distress

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structure repeated across the long-running Mario franchise. The incongruous relocation of this romantic narrative onto a city construction site expresses a distinctly anachronistic Gothic translation of arcane tropes onto modern settings. While game scholarship lacks specific focus on the Gothic, considerable work exists on the horror videogame cycle, in which the studies of Perron (2018), Stobbart (2019) and Krzywinska (2002; 2008; 2009; 2014) make substantial contributions. Overlaps exist between horror and Gothic genres, and both seem similarly compatible with videogame experiences. Designer Richard Rouse III details how horror themes assist production from a technical perspective. Games are good at producing fear and tension, over other emotions (2009, 20). Considering the antipathy many game scholars observe between narrative and gameplay, it is significant that horror stories can be relatively minimal, simple, oblique, leaving much to the imagination, thereby avoiding lengthy explanations which interrupt the flow of videogame play (ibid., 16–17). As a further consideration, generic mist and darkness reduce the space which game engines must visibly generate (ibid., 19). Perron also argues there is something distinctly ludic about horror media (2009, 3), pointing to the gaming analogies mobilised by scholars of horror cinema (2012, 13–14). Critics such as Miles write of the first Gothic novelist playing games with their reader (2001, 64). Van Elferen notes how Johan Huizinga, whose Homo Ludens represents a cornerstone of videogame scholarship, makes explicit reference to the ludic qualities of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. In sharing aspects of uncanniness, transgression, self-consciousness and excess, van Elferen argues for close connections between the Gothic and the playful (2012, 102). Engaging with the complexities of horror and the Gothic, Bloom writes of the genre as ‘profoundly disturbing, terrifying and sublime’ while equally concerned with ‘play, masquerade, toying, a delicious fiction by which we fake our own terror for the sake of mere pleasure’ (2010, 64). While acknowledging the multiple meanings of ‘play’, as genres go, there is something unusually ludic about horror and the Gothic genre. Explicitly engaging with Gothic elements in videogames, Laurie N. Taylor coins the term ‘ludic-gothic’. Here Taylor draws distinctions between games with Gothic aesthetics and those employing Gothic forms of gameplay. The author warns against approaches which confuse or conflate these two dimensions, story and game, in the application of generic categorisations (2009, 48–9). In so doing, Taylor’s discussion of Gothic games evokes a central tension in videogame experiences and game scholarship, between the storytelling, representational, audiovisual aspects of a game, and the ludic or gameplay mechanics which constitute the interactive, configurative, dynamic components of digital simulations. An important feature of the ludic-Gothic involves uncovering textual fragments scattered throughout the environment. For Taylor, this functions to reveal larger game world narratives, while simultaneously drawing attention to texts, technologies and processes of communication and miscommunication (ibid., 52–3). The hidden manuscript’s recurring presence throughout Gothic fiction is remarked upon by many critics. Additionally, Gothic literature frequently presents itself as collections of unpublished

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documents. Gothic games expand upon this trope, incorporating books, paintings, sculptures and decorative pottery through which historic events are revealed to the player (ibid., 53). In situating, or remediating, media within a medium, Gothic games reproduce what Punter and Bronfen identify as the ‘continual replaying of the notion of a text within a text’ (2001, 15). Players encounter a collage of diary entries, tape recordings, letters, notes and memos. As Eric W. Riddle observes, the Gothic ludic reader must piece together the narrative from these ‘little vignette-like stories’ (2016, 59). Also notable is the presence of arcane and anachronistic technology, such as analogue photography, radio and typewriters (Kirkland, 2014, 460). Given their digital context, these artefacts are imbued with the same sense of antiquity as the ancient tomes of early Gothic publications. Inherent throughout this collation of documents, revealing events dating back to before the game began, is a traditional Gothic concern with the past. Within Gothic videogames, the events embodied in these textual fragments tell tales which precede the player’s arrival on the scene but continue to impact upon the game world. As noted, the Silent Hill games are frequently referenced in discussions of Gothic videogames. Introducing a book-length study of the series, Perron makes a common distinction between Konami’s survival horror franchise and Capcom’s Resident Evil. While the latter is considered ‘action-oriented, focussing on quick thrill jumps, scares, and gory images’, Silent Hill is ‘more psychological in nature, more about character and atmosphere, intending to convey a tone of dread, anxiety, and helplessness’ (2012, 1–2). Perron’s extensive study does not explicitly relate the series to Gothic traditions. Nevertheless, the author cites Radcliffe’s famous distinction between terror and horror, the former invigorating the senses while the latter freezes them, alongside Lovecraft’s discussion of ‘cosmic fear’, in situating the series’ tone (ibid., 30–1). Silent Hill, as the title’s prominence in Gothic scholarship makes clear, exhibits a range of identifiable qualities associated with the genre. Located in a nondescript American town, which periodically transforms into a dark doppelganger, the franchise evokes Bernice M. Murphy’s ‘suburban Gothic’, a branch of American fiction validating ‘the niggling suspicion that something dark lurks below suburbia’s peaceful façade’ (2009, 1). Perron cites one commentator who proposes the external reality of Silent Hill is an extension and expression of the characters’ inner lives (2012, 56). This technique is typical of Gothic fiction, whereby distinctions between spaces, events, actions and the psychology of the protagonist and narrator become unclear. This extends what Punter identifies as a New American Gothic preoccupation with the ‘landscapes of the mind’, as the protagonist’s obsessions distort the environment, immersing readers in their dark psyche (1996a, 2–3). Monsters patrolling Silent Hill’s corrupted Otherworld personify impurity, muddying distinctions between inside and outside, human and machine, animate and inanimate (Perron, 2012, 43), consistent with themes of monstrous abjection and uncanniness in Gothic studies. Krzywinska writes of the ‘neo-Gothic foreboding gloom’ pervading Silent Hill, its dull colour palate, unsettling soundtrack, non-linear structure and ‘psychologicalhorror’ narrative (2008, 158). Darkness, shadows, gloom, as Botting points

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out, stretch across the Gothic. Contrasted with the light of the Enlightenment, knowledge and reason, darkness symbolises obscurity, mystery, imagination, the unnatural and the unknown (2007b, 32). Silent Hill continually returns to the story of a young girl, abused by her mother and left to burn to death in her family home. The game’s Otherworld, featuring blackened buildings, discarded hospital gurneys and faceless nurses, appears to be a projection of the young woman’s anguish and entrapment in the local hospital’s basement. Tobi Smethurst considers Silent Hill alongside other Gothic titles engaging with themes of trauma (2015, 817), a condition both Punter and Bronfen (2001) and Hogle (2014), among many, consider across contemporary Gothic. Although Perron notes how the series’ story has attracted positive critical responses across the franchise (2012, 33), Silent Hill does not tell a traditional, classic, linear tale by any means. Instead, its narrative is characterised by inexplicable dialogue, tangential sequences, moments of unsettling surrealism, and disturbances in causal and spatial coherence (Kirkland, 2007, 407). With some instalments not even taking place in the town, the series lacks continuity, exacerbated by the fact most games have multiple, occasionally contradictory, endings. As Perron observes, any conclusion to Silent Hill lacks finality (2012, 4). Such ambiguity and convolution, which Krzywinska argues, have accumulated throughout the game’s development, enhance the Gothic sense that ‘the status of the world and the source of the incursion of the horror itself becomes ever more obscure and enigmatic’ (2008, 158). The game also illustrates Gothic self-awareness. The streets of Silent Hill are named after various authors of suspense fiction (Perron, 2012, 74), such as Robert Bloch, Richard Bachman and Ray Bradbury. The game’s repertoire of citations incorporates allusions to horror fiction, suspense cinema and art films (ibid., 67–8), alongside high-brow gestures towards the paintings of Bacon, Bosch and Rembrandt, and Hans Bellmer’s doll photography (ibid., 78). As an inconclusive final chapter in the franchise’s history, Silent Hills exists only as a muchdiscussed playable demo, the completed version of which never saw the light of day. Following the game’s cancellation, this interactive experience was pulled from circulation, existing only on consoles where the downloadable content remains undeleted. PlayStations with this enigmatic, illegitimate, stillborn software exchange for considerable sums on internet trading sites. In an early academic chapter exploring horror videogames, Krzywinska describes a particularly Gothic quality of gameplay. The videogame experience entails a dynamic oscillating between self-determination, where the player is in control, and pre-determination, where they are subjected to the game’s structures. While these tensions exist across all genres, Krzywinska argues, in horror fiction, they uniquely express narrative themes whereby ‘supernatural forces act on, and regularly threaten, the sphere of human agency’ (2002, 207). Horror videogames capitalise on players’ potential influence of the game environment, a necessary distinction from the horror film where such impact is not a possibility (ibid., 215). Krzywinska applies the term ‘moral occult’ to the transcendental intelligence shaping and controlling interactive opportunities (ibid., 207–8), an influence analogous to various determining

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forces of fate within Gothic literature. This ludifies what Steven Bruhm considers a key insight that Freudian psychoanalysis provides in understanding Gothic fiction. Human beings are not free individuals functioning according to conscious will but are instead slaves to unconscious desires and the pursuit of forbidden objects (2010, 262–3). The determining architecture of horror videogames, both facilitating and prohibiting players’ action, corresponds with the uncanny experience of ‘curious coincidences, a sudden sense that things seem to be fated or “meant to happen”’ (Royle, 2003, 1). From a philosophical perspective, Gothic videogames embody the modern tensions of Gothic fiction. Videogames’ interactive possibilities, like Enlightenment philosophies, democratic citizenry and capitalist rhetoric, promise the individual freedom and control over their destiny. But games’ uncompromising infrastructures, like the mysterious forces at work within Gothic tales, serve to circumvent player agency. Central themes of Gothic literature are thereby interpreted according to the ludic opportunities of the videogame experience.

The Gothic game Gothic videogames employ ludic devices in generating the unsettling, uncanny, unnerving aspects of a genre designed to disturb, discomfort and disorientate. Determining infrastructures, fragmented narratives and multi-media storytelling elements feature across games of all categories, from adventure games to sport simulators. This implies Gothic qualities are inherent to the videogame itself, resulting in the genre’s prominence throughout the medium’s history. There is something already Gothic about the videogame format, which Gothic games exploit. For example, death, a defining obsession of Gothic fiction (Bloom, 2010, 64) has always been a disciplinary feature of the medium. Videogame characters are harbingers of death, destroying wave upon wave of adversaries. They might also die themselves, many times, throughout the course of a gameplay session, only to be born again with apparently little consequence. In this and other ways, videogames entail significant ‘serial attempts’, or repetition (King and Krzywinska, 2002, 18). Repetition is a theme of Gothic fiction, as history repeats itself, and characters find themselves trapped in patterns of compulsive repetition (Kilgour, 2006, 36). Repetition also has dimensions of the uncanny, itself a recurring theme of Gothic culture. Nicholas Royle cites Freud’s description of being lost, in the dark, in a strange room, continually bumping into the same furniture while looking for a door or light switch (2003, 109). This is a situation many players undoubtedly recognise, in the frustrating experience of going round in circles, randomly investigating every aspect of an environment in search of some elusive feature. As Krzywinska notes, videogame players are frequently positioned as detectives, searching for clues to solve puzzles or to progress through game space (2014, 506). The sleuth also has roots in Gothic fiction. Listing key fictional literary figures, William Patrick Day includes Sherlock Holmes as the ‘logical hero’ of Gothic fantasy (1985, 3–4). Similar connections between Gothic literature and detective stories are made by

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Jack Halberstam (2006, 2), while MacArthur (2011) has authored a dedicated study exploring the ‘Gothic footprint’ in crime fiction. In shifting from supernatural literature to novels where mysterious disturbances have ultimately rational explanations, Arthur L. Cooke argues, eighteenth-century Gothic novels assume a ludic dimension. Audiences were tasked with solving the mystery before the detective, thereby ‘the Gothic romance was transformed from a kind of ghost story into a kind of elaborate brain teaser, a sort of battle of wits between the author and the reader’ (2004, 23–4). Such a formation appropriately describes the often antagonistic relationship between player and game. The clues videogame detectives are tasked with piecing together frequently culminate in a single objective: the opening of a locked door. This door may take more prosaic forms, but adventure games’ overriding structure has players finding objects, passwords, combinations or solutions allowing progress through, across or along some otherwise impassable obstacle. Dani Cavallaro discusses the Gothic lineage of locked doors, from fairy tales to popular novels, functioning to hide taboo objects and secret crimes (2002, 27). In haunted house films, Curtis writes of the ‘anticipatory opening of the door’ as a central moment in the ghost story (2008, 170). This iconic point is famously recreated, with undoubted awareness of the trope, in the original Resident Evil as the loading screen which segues players’ transition from one space to another. Mark S. Madoff similarly argues for the centrality of locked doors to Gothic literature: ‘The locked-room mystery is characteristic of the Gothic. It nearly is the Gothic’ (1989, 49). The literary Gothic also encourages physical reactions in its reader, similar to the digital game in its player. Moers considers the extent Gothic fiction aims ‘to get to the body itself, its glands, muscles, epidermis, and circulatory system, quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear’ (1978, 90). This aligns with a form of popular culture demanding bodily activity from its audience, where players react, often without conscious thought, to sudden changes in circumstances, and a rigorous session of gameplay can often be a physically exhausting ordeal. Finally, Bloom identifies overlaps between weird and uncanny fairy tales for children and stories for adults (2010, 59), indicating that the Gothic suits the tastes of both generations. Videogames’ relationship with young people is complex and contentious, but much indicates the pastime remains regarded as a childish activity. This despite the substantial adult demographic engaged in videogame play. The penetration of videogame culture by the Gothic genre might explain the medium’s popularity with players of multiple ages and cultural preferences, together with the medium’s common perception as a juvenile endeavour. Associated with this playful sensibility, there remains something persistently artificial, superficial, simulated about Gothic media, suiting the structural requirements of digital games. Gothic culture provides easily identifiable repertoires of iconography, which games across genres can mobilise, including castles, mansions, derelict institutions, libraries, dungeons; imposing statues, suits of armour, ominous gilt-framed paintings, chests, leatherbound books, potions; zombies, bats, giant spiders, ghosts and goblins; swords, axes, arrows, daggers

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and perilous spikes descending from ceilings or emerging from below. Such assets are easily incorporated into first-person shooters, action adventures, platform games, role-playing games or point-and-click puzzles, and easily serve multiple requirements across videogame formats. Game content is frequently themed, and Gothic genres demonstrably provide rich repositories of recognisable settings, objects and adversaries. Lava levels, ice levels, underwater, city or jungle levels sit alongside Gothic environments featuring haunted houses, overgrown graveyards, creepy castles and ancient ruined landscapes. Gothic settings work effectively to produce what Jenkins calls ‘evocative spaces’, drawing upon well-known visual conventions, originating from familiar genres, texts and cycles (2004, 123–4). Consequently, like the Gothic heroines of literature, numerous videogame protagonists inhabit ‘a historical world that we would recognize as an elaborately artificial and contrived gothic world’ (Hoeveler, 1998, 65). Parallels exist between the rich, textured, familiar yet fantastical spaces Jenkins discusses, and the generically vague but easily orientated situations of Gothic protagonists. Environments incorporating ‘concealed doors, narrow towers, rusty and missing keys, winding hidden stairwells’ constitute what Diane Long Hoeveler describes as their ‘standard trappings’ (ibid.). Although Jenkins refers to fantasy, science fiction, adventure, horror and war as genres most easily facilitating spatial models of videogame narrative (2004, 122), they cite a classic Gothic novel to illustrate melodrama’s potential value to games designers (ibid., 127). Proximities between digital games and amusement park rides, a theme of Jenkins’ argument (ibid., 122–3), are also relevant. The carnival ghost ride, Bloom claims, became one alternative site for live Gothic experiences following the displacement of theatrical horror by cinema (2010, 172–3). Botting also refers to ‘disney gothic’ (2008, 73), an aspect of the corporation which has haunted its products since the early days. Something broadly Gothic resides in tourist resorts enabling a corrosion of history whereby ‘all past or present forms meet in a playful promiscuity’, in which ‘all cultures recur in a mosaic (including the cultures of the future, which are themselves already recurrent)’ (Baudrillard, 1994, 118). Such scholarly intersections display the considerable cultural overlap between the Gothic, the videogame and the theme park. Far from diminishing or cheapening such tropes, by appropriating well-worn Gothic skins, textures and surfaces for superficial aesthetic purposes, digital games participate in an established multi-media tradition dating back to the genre’s earliest incarnations. Gothic novels frequently exploit ersatz manuscripts masquerading as authentic documents. Gothic media history is replete with manufactured ruins, revived architecture, mythical histories, the self-conscious mobilisation of stock tropes and devices designed to excite a frequently knowing public. Hogle’s assessment of Gothic’s ‘endemic fakery’, its falsification of sources, and its anachronism (2001, 154) corresponds with digital games’ generation of artificial neo-medieval environments, drawn more from game culture conventions than historical realities. Gothic reproductions traditionally inspire Gothic reproductions, with little concern for stylistic verisimilitude.

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Bloom speculates that the extravagant Fonthill “‘Abbey’”, completed in the early 1820s, reportedly ‘the most spectacular gothic build’, inspired 1930s and 1940s classic horror films. Compelling visual, and ontological, connections exist between the fakery of the nineteenth-century Gothic mansion and the manufactured, fantastical and ultimately superficial façades of the studio backlot (2010, 31–2), with implications for the detailed yet two-dimensional digital environments of videogame play. Like plaster-of-Paris stone and painted brickwork, fake Gothic mansions and haunted house theme park rides, game worlds are pure surface, a collection of hollow polygons and depthless planes. Ignoring instances where actors, sports players or real-world spaces are scanned into game engines, behind the videogame image there is no real-life referent (Kirkland, 2014, 456). ‘The text defines its world, which exists only within the text,’ Day writes of Gothic fiction. ‘The surface of the Gothic fantasy is its substance’ (1985, 14). Equally the videogame exists solely within the world of the screen, as a surface of light and movement, an audio presence enjoying no originating relationship with the diegetic entities through which its soundscape purports to emerge. And like the readers, spectators, guests of Gothic entertainment, players know the game is not real, but are nevertheless impactfully moved by the experience it generates. Botting’s allusion to Jean Baudrillard draws established connections between the Gothic and the postmodern. Both Gothic genres and videogame media coincide in fabricating a past more mythical than founded in historical reality. Videogame theming processes often entail the same imitation of dead styles Fredric Jameson considers characteristic of postmodern culture, where creative innovation and originality are no longer possible (1998, 132). Videogames do not explicitly feature in Baudrillard’s essay on the ambivalent role of communication in post-industrial Western culture. Nevertheless, the author’s allusions to flight simulators and the science fiction living room, to contemporary audiences, might read more like a discussion of games consoles than television. Videogame cultures express multiple features of late capitalism, witnessing ‘the displacement of bodily movements and efforts into electric or electronic commands’, the ‘microprocession of time, bodies, pleasures’ in which ‘this body, our body, often appears simply superfluous’ (1998, 148–9). Discourses of digital play frequently evoke the confusion of real and virtual, an evaporation of the body into the screen, the collapse of mind and medium, towards which many postmodern theorists gesture. Indeed, more than a decade before Roger Caillois became a founding text in videogame studies, Baudrillard cited vertiginous ilynx to describe the dizzying ludic dimensions of a mass mediated society (ibid., 152). Many writers consider the postmodern dimensions of videogame cultures. From an industrial perspective, Stephen Kline et al. demonstrate how game production expresses defining postmodern phenomena, such as branding, synergy and hypercommercialism. Videogames are consequently considered the ‘ideal commodity’ within post-Fordist capitalism (2014, 23–4). Garry Crawford and Jason Rutter also discuss videogames’ alignment with postmodern culture. For some, the virtual worlds’ emulation of spaces, stars and sports threaten, in impulses resembling popular expressions of Gothic paranoia, to replace reality (2006, 158–9). Indeed, Hogle’s observation that within Gothic

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culture ‘what is already counterfeited can be transformed into a simulation among other simulations’ (2010, 16), chimes both with postmodern theory, and Gonzalo Frasca’s (2003) influential argument that simulation represents a core mode of videogame media. Apparently at odds with the postmodern pastiche described above, while quite consistent with the contradictory nature of Gothic media, videogames often evoke genuine sensations of awe, fear and wonder, correlating with the Romantic concepts of the sublime. Drawing on Edmund Burke, Botting describes the sublime as an experience which produces ‘terror, wonder and astonishment at scenes of grandeur, obscurity and magnificence,’ an impression which ‘overwhelms the mind with its object, suspending the motions of the soul’ (2008, 12–13). For Botting, videogames specialise in generating grand spectacle, a comparable ‘artificial sublimity’ (2010, 278). Despite their digital nature, these expansive, immersive, fantasy environments can produce authentic sensations of delight, enchantment, enrapture, as well as anxiety, discomfort and fear. Reflecting the inseparability of Gothic fiction from Freudian criticism, Punter connects the sublime with psychoanalytic notions of ‘sublimation’. Through such processes, any contradictory experiences an individual finds themselves unable to confront become expressed in fantastical ways. Potentially distressing encounters thereby transform into a source of pleasure (1996a, 74–5). The entire universe of videogames could be considered in such terms. Players are situated in ‘fantasy realms’, be it a Tolkienesque environment, a neon-lit racetrack, or a modern metropolis. Games simulate experiences which would be extremely unpleasant, or anatomically impossible, in real life. Avatars suffer repeated attacks, wounds, violations, physical exertion and deaths. Yet, ultimately, all well-designed games offer transcendental possibilities of success, completion, redemption and triumph. The sublime bleeds into experiences of Freudian terror expressed through the ‘digital uncanny’ or ‘uncanny valley’ towards which videogames easily gravitate. This concept, where spectators are unsettled by disturbance of divisions between real and artificial life in computer-generated imagery, are the subject of a book-length study by Angela Tinwell (2015), and is another reason, Rouse argues, why games’ ‘weird artificiality’ works well in a horror context (2009, 18). Freud’s conception was itself informed by Gothic literature and remains a recurring reference point for scholars of its history. Horror videogames deliberately capitalise upon the ambiguity of photorealistic digital imagery to produce moments of affecting beauty, alongside experiences of unease closely tied to Gothic traditions of sublime wonder and terror. One of Gothic literature’s central concerns, as Bloom argues, is ‘the confusion of the ontological and epistemological status of its subject matter’. Fictional examples include the animated corpse, human-like bodies changing into bats or wolves, shadows and reflections detaching from their physical form (2010, 4). Transformations and the violations of physical laws also suit the affordances of the digital game. Games are animation, digitally and procedurally generated, and this art form has its own historical association with the Gothic. Referencing Bloom, Paul Wells details one cartoon classic as effectively

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bridging Gothic Romanticism and Modernism, while anticipating the horror cinema of the 1930s. In its uncanny ability to enliven inanimate objects, evidencing and visualising supernatural transubstantiations, metamorphosis and destabilisation (2002, 29–30), animation has the technological potential to visualise Gothic scenes, themes and processes. More substantially, the videogame is a medium variously characterising Gothic uncertainty, liminality and the permeability of divisions between otherwise separate realms and entities: between player and character, screen space and physical space, life and simulation. In early Gothic fiction, Miles identifies a ‘blurring of the boundaries between subject and object, dream and the rational’ (2002, 115) approaching a description of the multifarious relationship between player and avatar. Be it a plumber, a hedgehog or an aristocratic adventurer, this on-screen surrogate is a complex extension of players into the virtual game world. Although the phenomenon is prone to exaggeration, videogames produce an intimate connection with the avatar upon whose survival their continued success depends, mirroring their movements and actions, performing in synchronisation with the manipulation of the interface. This differs profoundly from relationships between readers, spectators, viewers and fictional characters within other media. Considering distinctions between cinema and videogames, King and Krzywinska write of the possibility of players seeming to ‘move “inside” the fictional world on screen’, of how they ‘“become” the central figure’ (2002, 4). Punctuation here implies the authors self-distancing from such claims, and many writers express similar ambivalence towards popular perceptions of players’ conscription into game worlds. Barry Atkins asserts that while Tomb Raider (1996) might be an involving game, players undergo no ‘magical transformation’ into becoming Lara Croft (2003, 27–8). Yet the apparent need for such reminders underlines the historical prominence of journalistic and promotional claims characterising alignment between players and their games. The videogame player, as envisioned within such mythologies, is not so dissimilar to the Gothic protagonists themselves, for whom ‘the line between self and Other disappears and the integrity of the self vanishes’ leaving them ‘unable to distinguish between what is me and what is not-me’ (Day, 1985, 22). This ‘magical’ connection between player and avatar can intensify in certain Gothic contexts for disturbing impact, just as the already discomforting nature of photorealistic digital graphics is exaggerated for uncanny effect. Drawing on Rouse, Stobbart argues horror games have the potential to produce ‘emotional contagion’, specifically the emotions of fear and terror, which players share with their onscreen avatar (2019, 5–6). Such closeness is evident across multiple studies of horror, suspense and Gothic media, where proximities between reader and character are deliberately generated. Noël Carroll identifies a ‘mirroring-effect’ across horror fiction, noting the genre to be unusual in encouraging the same emotional state in viewers and characters (1990, 18). Neatly recalling the ludic activity of player as detective, Punter refers to Gothic readers’ activity in determining the path through a maze of incomplete information, potentially serving as a ‘creative participant’ in the story being told (1996a, 84–5). The intimacy observed between

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Gothic novel protagonists and readers is potentially reified in the avatar/player relationship. Paralleling contemporary anxieties concerning violent videogame protagonists, Kilgour observes how Gothic fiction’s ‘particularly intimate and insidious relationship between text and reader’ featured as a matter of concern (2006, 6–7). Miles argues such literary processes might be understood through a range of concepts, including Freud’s increasingly familiar formulation of the uncanny (2002, 115–16). The avatar often approaches an embodiment of this concept, something Diane Carr argues in relation to one canonical Gothic game. As the player’s double, Carr suggests, avatars produce either reassurance or uncanny discomfort, as a known quantity and resource, or a more ambivalent and fallible emissary within the game world (2006, 68–71). Indeed, Royle might be alluding to peculiar relationships between players and avatars, in describing the uncanny as ‘the experience of oneself as a foreign body’ (2003, 2), or else ‘a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves’ (ibid., 6). Videogames exploring the psychological horror of Gothic narratives can readily exploit such aspects of the medium, and many examples exist of generic titles which confound, complicate or confuse the avatar’s uncertain status for unsettling impact. Many videogame scholars evoke notably Gothic imagery in theorising videogame processes, interactions between player and screen, and relationships between user and avatar. Otherworldly, supernatural, uncanny metaphors frequently inform discussion of the player’s engagement with games and game worlds. Like many scholars, Jones cites Huizinga’s concept of the ‘magic circle’, while challenging the ‘Romantic Ideology’ informing the model’s detachment of gameplay from social and material situations (2008, 14–15). Jonathan Boulter uses both ‘uncanny’ and ‘sublime’ to refer to the paradoxical position of game players, games’ simulation of real-world dynamics, and the medium’s seductive appeal. This promises transportation to alternative worlds, but also into different subjective positions (2005, 59–60). Employing a Gothic fusion of human and machine, Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy consider the cyborg-like relationship produced through videogame experiences, as players perform rapid, coordinated movements, synchronised with the requirements of videogame hardware and software (2006, 115–16). Formulations of the player’s position within the game world often evoke Gothic notions of partiality, equivocation and division. For Dovey and Kennedy, the circumstances whereby a player remains a situated body located in time and space, while also inhabiting another on-screen physicality, result in an ambivalent betwixt and between scenario. ‘The player is not outside the game’, they write, while at the same time, ‘the game is not outside the player’ (ibid., 109). Jones considers successful players as occupying a liminal position, between the videogame and material physicality, ‘comfortably at the “threshold” of game and world’ (2008, 13–14). Explicitly Gothic in their perspective, van Elferen writes of games unfolding within ‘twilight zones’ which explore boundaries between reality and fiction, self and other (2012, 103). Games are understood as providing experiences in which players are partially transported to other spaces,

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half-inhabit other bodies, border other subjectivities, lurk on the threshold of other worlds and other entities, experiences closely paralleling Gothic protagonists and their readers. Consequently, the Gothic genre suits the videogame medium, and the videogame medium is particularly adept at expressing Gothic tropes and preoccupations. The Gothic’s easily reproduced repertoire of readily recognisable iconography suits game theming, evidenced by the multitude of videogame levels and environments which throw Gothic shades. Gothic’s artifice serves this postmodern medium where entire worlds are digitally generated, while those worlds have the sublime potential to enchant and enrapture, as well as induce fear and terror. The uncanny runs through videogames, incorporating the uncanny valley of digital media, the peculiar relationship between avatar and player, and the fateful determining infrastructure of digital games. These gameplay mechanics and dynamics are not limited to horror or Gothic games. Clearly the digital sublime and digital uncanny exist across many franchises, while the blurring of boundaries between player and screen is a significant, if contested, feature of the medium. Nevertheless, combining the already-Gothic dimensions of the videogame with the iconography, narrative tropes and themes of Gothic media creates particularly intriguing ludic experiences. Titles which achieve this blending of Gothic mechanics, narratives and iconography represent the exemplary case studies this publication will proceed to explore.

1

Haunting Ground

A Gothic tradition Exploring the hidden object series Ravenhearst, Shira Chess provides a compelling analysis concerning the game’s appropriation and transformation of literary Gothic conventions, particularly those of Gothic romance. Chess identifies the generic influence informing the franchise’s themes, gameplay, mechanics and cultural status across three titles. A paid casual game, Ravenhearst belongs to marginalised genres disproportionately associated with female players. The series’ denigrated status, outside the triple-A stable of ‘real’ games, reproduces a comparable gendered distinction which resulted in Gothic romance’s low cultural regard during the height of its popularity (2015, 384). The trilogy’s narrative, involving an eighteenth-century woman imprisoned and victimised within a large manor, draws upon the corpus of Gothic fiction, including captive ghosts, automatons and occult practices (ibid., 385–6). In illustrating Ravenhearst’s location within these cultural traditions, Chess cites several Gothic literature theorists, such as Tania Modleski’s work on romantic fiction that situates the franchise within the Gothic romance conventions of women’s literature. The dynamic Modleski details concerning the masochistic positioning of both victimised protagonist and the reader who shares her uncertainty Chess argues (ibid., 387), becomes increasingly acute in interactive games which construct more intimate relationships between player and character (ibid., 389–90). Beyond narrative or aesthetic similarities, Chess identifies something inherently Gothic about hidden object gameplay. Such titles traditionally present players within claustrophobic spaces, packed with an excess of stuff, thereby replicating the experience of being buried alive, a central Gothic trope identified by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (ibid., 391). The Ravenhearst series’ second sequel sees gameplay mechanics shift, from finding hidden objects to changing them. This Chess relates to the trope of liminality that Wisker recognises in Gothic literature (ibid., 392). Gothic doubling, absent in previous instalments, features in the third game where players follow in the footsteps of the villainous husband’s previous wife (ibid., 390). Emphasising videogames’ potential in positioning players as participants within a game’s narrative, Chess asserts, in Ravenhearst, ‘the player herself becomes the heroine, attempting to DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-2

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escape the grasps of a mentally ill and ghostly pursuer’ (ibid., 389). Chess’ paper neatly illustrates Gothic literature’s adaptation into videogame formats, and how Gothic histories might assist game scholars unpacking processes at work within such titles. Broadly speaking, Haunting Ground adopts the same Gothic milieu as Chess’ hidden object franchise. Indeed, of all the games discussed in this volume, Capcom’s survival horror game is the most traditionally Gothic in terms of narrative, iconography and the circumstances of its protagonist. Taking place within an elaborate castle, it features Fiona, a young woman tasked with completing a succession of puzzles and challenges in order to escape. Exploration is periodically interrupted by villains who pursue Fiona until they are effectively evaded. Their attacks reduce Fiona’s stamina, but also induce a high state of anxiety in the young woman. When experiencing such a condition, the screen pulses in a distorted expression of the character’s agitated state, fewer actions can be performed, and the player becomes unable to fully control the avatar’s movements. In ‘panic mode’, Fiona assumes an erratic and unpredictable life of her own. Successive levels unfold within different areas, as play moves from a castle to an old mansion to a water tower. Each features a distinct villain patrolling its corridors. These include the giant cook Debilitas, the maid Daniella, castle steward Riccardo, and the wheelchair-bound Lorenzo, who transforms into a younger renewed version of himself in the game’s final level. Fiona is accompanied by a white shepherd dog, Hewie, who attacks Fiona’s assailants on her command. Hewie can also be instructed to retrieve hidden or inaccessible objects, many essential to completion. Play involves scurrying around the castle, frantically attempting to solve progressive puzzles before a villain reappears. Escaping enemies means finding evasion points, such as cupboards to step inside, curtains to hide behind, couches to slide underneath, until the villain abandons pursuit. Instead of military weapons, the player crafts defensive objects from resources scattered across the castle, through a process referred to as alchemy. This employs a roulette wheel-style dynamic, where players chain together spinning coloured circles in correct combinations. Later levels feature mutant clone babies which stagger towards Fiona, wrapping themselves around her legs and crying out to nearby enemies. Luminessants, small balls of glowing light, are also attracted to Fiona, causing her to panic on contact, alerting villains to her whereabouts. Haunting Ground’s Gothic characteristics date back to one of the genre’s earliest incarnations, which might be termed the ‘Radcliffe template’ of the Gothic novel. The Mysteries of Udolpho, a founding text of the early Gothic canon, introduced its most enduring image: a young woman fleeing an imposing castle or mansion while pursued by a monstrous male figure. Terry Castle is one of many critics emphasising the simplification of Radcliffe’s novel this entails, (1995, 121–2). Nevertheless, it condenses the genre’s most iconic and recognisable moments. As Moers points out, the majority of scholarly and readerly attention has been paid to chapters where the heroine finds herself trapped and tormented within a labyrinthine castle (1978, 134). As the above

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synopsis shows, Haunting Ground exploits this brand of Gothic romance, stereotypically characterised by ‘tales of persecuted, often naïve, sometimes hysterical, sometimes paranoid, heroines, drawn into disorientating environments, threatened yet attracted by dark villains and lost in disturbing yet exciting worlds of amorous and adventurous possibilities’ (Botting, 2008, 11). Game spaces recall quintessential Gothic locations, including ‘castles in an eternal state of dilapidation, complete with winding passages, secret haunted chambers, and creaking hinges’ together with ‘narratives revolving around tyranny, rapine, and the ravishing of maidens’ (Clery, 2010, 35). Despite its early twenty-first-century release, Capcom’s title demonstrably mobilises conventions of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, typically unfolding in ‘picturesque landscapes amid haunted castles or ruins’, inhabited by ‘terrified heroines, often sexually threatened by dark and mysterious forces or by exotic villains’ (Dryden, 2003, 25). Critic after critic identifies the enduring components exemplifying the cycle’s early literary manifestation. Evidencing the various cultural, social, historical and psychological resonance this combination of settings, characters, imagery and atmosphere holds, these recognisable qualities soon became an established feature of late eighteenth-century popular literature, to the point they might be readily parodied. MacArthur is among several authors to cite an essay, published three years after Radcliffe’s novel, entitled ‘Terrorist Gothic Writing’. The already over-familiar series of standard elements such publications contained is indicated by this ribald piece, which features a Gothic recipe identifying stock ingredients such as a ruined castle, long galleries full of secret doors, dead bodies and skeletons (2011, 1). Even before the end of the eighteenth century, Angela Wright observes one satirical author detailing the qualities of what would now be critically recognised as Female Gothic (2004, 19). Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) might be the most famous example of early nineteenth-century literature mocking the formulaic nature of Gothic novels, and the naivety of their readers (MacArthur, 2011, 8–9). As will be seen, this Gothic format was superseded by works transforming the setting and cast of characters, incorporating more contemporary locations and protagonists in the process. Yet this model of female-centred Gothic literature endured across the centuries, persisting, as Wisker argues, among other cultural forms, in contemporary young adult literature (2016, 9). Haunting Ground is further evidence of the longevity and malleability of Gothic iconography, whereby a scenario established within late eighteenth-century literature becomes appropriated and adapted into an early twenty-first-century videogame. From this cycle emerges arguably the most recognisable, iconographic, and economically compact image of Gothic literature, one Haunting Ground embraces as its defining dynamic. This tableau of the heroine ‘fleeing the dark, brooding house, clad in her thin white gown’, Crow argues, ‘captures one of Gothic literature’s enduring archetypes’, a scene ‘endlessly reproduced on the covers of present-day popular Gothic romances’ (2009, 93). Scholar upon scholar detail the stock qualities which define the Gothic, in this early stage of its incarnation, whereby there is always a castle, always a woman, always a rakish villain. Sedgwick writes of the ‘trembling sensibility of the heroine’ persued by

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the ‘tyrannical older man’ (1986, 9). Similarly, Wisker writes of narratives involving ‘terrified virginal heroines … pursued by inappropriate men along dark corridors’ (2016, 10). The image of a scantily dressed woman escaping a foreboding architectural structure, ironically, even finds its way onto the cover of a 1960s edition of Northanger Abbey, reproduced in Douglass H. Thomson’s chapter on Gothic parody (2014, 286). Pale, slender, dressed in anachronistic medieval tunic, Fiona epitomises the archetypal Gothic heroine. Much game time is spent running around corridors, up and down stairs, through hallways, chased by diabolical characters with dubious designs upon her body. Like her literary equivalent, Fiona is ‘a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine’ (Moers, 1978, 91), representing a combination of vulnerability and strength. As videogame avatars go, Fiona is particularly feeble. The protagonist displays little physical clout, military training or ballistic arsenal. Her only attack, kicking her enemies, is not particularly effective. The most useful survival strategy Fiona has at her disposal is running away and hiding. Defeating enemies only happens in spatially appropriate locations involving highly scripted sequences. These require tactical use of the environment rather than brute force, for example, dropping a chandelier on Debilitas, or commanding Hewie to knock Riccardo from the Water Tower roof. Yet despite her position of relative weakness, the heroine commands the potential to overcome her adversaries and escape the castle she is imprisoned within. Fiona, therefore, exists within a history of the ‘shy, nervous, retiring heroine’, while ‘possessed of a remarkable ability to survive hideously dangerous situations’ (Punter, 1996a, 9). Haunting Ground’s location cements its position within Gothic traditions, and location is as important to the genre as its heroine. ‘If there is such a thing as a general topography of the Gothic’, Punter and Byron observe, ‘then its central motif is the castle’ (2010, 259). Kilgour also identifies the castle, ‘preferably in ruins’ among the ‘catalogue of stock characters and devices which are simply recycled from one text to the next’ throughout Gothic fiction (2006, 4–5), while Kate Ferguson Ellis highlights the castle as ‘metonymic for the terrors of confinement’ associated with the cycle (2012, 460). Spaces across Haunting Ground’s various levels express standard stately medieval aesthetics of stone masonry, tiled floors, fireplaces, four-poster beds and balconies, wide stairways and narrow passages. Walls are hung with paintings and tapestries. Antique objects, all polished oak and velvet upholstery, furnish every chamber. Baronial chandeliers hang from the ceilings. Further notable features the player encounters include a lever-operated portcullis, an iron maiden, numerous spiral staircases. While hardly a ruin, some areas are in poor repair, collapsing under Fiona’s weight, or disintegrating in response to well-placed kicks. A bibliographic preoccupation runs throughout Gothic literature, and Castle Belli contains many studies and libraries containing parchments, old books and manuscripts. One task necessitates filing volumes in the correct shelves, so bookcases form a pathway to an otherwise inaccessible room. Other challenges are suitably baroque. The secret chapel must be unlocked by channelling a beam of moonlight through a series of

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lunar panels. Another involves deciphering a code, inscribing alchemic words onto plates and putting each into mouths of stone dragons. Antiquated dispositions towards science, chemistry and astronomy enhance the game’s medieval setting. Alchemy informs the creation of weapons, and the arcane laboratory equipment and documents discovered throughout the castle. Keys which open significant areas are named after the planets. One puzzle involves aligning celestial bodies in a planetarium atop the Water Tower, notably designed to suggest the solar system revolves around the Earth. Despite such arcane features, Haunting Ground unambiguously takes place in the present day. This fusion of the modern and the medieval, like the very videogame itself, expresses a central Gothic sensibility. Digital spaces in Haunting Ground represent what Cornwell identifies as ‘a striking extension, to the point of elasticity, of what might be called the chronotope of the fantastic’ (1990, 69). The castle combines electric lighting with candle chandeliers. A music room boasts a wall covered in audio speakers. Facilities include indoor plumbing, baths, showers, toilets, and in at least one bathroom, a bidet. The plant nursery has automatic sprinklers. Several examples of modern media include a typewriter, which Fiona disparagingly compares to a computer keyboard, a television playing only static, and a telephone restricted to internal calls. Alongside alchemic vats and devices, the castle features a fairly modern, if unsanitary, hospital operating theatre. This includes electronic monitoring equipment, plastic containers of chemicals and a stainless steel cupboard. Before her abduction, Fiona was evidently in a car crash which killed both her parents. As a ludic acknowledgement of the game’s temporal ambiguity, mechanical clocks serve as save points, effectively etching moments in time onto the player’s PlayStation 2 memory card. Haunting Ground’s villains also incorporate various stock brands of Gothic antagonist, each of whom might be broadly situated within established tropes of literature. First is Debilitas, a giant figure with a stooped gait, asymmetrical shoulders and small head, dressed in dirty clothes, with a conspicuous missing tooth. In size and shape, Debilitas characterises the distorted scale of gigantism which Moers identifies as an effect used by early Gothic novelists (1978, 101–2). The figure combines stereotypical signifiers of physical and mental disability, and negative qualities relating to a dirty, infantile, genetically malformed working class. Such aspects are integrated into visual design and game mechanics. Debilitas is less likely than other antagonists to find the player hiding in the same spot twice, and is distracted by Fiona throwing a soft toy in his direction. First shown dropping a lump of indeterminate meat into a bubbling cooking pot, Carroll might say, the character is depicted as ‘unclean and disgusting’, a monster which evokes ‘revulsion’ and ‘nausea’, associated with ‘filth, decay, deterioration, slime’ (1990, 21–2). Another servant character is Daniella, who resembles an automaton, communicated through her jerky movements, inexpressive voice, and seeming imperviousness to pain. Botting draws compelling connections between eighteenth-century preoccupations with automata and mechanical dolls, the self-reflexive golems and animated corpses

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of early cinema’s moving images, and the potential of digital technologies to produce uncanny electronic doubles (2010, 279–80). In this context, Daniella represents a mediation upon the uncanny aspects of analogue and digital media. The maid’s slow and emotionless register constitutes a medium-specific articulation of this persistent phenomenon. Exploring games’ deliberate mobilisation of digital culture’s uncanny features, Tinwell draws on previous work detailing early horror films’ exploitation of imperfections in sound recording and reproduction for unsettling effect. In videogames, limitations in motion capture technologies, synchronisation problems and slow, lifeless voices combine to produce similarly unnerving audio-visual effects (2015, 65–6). Daniella’s delivery is characterised by a comparable monotonous register, where the words being heard are demonstrably detached from the image on screen. The male villains Fiona confronts in Haunting Ground’s final levels include Riccardo, the old man Lorenzo, and Lorenzo reborn as a younger self. These diabolical masculine characters reproduce Gothic features Botting identifies whereby patriarchal figures become a series of monstrous adversaries (2010, 283). The naming and appearance of Riccardo, the castle steward, recall both Italian and monastic Gothic heritage. This villain’s design harks back to the anti-medievalism and anti-Catholicism of early Gothic fiction, through which modern sensibilities were effectively distancing themselves from the religious authorities of the past. As Miles explains, the Gothic emerged in England at a particular point in history when the Catholic Church was being ‘abjected’ as part of a nationalist project. This entailed institutionalising the Church of England, alongside the modern Enlightenment project’s emphasis on scientific rationality over superstition and religion. Representatives of the Catholic Church were consequently depicted in villainous terms. A literary series of ‘scheming monks, mendacious abbots, and homicidal abbesses’ contribute to the ‘catalogue of Protestant horrors’ that Miles chronicles throughout early Gothic novels (2001, 47–8). This obscure history informs Riccardo’s design, which includes a distinct monastic cowl. Riccardo is also a double of Fiona’s father. The heroine mistakenly calls him daddy upon seeing his face revealed in a battle cut-scene. This adversary assumes the familiar uncanny doppelganger of Gothic horror, together with the villainous relative expressing incestuous designs upon the heroine’s body. An alchemic clone of Fiona’s dead father, Riccardo reproduces the trope Moers identified in Radcliffe’s works, whereby the kindly father is replaced by a perverted patriarch in the guise of a wicked uncle (1978, 135). This scarred clone’s intentions are clearly stated. As the scene ends and the final battle begins, Riccardo demands, ‘Let me into your womb’, a contrived method of ensuring his immortality. Fiona occupies the classic Gothic heroine position, trapped in a labyrinthine castle, pursued by ‘a domineering and lascivious patriarch who wants to use her womb as a repository for seed that may help him preserve his property and wealth’ (Hogle, 2010, 9). Lorenzo expresses a similar obsession with Fiona’s body. As the apparent ‘creator’ of both Riccardo and Fiona’s father, his fascination is no less incestuous. After Fiona defeats the old man, Lorenzo returns as a much more challenging

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adversary. The dynamic whereby the abusive old male is replaced by a younger, more dangerous version, repeats the trope of Gothic romance, whereby the husband/saviour morphs into the father from whose tyranny the heroine initially fled (Massé, 1992, 20). This transformation is translated into videogame devices. While old Lorenzo can only crawl along the floor, his new incarnation has the power to teleport and cause earthquakes, presenting a much more dangerous foe. In this manner, Haunting Ground does not simply appropriate visual and narrative tropes of Gothic fiction but effects a ludification of those tropes through gameplay.

Gender and sensibility Miles writes: Gender, one may say, is the law of the Gothic genre. Its origins in romance, the history of its readership, its obsession with plot-lines turning on heroines suffering at the hands of patrilineage, its links with hysteria; in every respect, in one manner or another, gender governs the Gothic genre during its first, ‘classic’ phase. (1994, 134) Concerning genre, audience, protagonist and narrative themes, early Gothic fiction is notably feminine, emerging from a brand of literature predominantly written, and read, by women, featuring female characters, and engaging with concerns specific to women’s experiences. The same cannot be broadly said of videogames. Numerous cultural histories attest to the masculine orientation of digital gaming along a number of axes. Irrespective of female employees working in the games industry, the high percentage of women videogame players, or the significance of female-orientated titles and protagonists, the medium remains in no small part defined by its masculinity. If the implied readership of early Gothic novels was gendered female, the implied game player historically has been masculine. Given this lineage, the translation of a female-centred literary genre into the videogame medium would seem likely to compromise, or at least complicate, its original gendered address. That said, there is nothing inherently masculine about videogames. Its culture is characterised by variety and lack of homogeneity. Videogames exist across an array of formats, addresses, modes and platforms, appealing to different players in different ways. Similarly, the femininity of early Gothic literature is far from uniform, totalising or straightforward. Exploring Haunting Ground, a title so clearly deriving inspiration from Gothic romance, allows a critical focus on the gendered dynamics of the cycle, its relationship to femininity and masculinity, subjective positioning of the reader, and generic flirting with themes of masochism and sadism. Similarly, considering the process of literary adaptation reveals complexities of the videogame apparatus, the gendering of the medium, the position of the avatar as the character, cursor, or player representative within the videogame’s world.

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Many authors consider feminist literary scholarship’s centrality in drawing critical attention to the significance of Gothic fiction, contributing to the genre’s emergence from the margins of literature studies (Fitzgerald, 2004, 9). Some parallels exist within game studies, which has a strong tradition of exploring popular titles from a critical gender perspective. Conversely, it was not so much the presence of women in gaming which drew such interest but, as Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees assert, their exclusion which has provided a ‘lightning rod’ for academics, practitioners, journalists, commentators and agitators (2018, 4). One female figure was a notable exception. In the early days of game studies, a certain upper-class archaeologist provided a focal point for much discussion, debate and controversy. The cultural impact of Tomb Raider’s heroine, whose adventures express their own Gothic dimensions, raised many questions concerning videogame representation and the masculinity of game culture. Reacting to academic preoccupation with the star avatar’s design, Aarseth famously proposed ‘the dimensions of Lara Croft’s body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently’ (2004, 48). Despite ludologists’ concerns that cinema-orientated perspectives might overlook the specifics of the videogame medium, the most revealing studies of this era acknowledge fresh paradigms are necessary to understand this relatively new form, illustrating such requirements by testing the value and limitations of film theory to games. Carr’s chapter on Croft compares the character to Alien’s famous heroine, Ripley, a protagonist similarly ‘exhaustively analysed’ within the academy, and coincidentally ripe with Gothic resonance. While acknowledging the pleasure of ‘playing with Lara’, Carr expresses concerns regarding the extent ‘Lara’s objectification jars against her role as homicidal archaeologist’. More so than Ripley, Carr argues, Croft undermines essentialist, binary notions of gender. Croft is both the subject of the objectifying gaze, and an active figure of sadistic agency. Carr substantially differentiates videogame protagonist from action movie heroine, bluntly stating: ‘Lara is an avatar; she is not just viewed, she is played, occupied, and propelled by an off-screen agent’ represented by the game player (2002, 171–2). What emerges is a model of digital heroine as hybrid figure, transgressing categories of classification, blurring boundaries, even if, as Carr concludes, she ‘reaffirms more borders than she crosses’ (ibid., 178). Implicating notable Gothic imagery in the videogame experience, Carr describes Croft as ‘a perfect mutant’ (ibid., 172), a fusion of technology and artistry, comparable to the work of Dr Frankenstein (ibid., 174), ‘an agile cypher, a vehicular android, a smooth-seamed femme-bot’ (ibid., 178), effectively continuing what Botting identifies as the entertainment industry’s tradition for using new technologies in producing uncanny electronic doubles, dolls and automata (2010, 279–80). More recently Braxton Soderman has criticised not just Aarseth, but the branch of game criticism this scholar stands for, and the dismissively feminising terms describing narrative or audio-visual game elements as ‘cosmetic’, ‘eye candy’ or ‘gift wrapping’. If Aarseth criticises cultural studies scholars for analysing Croft to death, with this statement, Soderman accuses the influential male game critic of effectively

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‘annihilat[ing] her iconic status as an important, contemporary “representative” of gender issues in video games’ (2017, 48). As with Gothic literature, gender politics clearly inform both Gothic games and Gothic game scholarship. Resulting from the title’s roots in women’s literature, and the tensions emerging from such tropes’ translation into a masculine format, Haunting Ground is a game in which, to paraphrase Miles, ‘issues of gender are deeply inscribed’ (2002, 46). Gender informs the construction of its distinctly female protagonist, and villainous adversaries, whose designs upon the heroine exhibit unmistakeably sexual dimensions. Concerning Croft, Carr asks, ‘can it be assumed that the viewer, of whatever gender, accepts on some necessary and unconscious level that the figure on screen is persuasively sexed?’ (2002, 175). This remains an important question concerning videogame avatars who, as Aarseth’s comment postulates, may be effectively unsexed by a player regarding the digital body as a straightforward vehicular means to ludic ends. Unlike the body behind traditional film, television or photography, there appears no female model for Fiona who might anchor her physical representation in an embodied gendered performer. Nevertheless, Fiona is defined by her femininity in a number of ways, the most immediately obvious being the avatar’s design. The game largely employs a third-person perspective, meaning the avatar is constantly, often centrally, present on the screen. Virtual cameras frequently shift to accommodate the figure’s movements in an occasionally conspicuous manner. Fiona’s design, as slender, pale-skinned, with long blonde hair, corresponds to traditional conceptions of Caucasian female beauty, vulnerability and desirability. The ‘European’ qualities of her appearance contribute to the avatar’s proximity with the Gothic heroine as depicted on book covers, fleeing so many castles, mansions and monasteries. Such visual qualities most notably emerge in cut-scenes where players are presented with images of Fiona in significantly more detail than her often-distanced avatar version will allow. The character’s voice is soft, highpitched, breathy in delivery, an auditory dimension to her femininity less apparent in avatar form. Undoubtedly, like ‘the “body” that emerges from female gothic textuality’ (Hoeveler, 1998, 18), the ‘body’ that is Fiona, the ‘body’ around which Haunting Ground is organised, is highly, traditionally, gendered. Clearly there is more to an avatar than its audio-visual design. In another early consideration of videogame play, along similar lines as Aarseth, Newman argues against affording the ‘representational traits’ of videogames too much significance. Newman points to different degrees of involvement presented by videogame dynamics, from fully- to non- to partially-interactive, along a spectrum defined as the ‘interactive continuum’. This continuum is polarised between ‘on-line’ play where players are fully engaged in participation, and ‘offline’ in which there is no player input. Fiona’s femininity may be most apparent in non-participatory cut-scene depictions which significantly define her as a narrative character, a fully embodied female, and Gothic damsel in distress. Such qualities recede in the switch to ‘on-line’ play, where relationships between player and avatar are instead based on ‘vehicular embodiment of “character” as sets of potentialities and capabilities’ (2002, 405–6). In this

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second form, avatars are primarily significant for what they can do, their speed, strength, skills and abilities, rather than how they appear. And yet, this avatar’s abilities are also highly gendered, complementing her design as Gothic heroine. As noted, the figure’s main potential response to the threats encountered is running away and hiding. Fiona must kick adversaries rather than use her fists, a notably feminine defence. Alchemic weapons contribute to the character’s arsenal, but their resemblance to military projectiles is emolliated by the magical process inherent in their crafting. Fiona can also command Hewie to attack assailants, another hands-off defensive strategy. The avatar’s main affordances are running from room to room, fleeing pursuers and hiding beneath items of furniture. They coincide with the character’s aesthetic and narrative situation as a slender, helpless, somewhat child-like figure, trapped in a castle, pursued by various wicked individuals. Moers argues there is something risibly doll-like about the archetypal Gothic heroine, a quality identified by both her critics and her authors (1978, 138). Haunting Ground betrays a similar disposition towards its protagonist, inherent in the heroine’s relation to the original literary figure, and her status as avatar. Successful players are rewarded with extra, often sexualising, clothing in which to dress Fiona, including a dominatrix outfit and cowgirl costume. Other in-game elements underline her doll-like qualities. Spaces players encounter include a doll room, a doll menagerie and a marionette room. When Debilitas first encounters Fiona, he looks from the doll he carries to the woman, as though comparing one with the other, before discarding the latter in favour of the former. ‘My dolly!’ is among several dialogue loops the monster exclaims while chasing the protagonist from room to room. Classic Fiona is clad in a close-fitting tunic dress and knee boots which accentuate her breasts and legs. The avatar’s movement embodies the further performance of femininity, its arm-swinging gait distinct from the square-shouldered march of more masculine videogame heroes. Other ludic mechanisms appear inflected with gender. Power-ups assume accessory form, such as earrings, boots and a choker, which reduce the damage the avatar suffers, or increase injuries inflicted upon adversaries. To calm down, Fiona takes camomile and lavender, soothing herbs associated with teas, potpourri and perfume. Basins restore her stamina, as though a refreshing splash of water brings the distressed damsel back to full health. Tasks also relate to the avatar’s femininity. One puzzle, aligning the heroine with the plaything she herself resembles, involves placing a doll on a door lever to trigger its lock mechanism. Another has players arranging flowers in a vase to shift a cloud of moths through which the heroine is incapable of passing. One elaborate puzzle entails arranging lunar lenses to direct a beam, recalling both the Gothic iconography of moonlight, and the satellite’s associations with the menstrual cycle. Fiona’s femininity and maternal potential colour every adversary she encounters. As Gothic heroine, she ‘innocently arouses the admiration of practically every man she meets’ (Howells, 1978, 11), no matter how unwelcome that attention may be. When confronting Fiona, Debilitas calls her ‘my darling’

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while leaping gleefully from foot to foot. Similarly, when crawling after Fiona, the elderly Lorenzo calls out for her ‘azoth’, an ambiguous magical quality somehow connected to her fecundity. Riccardo more explicitly demands entrance to the heroine’s uterus after Fiona mistakes the man for her father. Riccardo and Lorenzo are caught in an Oedipal competition for the heroine’s womb. Daniella also expresses fascination with Fiona’s anatomy. A cut-scene shows the maid coveting Fiona’s sleeping form, with attention focussed on her belly. Early scenes have Riccardo confronting Fiona with a life-sized pregnant figure, promising this is her fate. In later stages players encounter womb-like incubators filled with organic matter, one of them containing a fully-grown adult woman, suspended in green and red fluids. Even the luminessants respond to the odour of Fiona’s ‘azoth’, variously associated with her uterus, her womanhood, and her reproductive potential. Consequently, in terms of avatar appearance, animation, gameplay mechanics, puzzles and cut-scenes, Haunting Ground constantly defines its protagonist as female, trapped in a situation in which her gender is narratively central to the threats to which she is exposed, and from which the player is tasked with protecting her. Fiona’s femininity is central to the tensions the game generates, the sense of threat and persecution to which the player responds when shifting from off- to on-line play. Along the way the title continues the preoccupations with rape, incest and other deviant sexual activities within early Gothic fiction. If it were a novel, Haunting Ground might be located in the sub-genre of ‘female Gothic’, defined by Benjamin A. Brabon and Stéphanie Genz as ‘a familiar set of narratives that revolve around an innocent and blameless heroine threatened by a powerful male figure and confined to a labyrinthine interior space’ (2007, 5). Yet despite compelling similarities in content, there is no easy equivalence between the Gothic novel and the Gothic videogame. For Moers, a core quality of female Gothic is authorship (1978, 90). While novels inaugurating female Gothic were written by female authors, this is hardly true of the videogame culture in which Fiona finds herself. Despite many notable women having contributed to the medium, the games industry remains predominantly associated with male designers, coders, artists and players. Engaging with a different, more reader-focussed, gendering, Miles proposes the term ‘male Gothic’ as a useful complement to Moers’ literary branch. A visually orientated sub-genre, assuming a male audience, this branch of Gothic literature contains ‘a masculine subject’ characterised by ‘a tendency to an eroticization figured through the female body’ (2002, 46–7). Moers calls out male authors of Gothic fiction, who are accused of diminishing the strong Radcliffe heroine into ‘a defenceless victim, a weakling, a whimpering, trembling, cowering little piece of propriety whose sufferings are the source of her erotic fascination’ (1978, 137). Haunting Ground’s orientation, either towards male or female Gothic, centres on the player’s relationship with protagonist and avatar, a problematic one, as already rehearsed at length in terms of Tomb Raider’s heroine. Is Fiona a focus of fetishisation or identification? Are players complicit in the protagonist’s suffering, or do they suffer alongside her? Does the player, as heterosexual ‘masculine subject’, eroticise

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Fiona’s body? Or do they assume the female subject-position experiencing the controlling force of the male gaze? A significant concern within feminist film theory, issues of the gaze also figure within Gothic literary scholarship. Miles observes the role of the look in defining Gothic fiction’s gendered protagonists. A heroine’s eyes are characterised as ‘active, bashfully avoiding direct confrontation, modest, hygienic’, while the male villain’s are ‘penetrating, preternaturally fixed, or dangerously mobile and licentious’ associated with dysfunction and disease (2002, 52). Power dynamics of the gaze are foregrounded in Haunting Ground’s opening moments. Fiona is introduced, unconscious, in a cage, as Debilitas reaches out to touch her prone body. Several subsequent off-line sequences similarly sexualise Fiona’s body, in moments where players enjoy the optical perspective of the persecuting villain, while the heroine herself remains unaware of her objectification. In early gameplay, Fiona remains naked except for a sheet covering her body which flows seductively around her body as she escapes the castle’s grizzly kitchen. Shortly following this sequence, Fiona is depicted getting dressed. An unseen figure, presumably Lorenzo, watches from behind a painting. According to the remediated grammar of patriarchal narrative cinema, such scenes determine how Fiona’s body should be viewed, in distinctly heterosexual masculine terms. The game’s menu sequence, a montage of cut-scenes and original footage, features a partially clothed Fiona wrapped in a white bedsheet. Here the mobile camera offers halfglimpses of the character’s hips as the sheet parts, alongside fragmented images of Fiona’s feet, thigh, lips and cheek. This dream-like scene is ‘unauthored’ by any character, but rather seems emblematic of the game itself. As such, the sequence holds symbolic authority, cuing how players ought to regard the heroine, as the focus of slow-motion erotic contemplation. The final image of Fiona screaming presents no reverse vision from her perspective revealing the cause of her distress. According to traditional film theory, the virtual camera places players squarely in the sadistic position of her attacker. Yet Fiona’s meaning cannot be reduced to cut-scenes. Videogame identification emerges from a combination of on- and off-line moments, including video sequences, avatar design, interactive affordances and limitations. Optical perspectives do not necessarily retain the significant role in determining audience identification that they enjoy in cinema. Players anticipating a role as Fiona’s persecutor, a possible interpretation of these sequences, would find themselves disappointed. Seeing Fiona cowering on the floor may evoke sympathy, empathy, proximity, all necessary requirements considering the player’s subsequent role in leading Fiona through the labyrinthine castle. Successful play depends upon investing in the avatar’s safety and protection. When Debilitas compares Fiona with a doll, players might momentarily occupy the cook’s head space, sharing the sights he sees and the implied cognitive processes at work. However, this is immediately followed by a frantic interactive sequence where Fiona must escape Debilitas’ clutches, and the player is encouraged to assist in this goal. Any identification with the monster should be abruptly broken in shifting from off-line spectatorship to on-line play. Haunting Ground also features moments critiquing scopophilic power dynamics.

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A deadly trap in the marionette room explicitly depicts the violence of the gaze, as Fiona must avoid being killed by darts shot from eyes in the wall. Another sequence, central to solving a crucial puzzle, has Fiona viewing a film in a projector room. Acknowledging the filmmaking apparatus’ voyeuristic nature, and women’s position within cinema’s gendered economy, the screening room contains many female-shaped mannequins in various exotic costumes. The celluloid reveals Fiona has been secretly filmed throughout her adventures across the castle, a revelation which causes the heroine understandable distress. Unlike cut-scenes, this moment of diegetic cinema has the medium present in the game world itself. The voyeuristic qualities of mainstream cinema are foregrounded, rather than simply serving to present the story to the player. In a very Gothic manner, Haunting Ground plays with the ways players engage with videogames, the gendered implications of the gaze, the avatar, the cut-scene, and the persecution of the Gothic heroine within this formation. Further ludic elements encourage players’ identification with the fictional Fiona’s plight. After escaping her cage, being dressed only in a white sheet significantly reduces Fiona’s mobility and interactive capabilities. Fiona cannot run but is forced to wander around the environment at an almost painful pace. In this unclothed state Fiona cannot kick, crouch or backstep. Only after the avatar is properly clad are players permitted the full range of actions necessary for combat and puzzle solving, including throwing projectiles, charging enemies and pushing background objects. Through this, the game makes players experience the discomfort and debilitation that Fiona’s semi-nakedness produces. Another example where the game elicits proximity between player and avatar is the first-person perspective adopted when Fiona is hiding. A notably disruptive moment, this dramatically breaks the game’s standard third-person convention. Occurring at points of high tension and immobility, here the player can only wait to see if their pursuer will discover them. The optical perspective is frequently associated with control, mastery, self-determination. These sequences subvert such associations, positioning the player as helpless and non-participating victim, stuck in the on-line headspace of an immobile heroine. It is a painfully passive moment, where to perform any action would risk immediate discovery and molestation. This dynamic produces a particularly genre-specific proximity between tensions felt by the heroine and anxieties experienced by the player. A third, more pervasive, mechanic encourages further identification with Fiona’s plight, paradoxically, through disrupting traditional connections between player and avatar. When Fiona becomes too close to a pursuing villain, the aforementioned panic mode results in abrupt deterioration of the game’s aesthetic and interface. The game world assumes a monochrome visual style, Fiona’s movements become erratic, the avatar is harder to control. The soundtrack pulses to signal the heroine’s overworking circulatory system. Echoing the impression that time in Belli Castle functions strangely, in panic mode the game alternately speeds up and slows down. Discussing the famous ‘sanity meter’ of Amnesia, Stobbart argues this similar device effectively translates Lovecraftian themes into game mechanics, effecting an impression the

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protagonist might be losing their mind (2019, 34–5). Similarly, Haunting Ground’s panic mode ludifies the sensibility of the unsettled Romantic Gothic heroine defined by her sensitivity. The mode reflects, in interactive terms, the ‘moments of sublime terror’ experienced by Radcliffe’s heroine (Miles, 2002, 72). The heroine’s ‘trembling sensibility’ (Sedgwick, 1986, 9) is conveyed not only through narrative and representation, but through gameplay mechanics which effectively ludify the ‘tears, blushes, and swooning’ (Ellis, 2000, 53) of the avatar’s literary equivalent. Employing game studies terms, the condition reproduces its protagonists’ heightened emotion at dramatic key moments, mobilising the ludic quality of illinx, characterised by its disorientating, dizzying, unpleasant aspects. The narrative trajectory of Haunting Ground has Fiona, in keeping with certain interpretations of Radcliffe’s heroine (Castle, 1995, 122), learning through the player’s astute guidance to control the hysteria induced by these moments of panic. The discovery of a bloody pillar, a mummy, a swarm of cockroaches, encounters with luminessants, result for Fiona in momentary panics mirroring the famous sequence in Radcliffe’s novel where the protagonist believes herself in the presence of a dead body. While Emily falls into a faint, a habit to which the game protagonist is also prone, Fiona’s world momentarily pulses around her as the game exploits mediumspecific features encouraging player identification with the heroine. In this respect, Haunting Ground might be located in the cycle of female Gothic, irrespective of its player, designers and architects.

An avatar is being beaten The focus of this chapter, and this study in general, is on proximities between Gothic fiction and videogames. As previously discussed, Gothic fiction has been extremely prolific and influential across the centuries, impacting upon numerous popular styles, cycles and branches of entertainment. Haunting Ground enjoys relations with several traditions which have themselves developed from this cultural strain, particularly survival horror videogames and the slasher movie. Survival horror combines a particular audio-visual milieu with specific gameplay qualities. Just as Gothic fiction is distinct from horror literature, survival horror separates itself from the broader category of horror games through an array of visual strategies, interactive mechanics and player objectives. Various critics identify conventions characterising the genre, which Jason Rose defines as games involving ‘limited health and ammo, creepy or off-putting music and enemies, and environments designed to reinforce a sense of impending doom’ (2015, 20). Unwieldy controls (Perron, 2012, 84), restricted perspectives offered by fixed view camera (King and Krzywinska, 2002, 13–14) and the investigation of uncanny spaces (Hand, 2004, 117–18) offer further generic components. As van Elferen observes, survival horror is the genre most frequently aligned with Gothic culture (2012, 115), and many parallels exist between the two. In subjecting players to continual anxiety, the cycle produces the same ‘experience of fear as an ongoing condition’ Cavallaro sees in literary ‘narratives of darkness’ (2002, 6). Riddle notes Gothic fiction ‘takes otherwise unexceptional people and

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makes them act and react in extraordinary situations’ (2016, 63). This coincides with the often-nondescript nature of survival horror protagonists, who rarely exhibit the exceptional qualities and abilities commonly defining videogame heroes. The term ‘survival horror’ was famously first coined in Resident Evil’s loading screen (Perron, 2018, 35), although Stobbart is among many authors observing the label’s retrospective application to games pre-dating Capcom’s zombie adventure game (2019, 15). Just as Walpole was not necessarily the first author exploring Gothic techniques in The Castle of Otranto, Resident Evil has many significant precedents. Most commonly cited early forerunners include Atari’s Haunted House (1982), Capcom’s own Sweet Home (1989) and Infogames’ Alone in the Dark (1992), based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. With one notable exception (Kirkland, 2012b), Haunting Ground has attracted relatively little critical attention. Nevertheless, horror videogame specialist Perron prominently positions the title in a survey of the sub-genre’s consolidation (2018, 204–5). Day is among many scholars observing Gothic elements in slasher horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. Exploring the Halloween franchise, this literary scholar describes the series protagonist as ‘a twentieth-century version of the virtuous heroine’ (Day, 1985, 157–8), effectively relocating the Gothic damsel in distress into late twentieth-century exploitation cinema. Typifying the circuit of Gothic cultural influences, with its repetitive structure of running and hiding from various seemingly-invincible assailants, Haunting Ground effectively draws upon the established slasher movie template with which it shares generic roots. The game restores neo-medieval Gothic iconography to narratives of imprisonment, pursuit and flight which horror cinema previously transplanted to 1980s suburbia. Writing about Clock Tower, Haunting Ground’s spiritual predecessor, Matthew Weise notes continuities between certain horror videogame protagonists and the Final Girl figure famously defined by Carol Clover. Characterised by intelligence and resourcefulness, and the ability to craft weapons to defend herself, the heroine of Clock Tower, like Fiona, ‘runs, hides, escapes, tricks, overcomes, and fights back’, preferring evasion and survival over physical combat. Like the Gothic heroine, the videogame character’s success relies upon ‘her own ability to rise above her abject terror, to manage it and ensure it does not jeopardize her judgement’ (2009, 243–4). The Clock Tower games share Haunting Ground’s fear mechanic, its emphasis on escape, and the apparently undefeatable villain periodically materialising to terrorise the protagonist. Applying scholars Frasca and Ian Bogost’s work respectively, Weise argues that the ‘stalker simulation’ is a ‘procedural adaptation’ of a slasher film, (ibid., 240–1), just as Haunting Ground adapts the Gothic romance. Weise considers how the series’ third instalment, published in 2002, draws more on survival horror (ibid., 250). As an unofficial continuation of the series, Haunting Ground combines many qualities of the sub-genre, coroneted by Capcom’s zombie franchise, and consolidated throughout the 2000s. Aspects of survival horror, slasher cinema and Gothic literature intersect in producing a particularly discomforting player experience of interrogation, persecution and punishment. Conspicuous camera angles cut and pan as Fiona

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investigates the castle, enhancing impressions the heroine is subject to voyeuristic scrutiny. For Krzywinska, this technique serves to remind players of the predetermined nature of gameplay (2002, 209–10), a core element of the Gothic games’ dynamic. Distant shots, where Fiona is dwarfed by her environment, emphasise the protagonist’s isolation. This visually reproduces the scenario, identified by Punter, where characters find themselves cut off from the outside world, trapped in castles, dungeons, monasteries and convents (1996a, 67–8). Linda Williams’ observation that when women in slasher movies look, their gaze is inevitably associated with punishment and masochism (1996, 17), corresponds with the only point when players experience Fiona’s optical perspective, hiding from pursuing assailants behind curtains and beneath furniture. Restrictive gameplay reflects the ‘pattern of heroine as deceived victim caught up in an endless series of flights from her persecutor’ (Howells, 1978, 12). The deranged cook, the maniacal housekeeper, the lascivious patriarchs, constitute persistent threats repeatedly interrupting players’ investigation of the castle grounds in a manner most infuriating. Haunting Ground thereby exemplifies the dynamic of persecution Punter and Byron identify as the Gothic protagonist’s lot, with Fiona as hapless victim ‘subject to violence and pursuit for incomprehensible reasons’ (2010, 273). As a prototypical survival horror, Haunting Ground requires players to adopt a ‘masochistic subjective position’ (Kirkland, 2012b, 138) characterising the genre. This coincides with the ‘masochistic subject-position’ Miles regards as inherent to ‘female Gothic sublime’ (2002, 155), where readers identify with characters forced to suffer gruelling trials and tribulations. The survival horror game combines the masochism of the Gothic reader, discussed by Modleski, as cited by Chess, whose powerlessness mirrors that of the Gothic heroine (2015, 387); and the masochistic fantasy tied to sexual repression that Coral Ann Howells associates with female Gothic fiction (1978, 12). In popular debate, much concern surrounds the virtual violence enacted by videogames players. The routine harm videogame players are subjected to attracts less attention. In the context of horror gaming, Perron remarks upon how the third-person perspective makes the sight of players’ avatars being attacked and killed more impactful (2012, 22). Players of Haunting Ground are presented with multiple images of Fiona enduring acts of violence, in both cutscenes and game play. Debilitas wants to crush the life from the woman, while Daniella is determined to gut her with a blade of reflective glass. When hurt, the avatar shows physical damage, slowing down and visibly limping. The image of Fiona, at the rough end of her experience, shuffling down a stone corridor, clutching her side, dressed in bloody hospital robes, is one of abject suffering. Insofar as effective play necessitates investment in keeping the figure alive and mobile, players must feel Fiona’s pain. Yet the game’s successful completion does involve the heroine facing up to her pursuers. Explaining the pleasures of Tomb Raider, Carr draws upon Deleuze’s discussion of Freud’s theories of masochism and sadism. For Carr, Croft’s equally repetitive activities assume the role of ‘controlling parent in the punishment, objectification or debasement of a parade of nameless victims’ characterising sadistic fantasy (2002, 177–8). Fiona’s flight through Castle Belli hardly amasses the body count

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of Lara Croft’s more heroic escapades. Nevertheless, the videogame protagonist has some moves. Special attacks allow Fiona to push a bookcase onto Debilitas or throw acid into Riccardo’s face. Each level ends with the villain’s effective neutralisation. A chandelier is dropped on Debilitas. Daniella is ironically impaled on a shard of glass. Dynamite is used to destroy Lorenzo, a sick old man crawling along the floor, before he is squashed by a rock crusher. If the player so wishes, they can even kick Hewie. Haunting Ground’s gameplay, in such moments might also be considered sadistic, a quality Stobbart notes was closely associated with the Clock Tower series (2019, 14). Tensions between masochism and sadism recur throughout Gothic romance criticism. In a psychoanalytically-informed development of Sedgwick, Edmundson argues sadomasochism is central to the classic Gothic narrative dynamic of cruel villain and cringing heroine located in some hidden space (1997, 130). Masochism and sadism are both qualities Hoeveler identifies in the Gothic heroine, albeit complicated by her tendency towards passive aggressiveness (1998, 4), Elaborating on such themes, Michelle A. Massé argues Gothic romance and psychoanalysis are similarly concerned with staging what Freud identifies as the ‘beating fantasy’ (1992, 3). The author explains how, in Freud’s imaginary scenario, there are three subjective positions: the child, the beater who frequently embodies a father figure, and the spectator observing these actors at play. This ‘ambivalent third party’ (ibid., 6) watching the scene unfold is afforded either a sadistic, masochistic or voyeuristic role, depending on their identification with the beater, the victim, or as an observer outside the situation. Each point of entry brings its own pleasures and pains. Aiming to understand, or more likely complicate, this formation, Massé asks: What … is one to make of such a picture? Is it sadistic? Masochistic? Voyeuristic? Why is it so unvarying? Is its persistent repetition an attempt to recover from trauma? To maintain the image? Is it pleasure? Pain? And why must there be a spectator? (ibid., 52) Such questions perversely parallel those characterising previous discussions of the player’s gendered position, their relationship with the avatar, oscillations between off- and on-line engagement, voyeuristic cut-scenes, and the play of optical perspectives. While an established critical approach within film studies, and Gothic criticism, psychoanalysis is less frequently employed in videogame scholarship. Exceptional studies exist of videogame spaces (Skirrow, 1986), avatars (Carr, 2006), archetypes (Tews, 2001) and embodiment (Rehak, 2003) drawing upon the theories of Freud, Jung, Klein and of other psychoanalytically informed thinkers. These have failed to establish a coherent branch within game scholarship. Nevertheless, there are interesting parallels between the Freudian concepts of fantasy and the videogame situation. Discussing cinema and psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Cowie describes fantasy as ‘an imagined scene in which the subject is a protagonist, and which always

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represents the fulfilment of a wish’ (1997, 127). Cowie sees this dynamic reproduced through the cinematic apparatus, but it might be argued that the interactive videogame equally follows this description of the fantasy scenario. The avatar is the subject as protagonist, game space is the imaginary scene, while game goals represent the fulfilment of wishes. Like the daydreamer indulging in the beating fantasy, the player’s position is a fluid one. The fantasist’s passive, active, sadistic, masochistic, watching, participating, suffering, inflicting, shifting position presents a compelling model for understanding the attraction of videogames in general, Gothic games more specifically, and survival horror in particular. A perversity surrounds the pleasures of videogame play, variously frustrating, monotonous and tiresome, to a point bordering on the masochistic. As noted, repetition is a common feature of games, a recurring quality of masochism and sadism in Gothic fiction, and a structural feature of Fiona’s cyclical encounters throughout Haunting Ground. Repetition is central to the masochistic experience in Massé’s exploration of Gothic fiction, trauma and the Gothic heroine (1992, 12). The model of Gothic gaming proposed by Krzywinska (2002) implies a submission to the constricting architecture of videogames. The successful player of Haunting Ground must obey a defined route and sequence of achievements. They must escape the castle kitchen, evade Debilitas, rescue Hewie, knock Riccardo from the Water Tower room, push Lorenzo into a furnace. ‘What the beating fantasy’s static portrayal seems to insist is that there is no causality,’ Massé writes. This assessment underlines the lack of motivation informing any of Haunting Ground’s characters, caught in the repetitive formulaic cycle of survival horror hide and seek. In the Gothic videogame, Gothic novel, slasher movie, survival horror game, and beating fantasy, ‘the players just happen to be cast into their fixed statue-like molds’ (1992, 73). Playing Haunting Ground entails a specific mode of engagement, involving exploration, puzzle solution, evasion and eventual escape, in strict sequence, finally reaching the game’s conclusion. The pleasures of completing the title entail successfully fulfilling, submitting to, the role laid down by the game’s deterministic structure. One cut-scene uncannily echoes Freud’s fantasy scenario. Early on, if Fiona returns to a cobweb-strewn room, a cinematic sequence unfolds from her optical perspective as she peers through the keyhole in classic voyeuristic performance. Fiona and the player watch as Riccardo repeatedly strikes Daniella across the face, the blows loudly resonating through the castle corridors. Daniella seems largely unaffected by the assault, turning calmly towards Fiona, apparently aware of the woman’s witness to her abuse, possibly enjoying the attention. Acknowledgement of her presence sends Fiona into a mild panic. With no necessary impact on game progress, this remarkable sequence incorporates an unusual moment of scopophilia from the heroine’s perspective. Fiona is physically separated from this scene of sadistic cruelty, like the spectator from the cut-scene, entailing an ambivalent play of gazes between the two female characters. According to Williams, in horror cinema, an affinity is communicated between woman and monster, in this case a monstrous female, through the heroine’s gaze

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(1996, 19–20). A connection is established between the automata chambermaid and the videogame digital heroine, while rehearsing the Freudian fantasy Massé sees central to the gendered power dynamics of Gothic women’s fiction. Players subsequently assume the role of the punishing father, or rather the father’s clone, adopting Riccardo’s position in beating Daniella in an end of level battle unfolding in an ornate chamber. The maid’s defeat demands the deliberate, almost ritualistic, orchestration of on-screen elements, commanding Hewie to attack, moving a series of globes around the room, tricking Daniella into stepping on the centre. The maid dies impaled upon a phallic shard of glass reflecting the weapon with which she attacks the protagonist. Fiona thereby turns the means of abuse upon her abuser. Stobbart describes players’ relationship with the avatar as analogous to a puppet master and puppet (2019, 126). In their manipulation of dog, block, avatar and non-playable character, the player becomes, like the potential spectator to the beating fantasy, ‘the wishful puppet-master of the scene’ (Massé, 1992, 65), in which the boss is conclusively beaten. Rather playfully, Massé describes the position characters adopt regarding the beating fantasy as a game of musical chairs (ibid., 61), suggesting a ghastly ludic quality to the various subjective opportunities it presents. The videogame player’s shifting perspective, from subject to object, protagonist to antagonist, sadist to masochist, evidences the considerable mobility videogame fantasies afford. As Newman asserts, digital game experiences are not uniform, but structured, segmented and organised around different degrees of interactivity (2002, 408). The Haunting Ground player is offered an array of gazes, points of identification and experiences of subjectivity. Survival horror’s peculiar thirdperson perspective, characterised by disrupting edits and shifts in angles and perspective, depicts the space surrounding the avatar, while revealing sections not visible to the character to which only the player is privy. Cut-scenes adopt the omniscient conventions of classical cinema, showing spaces similarly beyond Fiona’s field of vision, or displaying her body being pawed by assailants while the heroine lies unconscious. When using evasion points, players may see from the avatar’s perspective, while other times the virtual camera follows their pursuer as they hunt for Fiona’s hiding place. Successful play needs players to perform as a participant identifying with the fictional situation of the heroine, yet the game both facilitates and frustrates this position in numerous ways. The avatar’s body responds in synchronisation with the player’s input. Fiona’s goal to escape the castle coincides with the player’s objective of completing the game. Except, at particularly frustrating points, the avatar assumes a life of its own, falling over and walking into walls. Panic mode produces a disorientating rupture between avatar and player. They become both helpless witness to Fiona’s emotional breakdown, and frustrated ‘handler’ of a recalcitrant puppet, to use the dominating term Boulter employs in denoting the player’s operation of dehumanised virtual figures within the game world (2005, 52). Moreover, at key points, play shifts from a player-avatar relationship to one involving player-avatar-avatar. One puzzle has Fiona controlling a golem, a mythical creature analogous to the videogame protagonist. Fiona also controls

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Hewie, who is instructed to follow, stay or attack her various adversaries. Here Fiona adopts a sadistic position, as successive golems are destroyed, and Hewie can both wound and be wounded. In such a scenario the dog may be beaten, virtually, to death by the villains, while Fiona herself is also beaten, expressed through her mournful response to the dog dying. The player is also beaten, defeated by the game, which must now be replayed from the last save point. Such techniques foreground the ludic processes players are engaged in. Such self-reflexivity is common in horror videogames, as with Gothic and horror culture, which frequently reference their own practices. The presence of dolls and mannequins throughout Castle Belli underlines the doll-like nature of the Gothic heroine, the automaton status of the avatar, and the puppet-like nature of the player’s relationship with Fiona. Although her precise origins are unclear, Daniella represents a more sophisticated version of these female bodies, displaying an unsettling potential for life-like animation. Comparable to the digital mechanics of the games console, Daniella is the product of technology, defined by a patriarchal structure intent on designing the ultimate fantasy version of the female form. An ambivalently tragic figure, Daniella speaks in pseudo-Freudian terms of her inhuman inability to experience pleasure or pain, her incompleteness. When Fiona asks what the maid wants from her, the android replied it is her ‘azoth’, the essence of life, and of woman, the desires for which sends Daniella into an uncanny frenzy. The trope of the android, jealous of the human who enjoys intelligence, free will, a soul, is twisted within the videogame by the fact these sought-after qualities are identified within the players themselves. As the animating force which brings the puppet-like avatar to life, the ‘off-screen agent’ propelling the digital antagonist, as Carr would have it (2002, 171–2), the player is the very essence Castle Belli’s residents are so keen to claim. Debilitas makes similar connections, wordlessly discarding his doll in favour of a female form possessed by something the toy evidently lacks. Riccardo’s and Lorenzo’s incestuous desire for their niece and granddaughter also fixate on the mystical azoth, an ingredient they believe will grant them eternal life. Thereby, Haunting Ground turns the malicious designs of its digital rogues upon the actual player. This persecution becomes personal, not through some mystical process whereby the player ‘becomes’ the character, or vicariously experiences her trials through the animation of her body, assuming responsibility for her safety, defeated if they fail. Rather the player is punished as an external agent, an ambivalent presence in the game world, regarded with a combination of spite, envy and sadistic desire by the game’s various characters. The player is both complicit in Fiona’s plight, as the object of her pursuers’ desire, and the target of her attackers. Haunted Ground uses the presence of the player in the videogame to enact a very Gothic expression of self-reflexivity, an unsettlingly uncanny moment where the player’s existence is acknowledged by the automaton-like digital protagonists, and subjected to vindictive persecution as a consequence.

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Genre splicing In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Halberstam presents a detailed exploration of the monster in Gothic fiction across literature and cinema. This account, incorporating Victorian novels, slasher sequels and art cinema horror, addresses a branch of fiction deviating notably from Radcliffe’s template of Gothic romance. Central to Halberstam’s study are the modern contexts of later Gothic fiction, the monstrous creatures featured across contemporary Gothic media, and the various identity-bound anxieties expressed within popular horror culture. The body, specifically the monstrous body within such fiction, is a contradictory, polysemic, highly ambivalent entity, evidencing historically-specific tensions circulating class, gender, sexuality and economic relations. Halberstam’s study opens with The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the character of Buffalo Bill. This composite serial killer’s preoccupation with skin suits the author’s interest in the visible monster in Gothic culture, one which ‘plays out an elaborate skin show’ whereby the creature’s exterior displays, rather than hides, its inside (2006, 7). The celebrated first-person action game BioShock exposes a similar fascination with skin, apparent in the violent assailants players encounter throughout the game. Across the city of Rapture, monstrous faces are obscured with bandages and surgical dressings. Broken masquerade masks both conceal and reveal physical deformities. Bloodstained clothes are torn, making visible damaged bodies driven to the edge of humanity through compulsive genetic augmentation. Additionally, these monsters appear intent on performing particularly visceral violence, breaking flesh with pipes, clubs, drills and vicious hooks which supplement the limbs of especially dangerous adversaries. These aggressive and prodigious monsters aspire to penetrate the protagonist’s body in the bloodiest way possible. While avoiding such violation, successful players must themselves penetrate the game’s expansive labyrinthine environment, getting to the heart of the mystery surrounding its creation and subsequent deterioration, necessarily breaking the skin, bones and skulls of multiple enemies along the way. In undertaking this enterprise, players will also penetrate their own surrogate body with syringes and power-ups which effectively transform the protagonist’s physiology, making them increasingly like the monsters they confront. DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-3

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BioShock appears predicated on the same ‘peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse’ (ibid., 23) demonstrated in Halberstam’s broad array of Gothic media. The game explores ideas of monstrousness and humanity, science and industrial capitalism, the impacts of modernity on skin and everything it contains. The body the player inhabits is a modern amalgamation, characterised by cosmetic surgery, biomedical implants and anabolic steroids, a shell more posthuman than human. An affront to the sovereign, unified, coherent and contained man imagined by Renaissance philosophy, this body is compromised, mutable, malleable, subject to modification and customisation. Ironically, such processes of disintegration are themselves facilitated by practices initiated by the enlightened era of biological, physiological and anatomical investigation. Central tensions within BioShock hinge upon the coherent sense of self provided by the videogame interface’s optical perspective, and the unruly, mutant, yet invisible, body onto which it is grafted. Positioning BioShock within Halberstam’s tradition of monstrosity evokes more recent incarnations of Gothic literature than those previously considered. Halberstam is one among many authors examining developments in the genre between the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, involving notable moves away from previous tropes of corrupt clergy, haunted abbeys and castles (ibid., 16). As such iconography becomes increasingly outmoded, clichéd and unrecognisable, Gothic horror shifts from distant foreign and medieval locations, towards centres of contemporary modernity such as the science laboratory, the city and the suburbs. Often similar tropes remain, such as claustrophobic labyrinths, tyrannical patriarchs, experiences of haunting and possession. This suggests similar concerns unify seemingly divergent versions of Gothic literature. More recent Gothic fiction evoked a sceptical disposition towards the supernatural, dismissing such fanciful notions in favour of scientific explanations, or allowing the possibility of natural phenomena to rationalise seemingly supernatural disturbances. The monsters they contain remain no less monstrous as a result. BioShock places players in the eminently modern city of Rapture, an underwater complex designed by industrialist Andrew Ryan as a haven within which scientists, artists and philosophers can work, free from the constraints of government, religion and conventional morality. By the time Jack, the playable protagonist, arrives, civil war has ravaged the city. Its inhabitants are either dead bodies littering Rapture’s hallways, or violent creatures transformed through obsessive genetic modification. Play involves systematically moving across Rapture’s distinct zones, completing missions for high-ranking members of the city’s community. In Arcadia, players help botanist Julie Langford revive a poisoned forest. At Fort Frolic, they must assassinate various side characters as instructed by artist Sander Cohen. Early progress is directed by the radio voice of Atlas, a freedom fighter enlisting Jack in rescuing his wife and children. While completing these objectives, players must fend off attack from Splicers, Rapture’s genetically mutated citizens, who exhibit various superhuman abilities, including teleportation and gravity-defying acrobatics. Competing with these adversaries entails employing increasingly destructive weapons, upgrading the protagonist’s own physical capabilities,

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purchasing plasmids and tonics from vending machines using liquid currency known as ADAM. With appropriate plasmids installed, Jack can zap Splicers with electricity discharged from his fingertips, fling them into the air, or distract them with an imaginary decoy. ADAM is obtained from Little Sisters, ghostly young girls who roam Rapture’s corridors collecting the precious red fluid from the dead bodies of less successful residents. Little Sisters are protected by Big Daddies, immensely resilient creatures wearing diving suits fused to their bodies. Having destroyed their bodyguards, players are given the option either to ‘save’ the girls, returning them to their human form, or ‘harvest’ them, resulting in their demise. The latter affords players more immediate currency. The former earns the gratitude of Dr Brigid Tenenbaum, the children’s creator and foster mother. Players must choose whether to redeem the girls or exploit them as a resource. Although, as many commentators observe, in keeping with the game’s Gothic resonance, such decisions have relatively little impact. Generically speaking, BioShock is a first-person shooter, situating play squarely within the protagonist’s optical perspective. Combat, resource management and spatial progression are central activities in which players engage. Jack acquires a succession of enhanced weaponry, from pistol to shotgun to rocket launcher. Plasmids and tonics upgrade player’s abilities, in response to increasingly hostile challenges. In keeping with Gothic hybridity, the generic mechanics of the militaristic first-person shooter are augmented by other milieus and genres. Set in an alternative history, featuring futuristic underwater engineering and biological technologies, the game has clear qualities of science fiction. For MacArthur, this genre significantly connects with the Gothic, as illustrated by the work of H. G. Wells. The savage, subterranean cannibals of The Time Machine (1895) are considered particularly Gothic monsters (2015, 7). War of the Worlds’ (1897) invading Martians and innocent fleeing humans reproduce the aggressor/victim relationship of the Gothic villain and persecuted heroine (ibid., 9). The ‘mad scientist’ of The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) (ibid., 30), a figure characterising many Rapture residents, exists alongside Dr Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Herbert West. No coincidence that Shelley’s novel, which many commentators see as marking a distinct shift in the Gothic genre, is frequently referenced throughout BioShock, aligned with both the protagonist and the monsters he encounters. Tenenbaum’s Little Sisters are referred to as a ‘Frankenstein’s parade’, one of several allusions to the text Patrick Brown considers the ‘primary cultural referent’ and origin for the game’s thematic preoccupation with bodily grafting and remixing (2018, 383). Like Frankenstein, BioShock meditates upon the physical impacts of modernity on the boundaries of the body and the self, the potential corruption of humanity in the machine age, and the potential for science to turn men into monsters. Introducing an edited collection on the series, Felan Parker and Jessica Aldred locate BioShock within numerous generic categories, including steampunk science fiction, horror and Art Deco architecture (2018, 5). In the same volume, Jamie Henthorn identifies BioShock as both working within and against the generic parameters of first-person shooter and survival horror

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videogames (2018, 217). For Stobbart, these latter generic videogame elements include human and non-human monsters, gore and violence, and a pervasive sense of unease and insecurity resulting in tension and terror (2019, 91). In combining science fiction and horror, BioShock also draws on the body horror genre. This horror film sub-genre has its own sub-genre, identified by Pete Boss as ‘hospital horror’ cinema (1986, 23). ‘Surgery, terminal illness, organ transplants and biomedical research,’ Boss observes within films of this category, ‘are topics which are regularly and eagerly exploited for their potentially disturbing values.’ A cycle of cinema which shares BioShock’s origins in film adaptations of Shelley’s novel, hospital horror expresses a particular postmodern concern with the integrity of the self, and the subjugation of the body to medical institutions and technologies (ibid., 14–15). Throughout BioShock, bodies litter the halls and hang pinned to walls in ritualistic displays of carnage. The successful player’s body must also be increasingly compromised by futuristic medical enhancements. In a gesture towards the anxieties Boss identifies, the earliest level unfolds in a plastic surgery, where one of Rapture’s many deranged scientists is caught operating upon a still-conscious patient. The game therefore amalgamates various generic, stylistic and gameplay influences, a common quality of Gothic media. Like the monsters its stories contain, ‘Gothic is a narrative strategy that refuses purity and, indeed, reveals the suspect ideological stakes of quests for purity’ (Halberstam, 2006, 119). Hybrid monsters, which combine human and non-human beings, recur across a genre which amalgamates different literary traditions, formats of communication, media and modes of engagement. In this respect, the Gothic text and Gothic videogame both resemble a Frankenstein monster of sorts. Underlining location’s centrality to Gothic media, the planned aquatic community of Rapture is thematically, atmospherically, aesthetically pivotal to BioShock. An introductory sequence unveils the underwater city in a manner seemingly designed to evoke the awe and wonder of the sublime. With the player positioned immobile in a bathysphere, an automatic recording explains Ryan’s personal rejection of conventional concepts of governance, illustrated by grainy black and white images. This concludes with the dramatic pronouncement: ‘Instead, I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture.’ Ryan’s voiceover continues extolling the virtues of underwater life, freed from censorship, morality and interference, as the vessel moves across the city’s exterior. This dramatic shift from still monochrome to bright three-dimensional movement explicitly contributes to the technologically mediated spectacle. The protagonist, only moments ago floating on the water’s surface, presumably experiences a sense of amazement at the considerable technical, engineering and design skill entailed in constructing this vast underwater habitat. The implied player might respond similarly to the digital skills entailed in realising BioShock’s distinct location, the lighting effects, the ripple of the water, the lifelike movement of fish through the ocean. Ryan’s automated promotional recording overlooks Rapture’s less savoury aspects, predating the collapse of civil society characterising contemporary life, foreshadowed by ominous exterior signs of technological breakdown. The player remains

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caught in a clockwork mechanism delivering them to the city. Affinities between the Gothic reader and the character are tangibly realised through the videogame apparatus. Contributing to the close alignment established between these two components of Gothic storytelling Day argues Gothic fantasy parallels the reader being drawn into the narrative with the protagonist sinking into the underworld (1985, 62–3). The videogame’s first-person perspective effectively sutures players into the protagonist’s shoes, as Jack is trapped in the bathysphere, arousing suspicion they are being taken somewhere dangerous, beyond their control. Indicating the diabolical experience in store, an advertisement for fire-shooting plasmids precedes Ryan’s monologue. The player’s journey to Rapture is a descent into a hell, underwater rather than underground, a detail which makes the setting no less claustrophobic and oppressive. Further features of Rapture place BioShock in dialogue with tropes of modern Gothic fiction. Throughout the nineteenth century, spaces of Gothic literature shifted away from foreign settings, and began increasingly to engage with a monstrousness closer to home. This new horror lay in what Halberstam describes as ‘the backstreets of London in laboratories and asylums, in old abandoned houses and decaying city streets, in hospitals and bedrooms, in homes and gardens’ (2006, 15). Such is the setting of BioShock. The decaying underwater city includes empty research centres, corpse-strewn slums, ransacked arcades and infernal engine rooms. Everywhere lie bloodied corpses, shattered rubble, broken glass, pools of flammable liquid and water, pouring in from outside. The ruin enjoys a pertinent position in Gothic iconography, an atmospheric location connecting early Gothic literature’s relationship with the medieval past and later fiction’s depiction of a monstrous modern present. In science fiction, Botting sees videogame spaces, similar to those of Frankenstein and Moreau, participating in visions of future landscapes as ‘another place of destruction and decay, as ruined as the Gothic past’. The alternative timeline of BioShock is similarly one of ‘corporeal disintegration’ brought about by ‘genetic experimentation’ resulting in ‘alien and mutant forms of life and death’ (2010, 279). Such themes characterise the barelyhuman Splicers, Little Sisters, Big Daddies, and increasingly the player themselves. As Victorian authors overlaid labyrinthine castles of medieval Gothic onto the cities of London, so BioShock’s ruinous underwater environment combines the palace, the castle, the city and the ghetto. The hybrid space’s degraded instability is apparent in numerous breaches of the city’s integrity, and the water flooding through its external walls, symbolising the penetration and collapse of the most essential boundary to the residents of an underwater city. If an enduring theme of Gothic fiction is fear of being buried alive, the pools in the corridors, flooded lobbies and ruptured arcades create the ever-present threat of drowning at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, ruins also facilitate gameplay elements. Architectural destruction both impedes and facilitates player movement through space. Resources are spilled and scattered across the environment. Civil and structural collapse provides moral justification for violent and excessive behaviour. The state of Rapture illustrates how well the ruins, ancient, medieval or post-apocalyptic, suit the videogame format.

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Like Haunting Ground’s Castle Belli, the world of BioShock is characterised by the chronological blurring Cornwell identifies as constituting Gothic fantasy (1990, 69). This quality gathers increasing resonance as modern Gothic transposes medieval tropes onto contemporary settings. Sarah Zaidan writes of Modernism’s influence on Rapture’s design, a style which ‘with its profusion of clean lines and steel, spoke of energy and speed, the age of the machine, the future’. The aesthetic notably characterised buildings with no prior architectural tradition, such as power stations, airports and cinemas (2018, 276–7). Rapture’s design, already anachronistic given the game’s 1960s setting, exists somewhere between a mythical modern past and a fantastical unrealised future. Examining Gothic postmodernity, Allan Lloyd Smith describes the ‘ransacking [of] an imaginary museum of pastness’ (1996, 11) which suits the clash of real and fictional periods brought together within Rapture’s permeated walls. A postmodern dislocation from history is part of BioShock’s alternative timeline design, a weird melding of 1920s Art Deco, 1930s Depression-era and steampunk futurism. The game combines bathtub gin and atom bombs with biblical and pagan allusions, in a confusion of interwar, post-war and pre-historical elements. Further complicating this chronological confusion are multiple references to ancient mythology in naming Rapture’s districts, including Olympus Heights, Apollo Square and Hephaestus. Rapture’s engine room, powering the city using futuristic geothermal generators, is named after the Greek god of volcanoes. The game concludes at Point Prometheus, once again referencing Shelley’s novel. Here the research centre which conditioned the Little Sisters is located. The player’s arsenal also combines the modern and the medieval. Weapons include the chemical thrower, a particularly brutal appliance which shoots napalm, nitrogen and electric gel at assailants. Devoid of such industrial associations is the crossbow, a weapon more associated with medieval marksmanship than modern chemical warfare. Anachronistic combinations of technologies, from past, present and potential futures, are common within videogames, evidencing Gothic sensibilities which run throughout gaming cultures. That a New Year’s party, marking the shift from one era to another, sparked the breakdown of Rapture’s civil society further implies a collapse of temporality within the city. This feature connects BioShock’s civil war with carnival, a theme Cavallaro identifies across Gothic culture (2002, 172–3). Discussing the game’s sexual politics, Cody Mejeur also draws on Mikhail Bakhtin in considering carnival a festival when the established order is suspended, unsettled and potentially undermined, for a brief and bounded period, before normality resumes (2018, 117–18). In certain Gothic novels, Hoeveler sees these traditions associated, not with the lower classes and other subordinate groups, but with an outdated and potentially disruptive aristocracy, indulging in their predilection for ‘adultery, gossip, slander, and dueling or poisoning as the preferred means for settling scores’ (1998, 28–9). Although little information exists on the sex lives of Splicers, they have clearly embraced violence as a strategy for defending their various territories. The first antagonists the player meets are upper-class party goers, contrasting with the labourers encountered later, a design choice tying the title to

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certain anti-aristocratic discourses within early Gothic literature. The player assumes the role of uninvited guest crashing a decadent party hosted by the corrupted cream of Rapture’s high society. The masquerade masks worn by many Splicers create an unsettlingly Gothic creepiness of sick playfulness and concealment, later incorporated into Fort Frolic’s grotesque corpse statues. All contributes to the sense of a party out of control, a carnival where normal behaviour has become permanently suspended, and the rich and powerful are permitted to indulge in the depraved peccadillos defining their class. This equally creates a carnival site for the player who is free, within the confines of BioShock’s virtual space, to indulge in looting, murder and other acts of antisocial behaviour, without fear of real-world consequences or diegetic remorse. Jack’s mechanical descent into Rapture, the claustrophobic tunnels channelling a sequential path through the leaking city, the theatrical sense of orchestrated set pieces unfolding before the player, all reinforce the game’s Gothic sense of pre-determination. This, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by commentators, is a central theme in the series. Ryan dramatically pronounces, ‘A man chooses, a slave obeys’, and participating in BioShock necessitates obeying the title’s strict, linear, unidirectional infrastructure. The player’s enslavement is realised, as Jordan R. Youngblood observes, in the pivotal sequence where the protagonist confronts and kills Ryan. Here gameplay shifts from interactivity to cut-scene, on-line to off-line play, where the audience can only watch the sequence unfold (2018, 161). The game’s subsequent twist reveals the protagonist is themself a genetically engineered agent, psychologically programmed to respond to the trigger phrase ‘Would you kindly’, a feature which has drawn much attention from critics. Youngblood presents BioShock as a challenge to Jesper Juul’s claim that games cannot be tragic, because tragedy relies on events beyond the protagonist’s control. Player power and agency in videogames make this unlikely. Youngblood claims it is such agency that provides games with this potential (ibid., 152–3). Consequently, Jack represents ‘a tragic Gothic figure, controlled and manipulated by unseen forces’, his servitude signified by the chains tattooed on his wrists, ironically visible since the game’s start (Kirkland, 2014, 458). Players determined to complete the game are complicit in the protagonist’s enslavement. The twist can only be revealed after a sequence of events has been enacted, following Atlas’ commands. As Daniel Ante-Contreras points out, referencing an early study of the industry, American videogames are based on principles of individualism, autonomy and self-direction, often expressed through violence and aggression (2018, 177). Indeed, the medium might represent an exemplary commentary on the fundamental ideologies underpinning the entrepreneurial capitalist modernity upon which Ryan’s Rapture is founded. BioShock repudiates such myths of enlightened humanism, suggesting the player of the game, indeed any game, remains a slave to the engine’s determining ludic infrastructure. And Ryan’s memorable soundbite indicates he becomes less a man, as a consequence.

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The BioShock of the new Punter is one among many critics who note how Gothic literature emerged during a period of radical change throughout Western Europe. Contemporary developments marking the shift into the modern era included the decline in rural living, increasing industrialisation and urbanisation, new working conditions, different class relations and concepts of time (1996b, 193). Gothic culture’s close relationship with modernity leads many scholars to examine the mode’s critical engagement with developments specific to this era. Halberstam’s (2006) study explores Gothic media responses to the reimagining of bodily concepts within this period of transformation and upheaval, entailing newly developing ideas concerning gender, criminality, deviance and the family. Like much Gothic fiction, BioShock engages with central questions in modern society, a theme foregrounded through the game’s aesthetics. This title’s textures bespeak modernity, albeit filtered through an ambiguous mélange of Art Deco, futurism and steampunk. According to Zaidan, whose account incorporates BioShock’s immediate sequel, Rapture is an exemplary modern space, expressed through its architecture, music, art and inhabitants, a democratic mix of cosmopolitan scientists, engineers, intellectuals and artists. Before collapsing into anarchy, Rapture was a city in ‘a constant state of progress’ (2018, 274–6). The spaces of Rapture are at one with scientific investigation, industrial power and medical institutions: the research centre, the engine room, the clinic. Fort Frolic personifies luxurious modernity, including a cocktail lounge, a casino, a cigar shop and a record store. As a planned community, Rapture privileges principles of social, cultural, philosophical and economic modernity, the autonomy of the individual, enterprise, industry, and, as evidenced by the proliferation of vocal vending machines, consumer capitalism. A scientific industrial disposition informs the tasks players perform. One mission requires gathering ingredients for a formula designed to bring Arcadia’s forests back to life. Another has players constructing an electromagnetic pulse bomb using a collection of wire clusters, cans of gel and nitro-glycerine. Two tasks incorporate photography. Players do not craft objects but invent them. Using the u-invent machines, household objects combine to make exploding buck, antipersonnel rounds and tonics. Objects employed in this process are themselves industrial products, such as rubber hoses, batteries, shell casings, brass tubes, kerosene. Play thus entails assimilation of defining practices of modern entrepreneurialism and industry. Yet despite the reliance on, even fetishisation of such practices, the game expresses multiple critiques of the capitalist modernity Rapture exemplifies. The logical conclusion of a society which is culturally, politically and economically detached from the moral controls towards which Ryan expresses such contempt, BioShock demonstrates, is violence, anarchy and self-destruction. Following the orchestrated bathysphere sequence, the player finds themself frantically running through a collapsing underwater corridor, light sources flickering and electrical equipment malfunctioning, surrounded by symbols of failing engineering, power and civil society. Modern life under the sea is quite

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literally buckling under the pressure, and Ryan’s laissez-faire policies have clearly exacerbated Rapture’s descent. Mechanised retail units make weapons and ammunition liberally available, as bloody conflict has become normalised and incorporated into the culture’s economy to an extent that seems barely sustainable. Plasmids have only weaponised functions, and are promoted as such in videos pastiching 1950s animated advertisements and the clichés of sexist heterosexual domesticity with which the decade is associated. Representing the perfect capitalist system, vending machines stock bullets but also sell bandages and first aid kits. Inherent across Rapture’s many constitutive elements are critiques of neoliberal economics, cosmetic surgery, propaganda and promotional culture. Again, players are conscripted into this nightmarish vision of aggressively competitive modernity. Participation in the economics of weapon stockpiling, personal enhancement and violent self-assertion is mandatory. Players making their way through Rapture shoot anything that moves and loot anything that lies dead. The game’s ludic interrogation of free will, agency and individual autonomy incorporates the determining parameters of the game system, which parallel the position of subjects within capitalist society. By including ruminations on philosophy, ethics and personal freedom, BioShock not only articulates Gothic meditations on modernity, but contributes to the mode’s distinctly polyphonic narrative tradition. This connects the title with the defining publication towards which it is so consciously and conspicuously indebted. Donna Heiland points to the many literary and cultural discourses which themselves inform Shelley’s Frankenstein, including religion, science and Romanticism (2004, 98). In engaging so explicitly in political philosophy, most famously the writings of Ayn Rand, the videogame follows Gothic fiction’s engagement with ideological debates and discussions within a fictional framework. Across BioShock, Gothic tropes are translated into modern contexts, discourse, conceptions of humanity and the monstrous. Many enjoy precedents in previous generic literature. Rapture stands for the ruined castle. Big Daddies represent the gigantic, mute, physically awkward yet loyal servant. Little Sisters constitute vampire-like figures haunting rubble-strewn corridors. Splicers materialise as ghostly apparitions or spider-like creatures possessing gravity-defying skills. These characters, their abilities and appearance, all attributed to Rapture’s scientific developments, combine past superstitions and contemporary science with futuristic speculation. They exploit Gothic fiction’s cavalier conflation of history and fiction, realism and fantasy, rationalism and the irrational. Like Frankenstein, BioShock is characterised by an ‘appeal to potential verisimilitude through the appropriation of scientific discourse’, while still drawing upon ‘“folk” elements’, mythology and legends (Howard, 1994, 242). Gothic fiction frequently has feet planted in both supernatural and scientific possibilities. One literary device Leslie A. Fiedler identifies, used by authors struggling to reconcile contradictions between Gothic medievalism and enlightened modernity, is the construction of magic as a kind of science. Thereby, ‘the magician Faust in his black robes becomes the scientist in his white coat’. Once again, Frankenstein enjoys a transitionary status in such developments. The eponymous doctor combines various older, pseudo-scientific

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disciplines, including alchemy and astronomy, while later fiction incorporate mesmerism, ventriloquism and phrenology (1967, 138–9). As the Gothic becomes rationalised, the reverse is also the case. In the fin-de-siècle era, Kelly Hurley observes ‘gothicity’ across numerous scientific discourses concerning evolution, sexuality and criminality. For Hurley, late Victorian and Edwardian fiction expressed nostalgia for the pre-modern body, characteristic of the wistful manner past cultures are often regarded within such fiction. This pure body was juxtaposed with the thrilling spectacle of monstrosity, hybridity and freakishness inherent in its collapse (1996, 4–5). The peculiar pleasures of BioShock combine freedoms and restrictions, monstrous creatures and awe-evoking environments, numerous bloody deaths and opportunities to inflict hellfire and winter blasts on would-be assailants, fantasies of self-assertion and self-mutilation, exploring tensions circulating the position of the individual and their body within the social and technological matrix of modern consumer culture. Despite being the product of scientific research, plasmids and tonics often have quasi-magical qualities. This point is made by Ante-Contreras (2018, 179), while James Cook alludes to Arthur C. Clarke’s often-quoted law suggesting that: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (2015, 56). Plasmids are activated by Jack’s left hand, conjuring up fire, cyclones and swarms of insects with a flick of the wrist. These abilities assume an almost mystical harnessing of the elements, natural forces and pestilential powers. Given Frankenstein’s heavy debt to scientific discourses of galvanism (Howard, 1994, 243), it is no coincidence that the first plasmid players receive allows electricity to shoot from Jack’s fingertips. Other abilities align with the pseudo-science of the Gothic doctor. Players induce mesmerism, hypnotising Splicers to attack each other. They can also ‘throw’ their body, much as a ventriloquist throws their voice, at dummy soldiers which draws enemies’ fire. Gene tonics also have magical impact. Some powers emerge from Jack’s body, a conceivable consequence of genetic enhancements, such as the tonic which electrically shocks assailants if they attack. Others change the player’s environment, shortening alarms or modifying the security parameters of machines, suggesting some intimate relationship between Jack and Rapture technology. One tonic, called Bloodlust, rewarding the player with extra health upon striking enemies, pushes the boundaries of scientific possibility. Despite the veneer of scientific rationality, enhanced by these products’ location within Rapture’s consumer-driven economy, tonics like plasmids produce abilities more superhuman or supernatural. Consequently, like the literature Hurley explores, BioShock ‘consistently blurs the boundary between natural and supernatural phenomena, hesitating between scientific and occultist accountings of inexplicable events’ (1996, 16). In such a formation, science becomes Gothic and the Gothic is afforded a degree of scientific plausibility (ibid., 20). Ghosts also haunt Rapture. Throughout his investigation, apparitions provide Jack with three-dimensional after-images of past events and long-dead Rapture residents. Spectres include Dr Steinman’s victim in Medical Pavilion, grumbling workers in Neptune’s Bounty, political activists in Apollo Square. In the Arcadia Tea Garden, players encounter two ghostly lovers on a bench. These hauntings

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apparently result from the player’s plasmid use, coinciding with more informed understanding of drug-induced hallucinations or states of altered perception. Evidently, memories pass from one user to the next through the recycling of ADAM. Like the audio recordings across Rapture, which Stobbart describes as representing a ‘haunting element’ (2019, 97), such ghosts are a mediated means of revealing BioShock’s backstory. According to the supernatural dimensions of recording technologies within Gothic fiction and videogames, when they apparate, these spectres are surrounded by black and white static, like images from an old television set. Imperfect aesthetics of communication systems already possessing the uncanny capacity to displace time and space are evoked to rationalise this seemingly supernatural facet of the Rapture ecology. The underwater garden is also haunted by pagan beings calling themselves the Saturnine, dressed in blood-stained robes and masks constructed from tree branches. In an orchestrated set piece, the first of these new assailants emerges as an ominous shadow before disappearing into a red mist. Similar to BioShock’s science-straining power-ups, these phantoms are framed within the ‘explained supernatural’, a term coined by Radcliffe, which Fiedler identifies as another strategy to reconcile the irrational with the rational within Gothic fiction (1967, 139–40). Dismissively described as nothing more otherworldly than aging frat boys, the Saturnine are ‘Houdini Splicers’ employing teleportation plasmids, not available to the player, to jump from place to place. One of many deranged cliques within Rapture, the Saturnine worship a combination of ancient deities, erroneously believing themselves divine as a result of excessive plasmid use. A belief in old gods granting immortality is therefore aligned with insanity, dementia and upper-class arrogance, another strategy of modern Gothic. BioShock also asserts rationality over Rapture’s seemingly irrational phenomena by constructing the player as an active researcher. Adopting a role associated with scientific investigation, players are tasked with documenting the quasi-supernatural creatures encountered throughout their journey. A necessary task in Neptune’s Bounty involves photographing Splicers with a camera. This device subsequently becomes a way of gaining an advantage over enemies. Depending on the quality of photographs taken of Rapture’s various adversaries, the closeness and centrality of the subject within the frame, the number of subjects captured, and the actions they are performing, players receive a research score. This affords benefits including increased damage to, and protection from, respective Splicers. Consequently, the player assumes an anthropological position concerning Rapture’s community, cataloguing the menagerie of semi-human, quasi-magical beings patrolling its corridors. This process assimilates a particularly modern strategy towards managing phenomena residing outside rational knowledge and understandings, with some precedent in Gothic literature. As Rosemary Sweet (2014) notes, the literary and cultural Gothic emerged from antiquarianism, the scholarly exploration of past cultures through remaining artefacts, ruins and manuscripts. Such is the role of Gothic videogame players, tasked with uncovering the game’s backstory through a combination of objects, spaces and documents.

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Camera in hand, Jack resembles an updated version of the folklorist, a semi-scholarly figure who emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. Fiedler points out at least one early Gothic enthusiast was such a researcher of ancient cultures (1967, 137). This historically-informed fascination with earlier civilisations initiated the original Gothic revival. Such branches of scholarship impacted on both the organisation and the content of Gothic fiction. Bloom sees folklore studies’ attempt to catalogue and categorise mythical creatures, as informing Dracula and characterising the scholarly vampire hunter (2010, 168). The folklorist’s project was another attempt by contemporary sophisticates to distinguish their beliefs from those of previous, and consequently less-developed, cultures. Their activities also assume a typically contradictory Gothic fascination with everything modern society believed itself to have left behind. In photographing, classifying and categorising Rapture’s monstrous inhabitants, an activity which rewards players with the benefits of knowing their enemies, Jack is imposing scientific order and rationality on the chaotic aftermath of the city’s social and biological experiments. Encapsulating Gothic fiction’s unstable disposition towards scientific developments, capitalising on the simultaneous terror and excitement of monstrous possibilities in defying the forces of nature, key figures within Rapture’s scientific community clearly resemble the enigmatic, charismatic but ultimately deranged ‘mad scientist’. As Fiedler writes, this is an archetype with roots in the magicians of folklores and fairy tales, figures existing in both early and transitional Gothic literature (1967, 138–9). Precursors of this ambivalent antagonist include black and white magicians, and alchemists (Svilpis, 1989, 64). In both Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, classic Gothic stories of medical experiments gone horribly wrong, Cornwell sees science replacing or updating alchemic activity (1990, 68, 95). Andrew Ryan, alongside Doctor Steinman and Brigid Tenenbaum, follows such literary types. The chaos consuming Rapture emerges from the alliance between monstrous science and monstrous capitalism, resulting in a disintegrating underwater city occupied by genetic abominations. Rapture’s location is significant. For J. E. Svilpis, the mad scientist is a solitary individual, detached, separate and isolated from the rest of humanity. Often they reside within, or are surrounded by, some sterile location symbolising their dislocation from normal human life (1989, 68). The overreaching ‘mad scientist’ performs their activities, like so many Gothic villains, under cover of darkness, in hidden locations, in the privacy of their own keep. Moored on the ocean’s bed, Rapture is analogous to the lone-standing castle, the subterranean laboratory, the underground research facility, and the secret island. Research, including the development of plasmids, Little Sisters, and the Big Daddies who protect them, is only possible somewhere beyond the social scrutiny of conventional morality, a fundamental principle of Ryan’s underwater utopia. Svilpis writes, ‘the modern scientist is a godlike, masculine penetrator of a secretive, feminine Nature’ (ibid., 65). There are clear gendered dimensions to the Gothic over-reacher narrative. Like other Gothic stories, BioShock

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features a male necromancer, alchemist or modern scientist usurping the maternal power to create life. Several factors align nature with the feminine, the familial and the domestic, while depicting science as a masculine perversion of the natural order. Although informed by Rand, Rapture’s architect, Ryan is the epitome of masculine authority, subjecting the city to the uncompromising patriarchal rule of a post-war industrialist, aligning this king of the castle with earlier Gothic villains. This results in a corruption of nature, symbolised by childhood, motherhood and family. The perversion of this trinity of cherished concepts is epitomised in an early sequence. Here players encounter a distressed female Splicer leaning over a baby carriage, singing a corrupted lullaby, filled with loss, death and loneliness. Underlining the brutal world that the player is entering, the carriage contains not a baby but a pistol. Rapture is a patriarchal institution, the site of conflict between Andrew Ryan and the entrepreneurial rival Frank Fontaine, both self-centred masculine megalomaniacs whom the player must destroy. The Little Sisters’ creation involves authorities taking young girls from their parents and implanting them with slugs designed to maximise their production of ADAM, an act of violation consistent with the lascivious activities of traditional Gothic villainy. Point Prometheus evidences the cruelty they have been subjected to under this male-driven regimen. In contrast, two female doctors, botanist Julie Langford and geneticist Brigid Tenenbaum, are depicted sympathetically. Both associate femininity with nature, nurturing and motherhood. The decision to save or harvest the Little Sisters is gendered from the start, with Tenenbaum urging the former and Atlas advocating the latter. As Rose points out, in BioShock’s narrative, Tenenbaum originally designed Little Sisters to provoke parenting instincts, making Rapture’s residents less likely to harm them. Ironically, a ‘motherly desire’ leads the previously detached scientist to care for the children in establishing a refuge for her research experiments (2015, 22). The Nazi collaborator’s redemption centres on the awakening of these ‘natural’ maternal instincts. While necessary tasks align players with these female characters, the majority of gameplay remains brutally masculine, geared towards assassinating and displacing two father figures. Aiding Langford is a scientific endeavour: collecting and mixing ingredients in an Arcadian u-invent machine, rather than a potentially more female-coded botanical process of caring and nurturing. Saving Little Sisters means destroying their Big Daddy protector, effectively replacing the monsters as the young girls’ male guardian. As Henthorn notes, in any game ending, irrespective of how Jack treats the Little Sisters, they remain subservient to him (2018, 216). Either they stay in Rapture while the hero assumes the role of overlord, or they break out into the surface where they adopt the position of dutiful daughters to their new daddy. On dry land, the Little Sisters are defined by modern institutions and concepts, sporting wedding rings and wrist watches, respectively associated with the modern institution of heterosexual marriage and chrononormativity (Brown, 2018, 392). Just as the game’s critique of consumerism is undermined by generic reliance on capitalist imperatives, such as resource management, weapon accumulation, individualism and competition, so the player is interpolated into

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patriarchy-coded processes of scientific production. No matter how sorry the player might feel for the confused woman mourning her lost child, they will still beat her to death with the monkey wrench and steal her gun. Of course, this contribute to BioShock’s determinism, that the player as Jack’s handler is fated to become that which they abhor, a patriarchal figure of science, industry and individualism.

Becoming abhuman In depicting a violent world of bodily augmentation, accelerated evolution and manufactured monstrosity, BioShock echoes various Gothic sub-cycles exploring questions of humanity and its place in a modern, postmodern, post-human world. The game engages with the question Punter observed in the ‘decadent Gothic’ literature of the 1890s, expressing concerns circulating the possible degeneration of the species. Such fiction asks, ‘how much … can one lose – individually, socially, nationally – and still remain a “man”?’ (1996b, 1). Splicers embody a response to this rhetorical question. Their mindless attacks on the protagonist imply they have lost much physiological and empathic humanity. By subjecting themselves to increasingly dramatic genetic augmentations, they radically deviate from physiological definitions of being human. Players witness Jack undertake similar processes in following Atlas’ instructions, assassinating Ryan, then Fontaine. Jack necessarily follows the Splicers in successively augmenting and enhancing his own body, taking it beyond the limits of conventional manhood. In dramatising such transformations of the human body, BioShock locates itself within Botting’s ‘Cybergothic’, a technologised updating of the genre nevertheless ‘cloaked in the reassuringly familiar images of vampire-cyborg-zombie monster’ (2007a, 209). Many of Rapture’s hybrid adversaries constitute monstrous cyborgs. Veronica Hollinger references the term’s origins, in science rather than fiction, denoting ‘any entity that combines the organic and the technological into a single self-regulating system’. A source of ‘fascination and anxiety’, a figure of ‘postmodern border crossing and boundary breakdown’ (2011, 273–4), the cyborg is an eminently Gothic being, whose literary origins lie in the original Frankenstein’s monster. Hollinger’s description clearly applies to the Splicers. Little Sisters, sharing symbiotic relationship with sea slugs, also have a cyborgian existence. Their Big Daddy protectors represent the most recognisable cyborg, fused into the technology of the suits they inhabit. And through their journey across Rapture, the player becomes increasingly cyborgian, assuming the activities and attributes of the monsters they confront. Decadent, cybernetic, cybergothic qualities express a ‘fascination with the biology of the human body’ running through the corpus of Gothic fiction. Characterising familiar tensions that Linda Dryden identifies between obsession and revulsion, narratives of this type express the excitement of scientific possibility intertwined with images of ‘mutilation and mutation’ (2003, 34–5), all contributing to the thrill of playing BioShock. The game’s monsters embody what Cavallaro describes as a ‘protean multiformity’, a ‘proclivity to undergo

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baffling metamorphoses’ (2002, 173). They affront modernity’s emphasis on clarity, coherence and clear separation of categories, which consequently ‘undermines the myth of corporeal unity insistently promoted by Western thought’ (ibid., 190). The perversion of the body represented by the Splicers confounds the healthy, rational, bounded physicality and behaviour expected of the disciplined subject of modernity, while being themselves the product of modern forces of science, technology and consumer capitalism. Alongside Bakhtin, whose definition of the carnivalesque applies to BioShock’s rabid masquerades, Hoeveler cites sociologist Norbert Elias. Exploring emerging regulations concerning manners and decorum during modernity’s early stages, Elias observes an emphasis on discourses of bodily control. The ideal modern individual was expected to internalise cultural concepts of shame, embarrassment and restraint around bodily functions, endorsing the importance of maintaining and institutionalising distinctions between inside the body and the outside world. Creatures throughout Rapture have clearly abandoned this model of the public body, with associated beliefs in self-control, correct manners and civilised performance. Instead they indulge in ‘physical violence, duelling, hunting, and public displays of bodily functions’, activities considered within modern codes of public conduct to be ‘abhorrent and grossly unacceptable’ (1998, 28–9). The player’s role is to cleanse Rapture, as much as possible, of such abject behaviour, even as this necessitates participation in violence, hunting and duelling it out with the Splicers they encounter. However, Jack’s endeavours are in vain. The player might employ upgraded weaponry, genetic superpowers and photographic methods of categorising and cataloguing to control the hybrid creatures they encounter, but there are no limits to the monsters that modernity can manufacture, and even the most upgraded tool can never completely lay these monsters to rest. They merely respawn again once the player’s back is turned. Rather than a superseded feature of the Dark Ages, Gothic fiction suggests that the monster remains at the heart of modernity itself. Writing of nineteenth-century ghost stories, Smith considers how many authors emphasise Marx’s use of Gothic language. The political theorist’s famous critique of capitalism repeatedly associates economic processes with the monstrous, the phantasmal, the demonic, the doppelgänger, the zombie, the spectre, ghouls, alchemists and werewolves (2010, 12–13). In a section entitled ‘Gothic economies’, Halberstam elaborates upon the Gothic tones in Marx’s description of capitalism as a vampire, sucking the blood of living labour. Children are a particular victim of capitalist modernity (2006, 102). Little Sisters exemplify the extent capitalism uses up child labour, turning them wraith-like, pale-skinned and ghastly in the process. The giant syringes they use to gather blood-red ADAM from the corpses littering Rapture also make them perverse agents of vampire capitalism. The chemical fluid Little Sisters collect is a vital currency in the city. Play requires engagement in this dubious economic system, either saving or harvesting the children. ADAM is used to purchase plasmids in the Gatherer’s Garden vending machines, just as first aid kits and ammunition are bought using more familiar monetary currency. Stylised images of Little Sisters flank these vendors. Their ceramic pink skin, clean clothes

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and fresh faces obscure the grotesque reality of the creatures’ true sickly appearance and suggest the ways capitalism uses cherubic promotional images of children to conceal exploitation of child labour. Upon harvesting the children, ingesting the sea slug their bodies contain, the girls conveniently evaporate. However, Little Sisters respond no more favourably to being ‘saved’, writhing in helpless resistance. As the vampire of commerce, these monstrous girls betray the horror at the heart of capitalist modernity, the exploitation of young labour which continues to feed the economic system, and the extent to which these ‘other’ children must be abjected by civilised society to justify their treatment. Little Sisters also capitalise on modern ambivalences that Marina Warner identifies in the mythical figure of the child, both angelic and demonic, a construct of Romantic imagination but also a being ‘with all the power of projected monstrousness to excite repulsion – and even terror’ (1994, 43). Describing Little Sisters as both abject and uncanny, Henthorn identifies two Gothic qualities characterising the modern monster, associated with that which society wishes to expel and that which returns to haunt (2018, 212). Several in-game commentaries express the girls’ unsettling appearance and grotesque, leaking skin. The children travel through the pipes of Rapture, thus associating the creatures with waste products. They feed upon the fluids of rotting corpses. Cavallaro’s ‘narratives of darkness’ also engage with perceptions of children as both Romantic innocent figures, uncompromised by the socialisation process, and threats to adult society for precisely the same reason (2002, 135). This dualistic nature inflects the relationship between these small yet invulnerable children, and the giant brutes who attack anyone who harms them. Two possible ways, Cavallaro argues, Gothic texts respond to the unsettling qualities this contradiction presents are to ‘ostracize children by abandoning them to a rootless condition’, or to ‘associate children with enslaved people’ (ibid., 139). Both seem applicable to the Little Sisters. Unsaved children wander the halls of Rapture, searching for ‘angels’, perversely reproducing associations between children and the divine. As Henthorn observes, the Point Prometheus conditioning rooms imply parallels between the Little Sisters and marginalised groups subjected to scientific experimentation during the Second World War (2018, 210–11). Yet the Little Sisters seem quite at home in their environment. Cavallaro writes that the possibility that children might be more capable of surviving the ‘terrorizing game orchestrated by adults’ renders their fears more tolerable through recourse to fantasy or play. As a consequence: ‘Ogres, spectres, goblins, giants, witches, metamorphic creatures, elves and poltergeists may even be considered friends’ (2002, 158). Popular culture, for children and adults, is full of such stories. Mr Bubbles, the Little Sisters’ nickname for their heavily armored protector, embodies an inconsistent amalgamation of these mythical creatures, clad in a steampunk diving suit. The player themselves becomes increasingly monstrous as they integrate themselves into Rapture’s grotesque culture. Upgrading plasmid abilities means developing the same thirst for fluid as addicted Splicers and gathering Little Sisters. The largely unseen body the player plays becomes increasingly defined

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by its abhumanity, a term employed by Hurley in describing late Victorian Gothic fiction’s preoccupation with ‘the horrific re-making of the human subject’ (1996, 5). Distinct from the stable, integral, secure, unitary, bounded body of the Enlightened subject, abhumanity is characterised by its ‘metamorphic and undifferentiated’ qualities, suffering a ‘gross corporeality’, experiencing an existence ‘both fragmented and permeable’ (ibid., 3). Jack’s body enjoys a similar state of fragmentation, permeation and metamorphosis. This body is continually being penetrated, by attacking Splicers, Big Daddies and security systems, but also by the self-administering of EVE to power plasmids. Jack expels various projectiles, including fire, lightning, ice and air, from within his own body. The Insect Swarm plasmid is particularly visceral, causing clouds of bees to burst from Jack’s palms. In a range of late nineteenth-century novels Hurley notes ‘the variety and sheer exuberance of the spectacle, as the human body collapses and is reshapen across an astonishing range of morphic possibilities’ (ibid., 4). The malleability of the abhuman body drives the increasing acquisition of physical upgrades, many of which transform the very composition of the character’s body. BioShock’s pleasures are bound up in the experience of new plasmids and the novel forms of violent interaction these evolutions afford in destroying monsters and further penetrating Rapture’s ruined architecture. According to Hurley, novels of abhumanity express tensions between nostalgia for the stable self which modern living undoes, and arousal for the possibility of monstrosity it promises. Jack’s body straddles this tension. It represents a virtually perfect, potentially invulnerable self, the centre of the first-person shooter universe. At the same time, this body is far from stable, but subject to repeated physical attacks, transformations, expulsions. Its virtual integrity is constantly being compromised through a necessary procession of augmentations. On dying, Jack immediately evaporates and regenerates in an uncanny double of himself. As Hurley says: ‘The abhuman subject is a not-quite human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other’ (ibid., 3–4). In Gothic literature, speculative fiction, post-human theory, videogames and videogame scholarship, cyborgs are a recurring, if ambivalent, polysemic and contradictory concept. Hurley connects the abhuman of the late nineteenth century with the post-human of late twentieth century (ibid., 11). Discussing such themes in science fiction novels, Hollinger identifies a literature of ‘estrangement’, including works by Shelley and Wells. Like BioShock, such fiction explores ‘the uncanny processes of denaturalization through which we come to experience ourselves as subjects-in-technoculture’ (2011, 270). A central point of reference in critical perspectives on this contentious sci-fi figure is Donna J. Haraway’s famous cyborg manifesto. Here the being emerges as a highly Gothic figure of blasphemy, irony, incompatibility, hybridity, partiality, perversity, contradiction, incompatibility, imagination and play. The essay’s argument in favour of ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’ (1991, 149–50) appears to be a central appeal of Gothic literature and videogames. Haraway’s phantasmagorical mode of expression frequently mobilises the Gothic, making

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reference to Frankenstein (ibid., 151), to ‘many-headed monsters’ (ibid., 154), to hybrids and chimeras (ibid., 177) and ‘monstrous selves’ in feminist speculative fiction (ibid., 174). While only briefly referencing videogames (ibid., 168), Haraway’s dichotomous distinction between representation and simulation privileges the latter (ibid., 161). Simulation is a postmodern model, both of Gothic fiction’s counterfeit ghosts and the prime mechanism of digital gaming. Two of the three ‘boundary breakdowns’ Haraway identifies in late capitalism, between human and machine, and between the physical and non-physical (ibid., 152–3) are associated with videogame play. The promise of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities’ (ibid., 154) might constitute the virtual attraction of many digital ludic worlds. BioShock unfolds in an environment where ‘the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred’. As a consequence, ‘mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms’ (ibid., 165). This situation applies both to Jack in Rapture and the player who juggles seamlessly between the shotgun weapon and the telekinesis plasmid in battling the city’s grenade-wielding Nitro Splicers. The cyborg is an unstable fusion of competing elements which embraces hybridity, partiality, uncertainty and abjection. As an imaginary figure of the earliest Gothic science fiction, it continues disrupting the boundaries of humanity. It exemplifies the genre’s ambivalent engagement with technology and constitutes one of the many entities which present readers with ‘new kinds of simulated life … animated machines, and reproduction by computer or genetic engineering’ (Punter and Byron, 2010, 24). A thrilling frisson exists between the monstrous blurring of categories and the liberating possibilities this presents. As Halberstam writes, in challenging hegemonic ontology, the monster and the cyborg have the capacity to ‘make strange the categories of beauty, humanity and identity that we still cling to’ (2006, 6). Dovey and Kennedy use the cyborg metaphor to describe the distinct videogame experience. They argue that feedback loops between the player and the game entail a collapse of boundaries dividing human and machine, representing a ‘compelling literalization of the ontology of the cyborg’ in a science fiction fusion of wire, flesh, code and screen. ‘During gameplay there is no separation of individuals and machines’, they write, ‘but only a collective process of engagement where action and reaction flow in a circuit of technologized bodies and their pleasures’ (2006, 109). This appears particularly appropriate for first-person shooters’ seamless synthesis of the optical perspective of the player and the protagonists. Adopting a less optimistic perspective, Boulter draws on Baudrillard in referring to the cyborgian synthesis of player and avatar as a ‘fractal subject’ (2005, 53), a concept chiming with Haraway’s ‘fractured identities’ (1991, 155). An expression of cyborg identity, negotiating the real and the virtual, the avatar ‘speaks to a cultural anxiety over the limits and boundaries of the body (and community) subjected to increasing threats from disease, from actual violence, from the encroachments of technology itself’ (Boulter, 2005, 54). Such an analysis is equally suited to the position of Jack and the player in Rapture’s hazardous underwater environment.

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BioShock’s reflexive engagement with the videogame experience foregrounds the cyborgian relationship between player and videogame technologies. This invites a critical consideration of the power dynamic inherent in this fusion. Who has the upper hand, human or machine? Brown reads BioShock as ‘an allegory of the political ambivalence of the subject’s relation to technological media’ (2018, 377–8), specifically the ways videogames and digital technologies restructure human subjectivities, actions and sensations of embodiment. Successful players surrender their will to the title’s requirements, a situation where the gaming apparatus has dominance. Just like Jack, whose name is synonymous with cyborgian fusion, unwittingly follows his programming, players follow the internalised walkthrough necessary for completion. For Brown, this reflects the videogame experience itself, one involving ‘a new relationship between the hands and eyes … one mediated – and arguably dictated – by the machine’ (ibid., 403). The author identifies further Gothic elements in BioShock, and games in general. The on-screen presence of Jack’s hands, usually absent from first-person shooters, demonstrates the uncanny relationship between player and character, hinging upon their unsettling status, somewhere between being ‘mine and not-mine’ (ibid., 377), simultaneously ‘familiar and unfamiliar’ (ibid., 382). Employing a particularly grotesque analogy, Brown writes of Jack’s hands as being prosthetically ‘grafted onto those of the player’, a parallel enhanced through in-game references to surgical procedures and bodily modification (ibid., 383). In a further monstrous Gothic blurring of boundaries between spaces, realities and bodies, Brown cites one author describing Jack’s hands as effecting a ‘leak’ between the world of the game and that of the player (ibid., 382–3). BioShock is thereby situated within historic concerns circulating the ambivalent relationships between (post)human subjects and the technological media which reshape bodies and subjectivities, anxieties dating back to early screen culture’s impact upon human experiences and embodiment (ibid., 378–9). The collapse of coherent corporeal identity, symptomatic of the modern experience, frequently features in Gothic science fiction. BioShock expresses such tropes in subjecting the player’s surrogate to various forms of modification, transformation and control. Dryden’s study of the work of Stevenson, Wilde and Wells identifies interconnected themes of dual identities, urban spaces, and a modern sense of identity fragmentation. Encapsulating the chaos of Rapture and its inhabitants, ‘The modern Gothic is a narrative of altered selves and shifting, fluid identities within a metropolis that itself has lost coherence and stability’ (2003, 41). Like modernity itself, the human in BioShock is always a work in progress, constantly shifting, morphing and evolving. Gene Banks allow players to arrange different combinations of plasmids and tonics, concocting an array of what Hurley might term ‘admixed embodiments’ (1996, 6). Each new level of Rapture, each new enemy they encounter, every Gatherer’s Garden and extra boost of ADAM promise a new ability, located not in external tools or weapons, but within the host body they inhabit. Ante-Contreras coins the term ‘self-enfreakment’ (2018, 174–5) to describe the wilful abjection players playing BioShock enact, a quality the critic

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relates to contemporary identity politics concerning masculinity and videogame culture. Throughout the game’s course, players develop a Gothic identification with the traps, threats and terrors of Rapture’s ruined infrastructure. Success means assuming an abject position, looting corpses and trash cans, crawling through vents and passageways, hiding from assailants, sneaking up from behind, incapacitating Splicers with electricity before burning them with napalm. Security devices are hacked to shoot Splicers on the player’s behalf. Plasmids function to turn enemies against each other. Accomplished researchers exploit Spider Splicers’ organs for extra health, much as Little Sisters gather ADAM and Ryan harvests Little Sisters. Through augmentation, the player’s cyborg body inhumanly aligns with their enemies, while they become increasingly inhuman through their actions. Whatever the player’s choice, harvesting or freeing the Little Sisters means killing their protector, the Big Daddy, whose death always reduces his young charges to tears. Indicative of the monster they have necessarily become, the final act has players assume the role of Big Daddy. They must smell, sound and dress like the Little Sisters’ patriarchal protectors using pheromones and a voice box stolen from the Point Prometheus research facilities. Donning boots, helmet and bodysuit, Jack adopts the guise of the great creatures he has been battling throughout the game. These physical augmentations entail a bodily appropriation of the Big Daddy persona. Wearing the diving helmet even alters the player’s perception in a manner entirely new to the game’s repertoire of effects. Signalling their complicity with Rapture’s infrastructure, when assuming this guise, the player is not attacked by either Splicers or security systems. The penultimate challenge, before reaching the final boss battle, is to guide a Little Sister through the museum wing, which includes a gift shop, fighting off assailants in the role of bodyguard. Upon success, and in preparation for the final showdown, players are given a syringe-like device resembling those Little Sisters use to drain corpses of ADAM. The player who survives to BioShock’s conclusion effectively assumes and internalises the qualities of their enemies. For Halberstam, the ‘reading subject’ of Gothic fiction is defined by ‘a kind of paranoia about boundaries’. They are plagued by existential questions concerning their relationship with the text and with the monstrousness it narrates: ‘Do I read or am I written? Am I monster or monster maker? Am I monster hunter or the hunted? Am I human or other?’ (2006, 36). Such uncertainties surround the videogame experience. Gothic games, like BioShock, deliberately confuse the divisions between reader and text, monster and human, persecutor and persecuted, player and played, foreground these qualities and illustrate the Gothic nature of the videogame itself.

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The haunting of Gone Home Throughout their extended study of haunted house cinema, Curtis (2008) observes a similar over-determination to the ghost as Halberstam identifies in Gothic monsters (Halberstam, 2006, 92). Haunted locations, Curtis argues, function as ‘powerful metaphors for persistent themes of loss, memory, retribution and confrontation with unacknowledged and unresolved histories’. Such stories typically explore aspects repressed within bourgeois domesticity, circulating social groups whose ‘ghostliness’ leaves a ‘lingering presence’. Within such a formation: ‘The house conceals a truth that has to be symptomatically worked out’ (2008, 10–11). Gone Home is similarly predicated on the investigation, exploration and ‘working out’ of a house metaphorically ‘haunted’ by events from the past and its absent inhabitants. From ground floor to first floor, basement to attic, players must excavate the Greenbriar residence, to reveal truths concerning its residents’ mysterious absence. This family includes father Terry, mother Janice, youngest daughter Sam, and elder daughter Katie, whose position players assume. Katie has spent the last year travelling Europe. During this time the family inherited the mansion from Terry’s uncle, Oscar Masan, and began moving into their new home. Terry has struggled with writers’ block, Janice is crushing on a co-worker, while Sam started at a new school and developed a passionate relationship with riot grrrl singer, Lonnie. Terry’s editor has made clear his copy is increasingly unfit for purpose. Janice managed a controlled burnout for the State Forestry Department. Sam and Lonnie saw Pulp Fiction together on a tentative first date, among many details indicating the game’s 1990s setting. Lonnie was reprimanded for wearing a beer logo t-shirt to class, and Sam for distributing feminist fanzines on school property. The family are having a new kitchen fitted. Everyday events throughout the past 12 months, and earlier, must be uncovered and interpreted by the player who investigates the Greenbriars’ house, examining documents, objects and artefacts: a letter, a newspaper clipping, a ticket stub, a work memo, a note from school, a mix tape. Collectively, these found fragments tell of Terry’s occupation as an electrical appliance reviewer, Janice’s Canadian heritage and continued friendship with her college roommate, and the DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-4

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oblique history of Oscar, whose reclusive behaviour earned the new Greenbriar family home its nickname ‘the psycho house’. Sam’s narrative, the most central to the game, emerges through notes exchanged with her girlfriend, the fictional stories she authors, the magazines she reads, the videogames she plays, the music she enjoys. Audible entries to Sam’s journal feature as soundtrack voiceover at salient points, triggered by interacting with specific objects throughout the home. While not, strictly speaking, a haunted house story, uncovering the Greenbriars’ saga draws upon many mechanics identified in Curtis’ account of the film genre. As Curtis argues: ‘All explorations of the haunted house involve a kind of archaeology, the uncovering of an occluded narrative that constitutes the exorcism’ (2008, 33). Gone Home positions the player as archivist, anthropologist, exorcist of the family’s estate. Object after object express narrative detail. Some storytelling components lie prominently around the house. Other are harder to find. Exploration informs haunted house cinema, an essential requirement for their ghosts to be effectively laid to rest (ibid., 34–5). Gone Home follows such a formula. This house is filled with secrets, which must be uncovered for the family’s narrative to be successfully assembled and Katie to feel at home. Some narrative strands, such as Janice’s feelings for ‘Ranger Rick’, Sam’s growing relationship with Lonnie, are evidently concealed from other family members. One of Sam’s journal entries, entitled ‘Lie-to-Mom-and-Dad Situation’, suggests both sisters’ complicity in being economical with the truth when it comes to family relations. As in many Gothic tales, the haunted house provides a setting for generational confrontation (ibid., 15). Sam is clearly embarrassed by Janice, who behaved extremely rudely towards Lonnie at Thanksgiving dinner, and distressed at her parents’ hostile reaction upon discovering their relationship. Notably referencing work on queer subcultures, Curtis points out that ‘haunting’ refers both to places and to people, characterised by their marginal, overlooked or oppressed status. Ghost stories often entail drawing attention to injustices which evade the public records (ibid., 24). Sam’s queer narrative haunts the domestic space of Gone Home. The young woman’s intimate journal entries activate upon examining postcards, school notes or band flyers, as though these objects have somehow become imprinted by past events. As such, ‘“Old things” – souvenirs, keepsakes and relics’ function in ‘accessorizing the “personality” of their owners by maintaining continuities or establishing links with previous times or distant places’ (ibid., 67). Gone Home assumes a logic whereby artefacts stand in for the voices, experiences and histories of absent characters. Consistent with haunted house cinema, and Gothic videogames, players engage in a symbolic exorcism, uncovering newspaper reports, photographs and other documents evidencing the trauma which initiated this haunting (ibid., 84). In Gone Home, this trauma explains the absence of the Greenbriar family members who exist only as a spectral presence throughout the game. Curtis’ account highlights further continuities between Gothic fiction and the Gothic videogame that Gone Home exemplifies. Like haunted house films, games are often ‘journeys’ involving ‘an investigation of labyrinthine spaces’ (ibid., 56–7). The theme of ‘obstruction becoming induction’, the moment when

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‘an implacable barrier becomes a seductive invitation’, Curtis notes, frequently initiate the narrative, as the haunted house opens itself up for investigation (ibid., 49). This exemplifies the thematic permeation of boundaries noted throughout Gothic literature and videogame scholarship. Across genres, multiple games are organised around players discovering ways to enter sealed, locked or otherwise inaccessible areas. Moments of induction punctuate play, as successive puzzles are solved and players are permitted further into the videogame space. Two significant sites in Gone Home, both resonant with ghostly potential, are the basement and the attic. The game’s initial challenge as Katie, arriving home for the first time, is to locate a key incongruously hidden under ‘Christmas duck’. This pagan-like totem represents one of many childhood objects Katie finds during her investigation. The ‘frozen time’ of haunted house narratives (ibid., 31), echoing the recurring quality of temporal stasis, collapses, and confusion in Gothic culture is generated by Gone Home’s conspicuous location in 1990s America. While hardly as anachronistic as other Gothic spaces, the Greenbriars’ mansion is nevertheless characterised by temporal dislocation. A Gothic sense of pastness emerges through outdated technologies and cultures: audio and video cassettes, riot grrrl bands, conspiracy theory television and magic eye pictures. This complex relationship with history infects the game’s structure. The playable protagonist is investigating a space, uncovering documents which exist in the present, while contributing to understandings of events located in the past. These largely relate to the period of Katie’s year-long absence. Throughout this exploration players encounter extracts from Sam’s diary. Written over the preceding months, these sequentially narrate the teenager’s experiences of moving home, starting a new school, and developing her relationship with Lonnie. However, as Katie cannot find this diary until the game’s final moments, it cannot be read until she has completed her investigation of the house. As such, while looking backwards to the past, the game also anticipates a near future when Katie can fully make sense of her sister’s experiences, and the narratively-loaded objects the mansion contains, by reading her first-person account. Indeed, many artefacts only become significant through diary entries which only the player hears. These privilege the spectator with an understanding that will only become available to Katie following the game’s closure. Gone Home is a celebrated independent title, attracting academic and popular attention for its sexual politics, storytelling, and disputed status as a videogame. Dimitrios Pavlounis (2016) and Shane Snyder consider the game’s queer perspectives on history and the archive, and surveillance of non-heterosexual relationships. Kevin Veale (2017) positions Gone Home within museum and heritage studies, while Robin J.S. Sloan examines the title’s postmodern nostalgia. While none explicitly engage with generic elements, there are recognisable Gothic dimensions to perspectives employed by these scholars. Archival studies align the Gothic and ludic-Gothic concern with documenting past events. Sloan associates 1990s nostalgia with a debilitating medical condition, identified in seventeenth-century Europe, characterised by loss and longing, melancholy, suicidal feelings, and severe homesickness (2015, 529–30). Such experiences

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frequently feature in Gothic criticism, literature and games, particularly surrounding Gothic heroines like Janice. Little scholarship considers Gone Home as horror, ghost or Gothic fiction, and with good reason. Such generic elements are overshadowed by the game’s progressive narrative and innovations in storytelling design. Moreover, the game deliberately tricks players into experiencing the game as Gothic, only to rescind in the final moments. The prominence of Gothic titles and iconography throughout videogame history provides the context for such misdirection. Much indicates the title’s contribution to this Gothic heritage of digital gaming. The game unfolds in a large, empty, unfamiliar house on a dark and stormy night. Katie arrives at the front door at 1:15 a.m., finding the family home inexplicably abandoned. Lights flicker throughout the mansion. Rain and thunder rumble in the background. An emergency television transmission sounds throughout the house’s corridors warning of the dangers outside. Hidden compartments reveal evidence of ghosts and ghost hunting. Paranormal media appear everywhere. These atmospheric elements collectively indicate the player’s situation within a ghost story with Sam’s voice echoing from beyond the grave. Ellis points to the centrality of families to the Gothic. Of the inaugural text they write, ‘Although this gothic novel is about dreams of ghosts and monstrous calamities, it is actually about families and children’ (2000, 34). Gone Home almost exclusively focuses on the Greenbriars and their histories. Upon entering the building, players encounter a large picture displaying Sam, Katie, Janice and Terry. A strangely amateurish plaque identifies each character by name. Like many Gothic tales, the game unfolds within the family home, establishing close relationships between the house’s architecture and the dynasty residing within its walls. Mighall observes how ‘house’ might reference either a building or family. The Greenbriar mansion, if not the location of actual supernatural occurrences, is nevertheless, like so many Gothic ancestral homes, ‘a building haunted by its “House”’ (2007, 85). Rooms and their contents express the absent family members who have only recently taken up residence there. Veale cites one commentator observing how sections are divided according to family members, whose personalities emerge through their use of these spaces (2017, 659– 60). Investigation is directed towards two locked and foreboding areas, a basement and an attic, familiar bad places within Gothic literature. The latter’s sinister potential is underlined by an arrangement of blood red fairy lights surrounding its entrance. Players learn the mansion is known as ‘the psycho house’ after its previous inhabitant suffered a mental breakdown. As gameplay progresses, secret panels and passages are revealed throughout the building, amid indications the house might be haunted by its recently deceased previous owner. The game thereby establishes a tone of suspense and foreboding, drawing on many features of Gothic fiction, anticipating the player’s inevitable movement towards an unpleasant climax. Familiar ‘horror tropes’, the large empty house, flickering lights and atmospheric weather conditions, contribute to what Pavlounis terms spooky ‘red herrings’ (2016, 587), foregrounding the player’s generic location within a tragic narrative experience. Objects scattered throughout the

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family home self-consciously prime players for this grizzly conclusion. Sam clearly enjoys a fascination with supernatural culture. The television room features a cushion fort, a more comfortable home within the home, with a book on poltergeists lying inside. Throughout their evenings together, Sam and Lonnie have amused themselves by ghost hunting. A Ouija board lies beside a note, recording a séance where Oscar appears to have expressed a desire to return. A fantastic Gothic uncertainty hangs in the air. Has the troubled Oscar returned from the grave to wreak revenge on the family who shunned him? Has Sam killed and dismembered her homophobic parents in an act of queer vengeance, fulfilling her school nickname ‘psycho house girl’? Or is Sam herself lying dead in the attic? As the game reaches its conclusion, journal entries prime players for a particularly unhappy ending to the young woman’s romance. A ghostly return, a patricidal massacre, an act of morbid self-harm, all coincide with the tone established through these Gothic audio-visual and gameplay elements. The ghostly sound of Sam’s account contributes to an impression the young woman is dead, her disembodied voiceover possessing all the tragic hallmarks of a protracted suicide note. Only in the game’s final moments is the mystery resolved. Narrative echoes and doubling contribute further to Gone Home’s Gothic atmosphere. Objects and artefacts frequently reference others, investing the most banal of domestic detritus with storytelling potential. Unremarkable possessions become enigmas awaiting resolution through accompanying documentation. An Earth, Wind & Fire poster by the Greenbriar marital bed connects with a note Rick sent Janice, inviting her to a concert, and a ticket stub found on the floor in the east wing. The family portrait’s poorly-made plaque is revealed as Sam’s shop class handiwork, expressing her antagonism towards both school and family. A note from the metalwork tutor advises Sam to take more pride in her work. The house’s overdetermined contents are a web of narrative points, constructing an almost uncanny synchronicity in their deliberate placement throughout the home. Echoes and reflections exist between family members, reproducing the world of doubling Day considers central to Gothic fantasy (1985, 21). Katie and Sam double each other throughout the game, most comically in a sex education task both have completed. The eldest daughter has a perfect score. The youngest has transformed this routine exercise into an elaborate historical epic. Only tangentially related to the menstrual cycle, Sam’s essay further communicates her antagonism towards the heteronormative scholastic institutions. Both Terry and Sam are writers. Terry has authored a trilogy of books combining science fiction, conspiracy theory thrillers and action adventure. Increasingly sophisticated versions of Sam’s fantasy pirate story, narrating her maturing sexuality, appear throughout the house. The teenager has successfully applied to a summer writing retreat. Copies of Sam’s outlawed anti-patriarchy fanzine can also be found in the basement, mirroring the unsold copies of Terry’s book stacked in his office. Central to Terry’s book series is the assassination of John F. Kennedy, contextualising the game in a 1990s preoccupation with conspiracies relating to 1960s events. A video recording of Oliver Stone’s early 1990s film features among many cassettes in the television room. The tragedy’s date is the last year

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a young Terry visited his uncle’s house, and is also the combination to the safe hidden in his basement. Notch marks on the wall, recording Terry’s growth in height, constitute a literal inscription of the family member upon the ancestral home. Media throughout the Greenbriar house express the self-reflexive nature of Gothic culture. A copy of Author magazine features an article about Stephen King, a writer closely associated with Gothic literature (Sears, 2011). Sam has stockpiled off-air recordings of The X Files (1993–2002), a show considered by Hogle, writing in 2001, as ‘the most “Gothic” series now on American network television’ (2001, 168). Other VHS120s cassettes include Beetlejuice (1988), Blade Runner (1982) and The Dark Crystal (1982). A TV guide snippet, where Sam has circled her favourite programmes, lists Picket Fences (1992–96), Theatre of Blood (1973) and American Gothic (1995). Gone Home also foregrounds its own ludo-Gothic status. Hidden in cupboards are the board games Haunted House and Got Your Number, highlighting the title’s preoccupation with ghostly buildings and audio messages. Fictional console cartridges lie in the media room. Through their ghost hunting escapades Sam and Lonnie, like the player, have indulged in a game of scaring each other. Such self-reflexive gestures, corresponding with Gothic fiction’s ironic disposition, paradoxically reinforce rather than undermine the game’s spooky effect. These references contribute to convincing players they are experiencing a work of paranormal fiction, one fully aware of its proximity to similar media, only to finally reveal, in a typically Gothic manner, that it is nothing of the sort. Gone Home even participates in the ‘explained supernatural’, whereby spooky features have potentially rational explanation, while leaving space for alternative interpretations. A note from the Black Cat Electric Company, its name contributing to the game’s occult atmosphere, records an inability to identify the precise cause of lights flickering throughout the house. Generations of rewiring, it postulates, may have rendered the house’s power supply unreliable. Accumulations of the past within the present giving rise to ghostly phenomena, a central Gothic theme, are here expressed through the metaphor of degrading or jerryrigged electrics. Sam’s ghost hunter journal leaves space for reasonable explanations behind the potentially supernatural phenomenon she and Lonnie have recorded. Sour milk could evidence spectral intervention, or natural spoilage, another consequence of the house’s dodgy wiring. Noises in the basement might emanate from the furnace, which players may note, is particularly monstrous. Ectoplasm, Sam admits, could well be caused by a leaky ceiling. What looks like blood in the bath by Sam’s room, possible traces of a murder or suicide attempt, is actually red hair dye, as a diary entry narrating the development of Sam and Lonnie’s relationship clearly shows. Yet the absence of explicit supernatural content does not preclude Gone Home from being considered either Gothic or a ghost story. As Smith points out, the ghosts of early Gothic fiction were fake, ‘the ghost of a ghost’, designed to confuse the superstitious protagonist (2007, 147). These details collectively seed expectations that something unpleasant awaits the player, either in the locked basement or in the sealed attic where the game concludes.

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Gendering the ghost story The central mystery of Gone Home, the game’s core enigma, and a major incentive for the engaged player to follow through to completion, is the conclusion of Sam’s story, explaining her absence from the family home. Multiple sources indicate Sam’s tale ends in her suicide, devastated at the desertion of her girlfriend, as Lonnie leaves to join the army. Sam’s later journal entries become increasingly distraught. Players hear of Lonnie’s final gig before leaving town, where Sam ran out in tears, of the last night the teenagers spent together, and Sam’s anguish following Lonnie’s departure. The penultimate entry narrates Sam’s retreat into the attic, a space significantly full of Gothic foreboding. Ambiguous notes, including the very first message players encounter pinned to the front door, strike a cumulatively sinister chord. The game’s title is subtly revealing. It is not precisely clear which character ‘gone home’ refers to. Katie has not, strictly speaking, ‘gone home’. This is her first time at the Greenbriars’ new house. No family members have ‘gone home’ either. They are nowhere to be found. Gone Home may instead reference the Scout movement’s use of the phrase to mean dying, a euphemism chiming with Lonnie’s military background and riot grrrl band Girlscout. The implication that Sam is dead, awaiting discovery in the attic, lends further ghostly qualities to the teenager’s narrative, made all the more spectral by its peculiar temporal displacement. Although Katie’s investigation activates Sam’s journal entries, the voiceover is non-diegetic and for players’ ears only. The Greenbriar manor may be actually haunted by Oscar, but is more symbolically haunted by the teenager’s disembodied commentary. Gender remains a recurring feature in critical discussion of the Gothic, the haunted house, and the ghost story. Gone Home’s self-conscious situation within these traditions raises numerous issues concerning the gendering of protagonists, spaces and the activities to which they bear witness. The domestic Gothic is understood as thematising the claustrophobic bourgeois family home as a site of patriarchal oppression. A significant transformation of Gothic literature, accompanying shifts from medieval to modern settings, entailed a departure from castles, abbeys and monastery, and a relocation to the domestic sphere of the contemporary middle-class family. Persecuted female victims found themselves transported from decaying ruins of distant times and faraway places into interior spaces much closer to home. Here heroines endured uncannily similar ordeals at the hands of uncannily similar male oppressors. Contrasting with idealisation of the private home as a site of harmonious relations throughout Victorian England, Kilgour argues, contemporary domestic Gothic novels depict the house as ‘a gothic prison’, a ‘torture chamber of horrors’, or ‘a feudal castle in which, freed from the restraints of society, the man may exercise his will and so rule with absolute despotism’ (2006, 76). In a transatlantic context, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock argues that ghost stories, authored by female writers, served to throw light on women’s disenfranchisement throughout American culture (2014, 48). Diana Wallace argues the Female Gothic is ‘par excellence the mode within which women writers have been able to explore deep-rooted female fears about women’s powerlessness

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and imprisonment within patriarchy’. In particular, Wallace argues that the ghost fiction short story provides a vital critical space, admonishing academic scholarship for overlooking the form in favour of seemingly more substantial Gothic novels (2004, 57). Such approaches afford a particularly effective critical context concerning Gone Home’s engagement with issues of gender, sexuality and social injustice. In nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ghost stories, Smith sees such tales as constituting vehicles for communicating ‘the presence of suppressed, and so ghostly, female histories’ (2010, 6). Gone Home’s central narrative tells of a young woman navigating the precarious requirements of school, family, social, personal and sexual relationships, within a homophobic culture. Sam’s story corresponds with the tradition Smith and others identify, even if the game’s spectral presence might be more symbolic than actual. If ghost stories are platforms for revealing critical insights into past and present injustice, Smith concludes, ghosts themselves are ambiguous entities, ‘both powerful and powerless’ (ibid., 187). Through her initial discovery, investigation, revelation, and exorcism, the ghost tells her story, often one of persecution and oppression. While her narrative and subjective position is privileged, the ghost’s spectral status renders her unable to directly intervene upon the present. Instead she needs others to realise her disembodied presence. A defining quality of the ghost is her lack of physicality, resulting in extreme difficulty in interacting with objects. A fundamental difference exists between Katie, the figure agented by the player, and her sister whose voiceover intrudes at pertinent points. Katie is mute yet physical, while Sam is vocal but non-corporeal. Sam exists in notes, artwork and journal entries. Katie, whose things largely lie in storage, nevertheless exists as a physical agented entity within the house. Katie’s main means of engagement is picking up, rotating and replacing artefacts populating the Greenbriar home. Few of these tell anything of the older sister’s story. While Sam is directing, narrating, her experiences of the last year, Katie’s narrative function is more passive, serving as the medium through which the story is told. As a ghostly presence, Sam shares many ambiguous qualities Smith notes, paralleling other female figures symbolically haunting the spaces of Gothic literature and cinema. Like the first Mrs de Winter in the 1940 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), as discussed by Hanson, Sam is ‘never fully present’ but also ‘never fully absent either’ (2007, 78). The teenager’s possessions proliferate throughout the house, in images, objects and texts, evidencing a messy prominence not matched by the building’s more discreet inhabitants. Players might find Terry’s note reprimanding Sam for not switching off the lights, alongside evidence of the author’s moribund publishing career. But unlike his daughter, whose pirate stories are concealed throughout the house, players cannot read any of Terry’s literary works, although the covers offer an insight into their content. Janice’s presence remains even more slight, with little first-hand evidence of the mother’s thoughts or feelings. Most texts detailing Janice’s life are directed towards, rather than authored by her, as letters, work memos and official documents. Hanson mentions the sonic qualities to the ghost’s presence, apparent through

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portraiture and costume, and through music and sound (ibid., 98–9). This provides peculiar Gothic resonance to audio tapes featuring girl punk bands Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile, among the objects found throughout the house. If inserted into conveniently placed cassette players, these provide a diegetic soundtrack to Sam’s story. Of course, a more significant sonic complement to the numerous written documents telling Sam’s story is her journal entries. Aside from answering machine messages from Katie and Lonnie, only Sam’s voice sounds throughout the game. Neither parents narrate their stories directly. Katie’s voice exists only as on-screen text, responding to a childhood toy, or finding a resting place for the Christmas duck. In this respect the younger sister’s autobiographical narration is privileged. ‘To assert that the body is the source of the voice seems like a redundant statement,’ Hanson writes, ‘until we consider how often films in the gothic and horror genres separate the voice and the body, and the uncanny effect that this separation has on the audience’ (ibid., 104). Of course, voice and body in the videogame can claim no connection, as Tinwell (2015) details, affording the relationship between the visual and the audio an always-uncanny dimension. Unpicking the voice’s ghostly qualities within Gothic cinema, Hanson cites sound theorist Michel Chion, who identifies a particularly spectral quality to the voiceover. Chion considers this the ‘I-voice’, whereby a ‘character’s voice separates from the body, and returns as an acousmêter to haunt the past-tense images conjured by its words’ (1999, 49). In Gone Home, the voice does not, according to cinematic convention, displace the imagery through a traditional flashback. Instead, in an environmental storytelling translation of this technique, Sam’s journal entries are attributed to the objects associated with each instalment. The audio file, ‘First Day of School’, is triggered by removing a list of pertinent instructions from Sam’s backpack. ‘Dealing With Roots’, detailing Sam’s intimate experience of colouring Lonnie’s hair, plays upon picking up a bottle of hair dye. Sam’s Girlscout concerts are connected with flyers and set lists. Despite these documents’ substitution for cinematic flashbacks, the videogame voiceover follows filmic conventions in encouraging empathic connection with Sam and her story. The teenager’s narrative, as Chion might argue, has ‘a certain sound quality, a way of occupying space, a sense of proximity to the spectator’s ear, and a particular manner of engaging the spectator’s identification’ (ibid., 49). This elicits a close, intimate, domestic sympathy for Sam, denied other Greenbriar family members. At the same time, as implied by Chion’s description of the omniscient disembodied voice haunting the filmic present, there is something ghostly about the voiceover. This corresponds with other communication and recording technologies such as the telephone and gramophone, each expressing a ‘funerary quality’ associated with ‘the soul, the shadow, the double’ (ibid., 46–7). Such morbid qualities contribute to impressions that Sam has committed suicide. The device also aligns the spectral voice of the teenage girl with the marginal position of the female ghost in supernatural fiction, and her connection with social injustices related to class, gender and sexuality.

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As Hanson observes, there is something Gothic to Chion’s discussion of the voice as a homeless entity, a wandering soul, an intelligence with no body. Parallels also exist between Hanson’s account of the portrait ushering in the uncanny return of its subject (2007, 108–9) and the ways a bottle of hair dye, a gig flyer, a hat, a key, a drawing, conjure up the spirit of the departed teenager. In evoking Sam’s presence through these mundane objects, rather than through the grander aristocratic family portrait, Gone Home enacts another Gothic transformation of traditional tropes into more recognisable features of domestic modernity. Katie’s gender is also significant. If the ghost in a ghost story is often female, so too is the character whose sensibilities attune to the home-bound spirit’s supernatural presence. The haunted house female protagonist, as a consequence of her gender, has responsibility for resolving problematic issues concerning domestic and family habitation (Curtis, 2008, 15). Young women often make connection with the spirit world, a throwback to the female mediums of the spiritualist movement (ibid., 97). Such perspectives on the relationship between modern media and the supernatural recur throughout Curtis’ study. Gone Home mobilises similar conventions, mythologies, discourses and structures. In particular, the player’s position uncannily echoes the spiritualist process of ‘cross-correspondence’, as discussed by Smith. Through this method, multiple mediums would receive related messages. It was believed that these fragments might be assembled to provide a coherent story, resembling a literary collage which, for another author, evokes Roland Barthes’ ‘tissue of quotations’. The problem posed in making sense of such collections, Smith notes, was one of analysis and interpretation (2010, 98–9). Similarly, players of Gone Home must assemble and understand the different texts to determine obscured narratives, relationships, events from the past, many of which have a haunting quality. If Sam’s ghostly, invisible, spirit-like presence, and marginal identity, define her as Gothic spectre, both Katie and the subjective position of the player bear traces of the Gothic heroine, uncovering the family mystery she finds herself compelled to investigate. Bloom comes close to describing the position of player and protagonist, for whom ‘everything is or could be significant in the scheme of their narratives’ (2010, 74). The contents of Greenbriar manor are notable for their storytelling significance, illustrating overlaps between the over-determined features of the Gothic building and the architectural narration of the Gothic videogame. Members of the Greenbriar household are defined by the culture they enjoy, the art they make, and the media which surround them. Terry has an extensive collection of old records neatly shelved in a dedicated music room. Sam first bonds with Lonnie playing Street Fighter, and later through riot grrrl rock bands. Janice paints watercolours, and also connects with Rick over music. Yet few narrative objects make sense in isolation. Instead, they gain a contextual relationship with others, necessitating the interpretation of player as medium, sleuth and Gothic heroine. A particularly condensed example of this practice incorporates a letter, a novel, a painting and an academic study, which collectively explain the psychological root of Terry’s unhappiness. Following the publication of his first book, Terry’s father evidently sent his son a critical letter, concluding with the damning phrase ‘you can

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do better’. This communication, attached to a returned copy of The Accidental Saviour, exists alongside a portrait of Terry’s father with his face removed, most likely punched in. A nearby copy of Greenbriar senior’s monogram on James Joyce suggests the patriarch’s assumed literary superiority. Repeatedly in Gothic fiction, family is the cause of all suffering. Patriarchal parents punish their children for their shortcomings, the impact of which persists into adulthood, subsequently inflicted upon their own offspring in a bitter cycle of dysfunctionality. Typifying the media echoes reverberating across the Greenbriar household, Terry’s father’s words appear on a noticeboard above his son’s desk, a constant reminder of the son’s failure to fulfil his expectations. Gone Home positions the player as amateur detective, anthropologist and ghost hunter, roles echoed in both Sam’s and her sister’s investigation of the old, creaky, empty house. Such interactive doubling, in which players actively participate, has Katie following in the footsteps of her sibling, investigating secret compartments and passageways hidden throughout the Greenbriars’ new residence. Accessing these essential architectural features involves interpreting another medium, one central to the videogame. Maps left by Sam highlight concealed panels’ otherwise undetectable presence. The game’s first-person perspective contributes to the spectral qualities of this investigation, enlivening Sam’s ghostly presence. Hanson discusses how, during a famous sequence of Gothic suspense cinema in the film adaptation of Rebecca, the camera replays a dead woman’s movements in lieu of an on-screen presence (2007, 99). In Gone Home, the player, guided by the game infrastructure, directs the ‘camera’ represented by Katie’s optical perspective, following her sister’s secret route through the house. This dynamic effects a collapse between the vision of the protagonists, of both Sam and her sister, the vision of the game apparatus, and the vision of the player. Hanson notes how the Gothic mode is one which ‘dramatises questions of identification (and disidentification), through the generic gothic trope of female mirroring or doubling, and through the affective operation of the gothic as an experiential mode’ (ibid., 188). This condenses many nuances of Gone Home’s interplay between characters, narratives, gameplay and player, illustrating further overlaps between Gothic games and cinematic adaptations. The interlocking gaze between Sam and Katie evokes features of both ghost story and female Gothic film, where subtle affinities exist between the heroine and the spectral women they investigate. Hanson’s analysis emphasises how camera movements animate the ghostly antagonist, analogous to the first-person movement through space. Curtis draws attention to intersections of optical perspective whereby ‘the point of view of the spectator becomes spectral itself in order to investigate the liminal spaces and traces that might lead to a necessary resolution’ (2008, 57). Investigating the haunted house elicits identification with the ghost, as viewers follow its path and see its sights, a suturing affinity between spectator and spectre replicated throughout Gone Home. Cavallaro notes how, in narratives of darkness, ‘it is hard to establish who is being haunted and who is doing the haunting’ (2002, 61). Instances are cited of well-known spectral narratives where living protagonists are associated with

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the ghostly (ibid., 69). Like Sam, Katie remains an unseen presence throughout the game. The globetrotter’s postcards appear throughout the house, testifying to her significance to the family while away. But unlike Sam’s journal entries, these are in text form only and offer no audio commentary. Moreover, these chirpy missives read as rather performative and lacking in personal detail concerning Katie’s deeper thoughts and feelings. Any reasons behind Katie’s departure for Europe, details of her own childhood, past relationships, her sexuality, or examples of artistry are absent from the family home. The few unpacked objects belonging to Katie number awards for track and field, science, and a dutifully completed sex education task. These function more to emphasise her sister’s comparative creativity and rebellious personality than her own. While the optical perspective of BioShock conspicuously incorporates its protagonist’s physicality, Katie remains a transparent entity. There is no indication of her hands, feet, shadow or reflection. Katie herself may well be a ghost. When picking up and examining smaller domestic artefacts, such as pens and cups, these objects hover in the bottom right corner as though held in an invisible hand or suspended by some supernatural presence. In a game experience leading to some Gothic conclusion, it would not seem out of place to finally reveal that Katie is the haunting element within the home, with news that her plane crashed returning from Europe as a consequence of the storm raging across the state. Indeed, Katie makes a very good poltergeist, opening doors and cupboards, discarding objects and documents, exposing secrets hidden in drawers and under furniture. Her ghostly interactions with the house’s light switches might even explain the issues the Greenbriars have been having with their electricity.

Gone Home’s queer gameplay While Gone Home’s mobilisation of Gothic literary tropes is clearly evident, as a videogame, the title occupies a genre known, somewhat derisively, as the walking simulator. Examples of this collective category are typically indie productions which eschew technically complex elements, such as heavily interactive environments, set pieces, cut-scenes and character animation, for atmospheric spaces heavy with narrative-centred architectural detail. Walking simulators often contain few puzzles, challenges, or impediments to player’s movement through space. As the name implies, walking simulators primarily provide environments for players to explore at their leisure with the emphasis on storytelling rather than action. Technically, the genre accommodates the limited budgets of small production companies. The empty house devoid of residents, the use of voiceover to convey Sam’s story, the way pencils and beakers hover in space rather than being held in an animated hand, are spectral features attributable to the limited resources of more independent game producers. Curtis considers the extent to which haunted house narratives accommodate filmmakers’ economic restrictions, a house set and limited cast being fairly inexpensive (2008, 53). Similarly, virtual houses are relatively easy to

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create, and a building’s spaces and contents, as demonstrated, can potentially bring absent residents to life when a budget cannot stretch to realistic nonplayable characters. Media producers’ use of Gothic and horror tropes to manage financial and technological limitations are frequently observed in videogames’ use of darkness and mist. No coincidence that many celebrated walking simulators, featuring lone protagonists exploring gloomy spaces, following a determined path, uncovering tragic stories from the past, have distinctly Gothic qualities. There may also be something both Gothic and feminine about the walking simulator’s emphasis on exploration and investigation, as opposed to the violent interaction, combat and conquest characterising more masculine ludic experiences. Connections exist between walking simulators and hidden object games, the casual genre previously discussed by Chess (2015), in terms of Gothic literary origins, female gamers, and the genre’s lowly cultural status within dominant videogame hierarchies. The primary interactive affordance of walking simulators, alluding to the pedestrian pleasures sought by its audience, also has a special place within women’s Gothic fiction. Moers points to the significance of travel as a route to female empowerment within women’s literature. Here the author distinguishes between ‘indoor travel’ and ‘outdoor travel’. The latter affords heroines significant independence, adventure and selfhood. In contrast, indoor heroines appear much less transgressive figures, permitted only to ‘scuttle miles along corridors, descend into dungeons, and explore secret chambers’ (1978, 126–7). The interiors indoor heroines inhabit are nevertheless comparatively female-coded spaces, environments where women are uniquely permitted to travel unescorted, proving ‘a challenge to the heroine’s enterprise, resolution, ingenuity, and physical strength’ (ibid., 129). Gothic videogames, located within the domestic home, afford places where indoor heroines can equally triumph. There might even be a history of literary feminism, Moers says, organised around the act of walking (ibid., 130). The walking simulator has the potential to offer comparable gaming experiences. In contrast to the frenetic pace of more masculine games, the walking simulator, with its leisurely emphasis on narrative, character, relationship-centred exploration and player interpretation, might, along similar lines, be considered a feminine game genre in the context of dominant gaming culture. Gone Home is a relatively brief ludic experience, located within an oftenderided cycle of low budget games, aligned with non-traditional gamers and gameplay. To this extent the title parallels the short literary format Wallace considers particularly well equipped to explore women’s powerlessness within patriarchy (2004, 57). The game’s compressed critique of the domestic sphere depicts the family home as a space of oppression not only for young women, but for all inhabitants. Sam may represent the most prominent ghost to haunt the Greenbriar home. But all the house’s invisible residents have spectral qualities, expressing various narratives of domestic discontent, entrapment and repression. Terry suffers his father’s disregard, as the basement triptych of letter, book and damaged portrait makes clear. The bar in his study and the

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glass beside his typewriter indicate Terry’s turn to alcohol for solace. A letter from the electronics magazine for which he writes reprimands the frustrated author for the rambling content of recent reviews. Protracted ruminations on his childhood, an example of the unnecessary tangents his over-long copy contains, imply personal as well as professional preoccupations are implicated in Terry’s despondency. The house contains several self-help books, suggestive of a family unable to help itself. One publication entitled A Stranger Under My Roof shows the Greenbriar parents are struggling to understand their maturing children. Another, Making Friends Even When You’re Shy, has Terry’s Post-it note attached. It reads: ‘Sam – thought this might help’. Among the more touching objects, this discarded gift painfully evidences a father’s clumsy attempts to positively intervene in his daughter’s life. Sam’s dissatisfaction with her family is clear throughout. From lying to her parents, to concealing her relationship with Lonnie, finding hiding places throughout the house in which to conduct clandestine activities, Sam is clearly not at home. Indeed, the house itself exerts a particularly oppressive quality. An unpleasant note from a student seems to offer Sam friendship, only to end with a spiteful question, asking if the insanity of the psycho house’s previous owner rubs off on her. ‘Was it just your uncle who went psycho or does it run in the family’? The suspicion that houses might embody the psychosis of their owners, that a building’s personality pervades the psychology of inhabitants, that insanity passes through the generations, all feature across Gothic fiction, haunted house tales and ghost stories. Sensations of domestic entrapment are enhanced throughout Gone Home, in the darkness outside, the sound of rain and thunder, and stark weather warnings to remain indoors. Literally nowhere exists outside the house. Katie arrives on the porch, with no place to proceed but through the front door. The depiction of family relations as ‘oppressive and claustrophobic’ (Palmer, 1999, 11) is a Gothic theme Gone Home develops, in terms of sexuality as well as gender. Another self-help book entitled After the Honeymoon implies the dissatisfaction Terry and Janice are experiencing in their relationship. An early message, located in the hallway drawer, from Janice’s college friend and confidante responds to evident complaints about the state of her marriage. The couple’s absence upon their eldest daughter’s return is because they have embarked on a couple’s retreat, either indicating renewed commitment to their marriage, or evidence that it is not long for this world. An erotic lifestyle magazine lies hidden in Terry’s office, ineffectively concealed inside a box of unsold novels. Janice has a secret Harlequin romance novel, its cover depicting a bare-chested fire fighter. A copy of Walt Whitman poetry lies by her bedside. Both indicate Janice’s growing fondness for Ranger Rick. The mother’s voice, like that of female Gothic writers, and of her husband and daughter, is expressed through literature. Only in Janice’s case it is the literature she reads, not writes. Of all three absent Greenbriars, Janice is the most ghostly, evidencing the marginalisation of wives and mothers within patriarchy.

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If heterosexual family members are suffering within the domestic home, Sam’s unhappiness receives most attention. Ghost stories and haunted house cinema both demonstrate how spectral fiction provides a vehicle of expression for socially marginal groups, presenting critical perspectives on both past and present. Sam is triply marginalised, as a teenager, as a woman, and as queer. The young adult’s troubled sexual identity finds a particular home within the Gothic tradition. Just as Sedgwick argues Gothic fiction was the first English literary form to depict male homosexuality (1985, 91), Gone Home is significant in histories of videogaming as among the first to contain same-sex sexuality represented in such an intimate and thoughtful manner. Gone Home is an example of ‘lesbian Gothic’ identified by Paulina Palmer, another sub-genre which complements other critical categories focusing on gender or national identity. Palmer observes the Gothic mode’s concern with sexual transgression, while, like many authors, expressing necessary caution regarding its positive depiction. Despite Gothic fiction’s acknowledgement of experiences otherwise ignored in mainstream culture, and some examples of genuinely radical texts, Palmer considers the tendency within popular Gothic culture to circumscribe these transgressive alternatives in favour of the dominant order. The result is films and books which, while exhibiting progressive potential, are frequently misogynistic, homophobic or racist (1999, 3). Gone Home might be considered a comparatively positive example of Palmer’s lesbian Gothic. Sam’s developing relationship with Lonnie provides the central thread to her journal entries which themselves form the game’s narrative spine. These tell of a relationship characterised by frequent experiences of intolerance. The hostility Sam encounters is revealed in one journal entry complaining of her parents’ negative response to her coming out. It is explicit in an angry note left by Terry, grounding his daughter, removing her telephone privileges, and telling Sam her bedroom door must be kept open whenever Lonnie visits. A formal letter from the principal’s office details a refusal to act on complaints about students’ antagonistic response to Sam and Lonnie’s relationship. Instead, the bureaucrat implies the fault lies in their own provocative behaviour. The tragic end to their relationship is precipitated by Lonnie joining the army, an institution implicated in homophobic prohibition. Various modern institutions conspire in the lovers’ persecution, and Gone Home encourages considerable sympathy for Sam and Lonnie. This largely emerges from the audio perspective provided by Sam’s journal entries. As Chion argues, the ‘I-voice’ elicits particular spectator identification (1999, 49), one not afforded to Sam and Lonnie’s detractors. Empathy also emerges from written exchanges between the couple. One way Sam and Lonnie communicated is through relays of playful notes placed in each other’s lockers. Fanzine-like illustrations often accompany these handwritten exchanges, further characterising the two women whose relationship is central to the game. Other characters’ communications are comparatively sparse, formal, humourless and unillustrated. Gameplay also produces affinity with the young women as players follow in their footsteps. As Snyder (2018) writes, also referencing Sedgwick, the surveillance Terry imposes

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forces Sam and her girlfriend to hide in the mansion’s secret rooms and passages. In Gothic style, the house’s architecture becomes symbolic of hidden sexuality. The player also transgresses the family home’s heteronormative veneer, folding back the house’s wooden panelling to explore alcoves concealed within its infrastructure, experiencing the spatial dimensions of the teenagers’ forbidden activity. Such empathic investigation aligns players with the game’s sexually marginalised characters, evoking a queer affinity according with certain Gothic dispositions towards the othered and the abjected. Just as walking simulator gameplay has feminine associations with Gothic women’s literature, this sub-genre also embodies certain queer affinities. In this context, Chess argues, traditional narrative structures organise themselves around patriarchal, masculine, heteronormative impulses, the drive towards a productive climax analogous to the heterosexual act itself. Provocatively, Chess asserts that videogames are not recognised as narratives because they lack this heterosexist structure, being designed to satisfy more onanistic pleasures geared around incompletion, non-reproductivity and anticipated sensations. Games contain many small climaxes but no concluding ‘cum shot’ (2016, 88). For Chess, Gone Home, among other games, evidences the extent to which ‘form and content in queer gaming can be coupled in meaningful ways’ (ibid., 85). Consistent with the lesbian relationship at its centre, the game expresses queer sensibilities in denying players a satisfying climax, fading to black at the point the volume containing Sam’s diary is discovered (ibid., 91–2). Gone Home eschews Haunting Ground’s clearly demarcated levels. No sequential puzzles culminate in structured boss battles. The rigid linearity of BioShock, which forces players to complete each stage in a determined manner is also absent. No marauding monsters patrol the hallways of the Greenbriar residence. Player can leisurely investigate the family home, uncovering documents and objects which, while contributing to various narratives, are not necessary for completion. Notably the first traditional puzzle, finding the combination code to unlock Terry’s filing cabinet, although allowing access to important legal documents, is not essential for progress. And, if the player knows where the final panel is, it is possible to finish the game in a matter of minutes. Pavlounis also identifies queer potential in the game’s structure. The exploratory nature of Gone Home’s gameplay means players trawling the Greenbriars’ family home may miss details or interpret them in different ways. However, various techniques drawn from mainstream gaming impose a preferred, chronological, teleological ordering of events according to a traditional three-act structure. For Pavlounis, this act of ‘straightening’ compromises the game’s queer potential (2016, 585–6). The enactment of certain tasks, performed in a particular order, remains necessary for completion. Suspense is generated through requiring players to investigate two traditionally forbidden Gothic spaces. Steering the narrative, and the player, towards the basement, then the attic, follows the determining infrastructure observed within horror and Gothic videogames. Considering another Gothic title, Krzywinska argues that open-world format games appear less compatible with Gothic

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gameplay, meaning most games of this cycle opt for more closed topographical structures (2014, 510). Such manipulative qualities conceivably compromise the fluidity associated with queer gameplay. A tension therefore emerges between the controlling Gothic game and the open walking simulator. Furthermore, there is something heteronormative in the experience of penetration, investigation and revelation informing much of Gone Home. This would indicate not so much a sympathetic and empathic alignment, and more a pursuit, investigation, interrogation. Players are effectively positioned as someone tracking down, sniffing out, the deviant protagonist, in order to reach the game’s end point. Despite its somewhat meandering structure, this game has a clear narrative path, storytelling structure and conclusion. Considering two key survival horror franchises, Marc C. Santos and Sarah E. White (2005) observe that players tasked with making sense of various scattered documents, according to common ludic-Gothic structures, must determine the true nature of events preceding the game’s opening. In their psychoanalytically-informed analysis, diverting radically from Chess (2016) and Pavlounis’ (2016) queer perspective, Santos and White argue players in such scenarios are effectively ‘following the Law of the Father’ in asserting ‘a fetishized coherence and illusory linearity to an otherwise fractured narrative’ (Santos and White, 2005, 70). Such a dynamic constitutes an undeniable component of Gone Home’s gameplay. Players enact a comparable linear, authoritative, heteronormative process of uncovering evidence, piecing together facts, determining the story of Terry’s literary redemption, Janice’s possible love affair, and Sam and Lonnie’s relationship. In the tight arrangement, design and synchronisation of documents and artefacts, Gone Home often leaves relatively little room for interpretation. Indeed, a central gaming pleasure emerges from effectively connecting a ticket stub with a letter, a school note with a portrait plaque, a locket with a photograph. Far from queer multiplicity, uncertainty, fragmentation and incompleteness, exploring the mansion ‘thus becomes a symbolic “killing”’ whereby players ‘annihilate the multiplicity of possible interpretations that threatens our conception of One, true self’ (ibid., 75). Undisturbed, the Greenbriars’ messy home may be a queer space. But the active player, as Pavlounis (2016) also suggests, effectively straightens things out. Even Christmas duck has a final place to rest. While the detective of Gothic fiction often has a liminal status, the detective of mainstream cinema is more commonly associated with the processes Santos and White describe. The Hollywood gumshoe is predominantly a force of the Law, tasked with uncovering the Truth in an interrogative process inflected with aggression, sadism and voyeurism. The player’s first-person perspective is not immune to such interpretations. Piecing together Gone Home means moving from room to room, rummaging through drawers and cupboards, reading intimate correspondences between Sam and Lonnie, uncovering evidence of their clandestine relationship, however sympathetically depicted. Uncovering the narrative surrounding a heart-shaped necklace, a Mexican skull, a red stain on the bath, demands investigating a queer storyline in a particularly heterosexual manner. The attic where the game concludes is not just the dark and forbidden place of Gothic literature, it is also the love nest of Gone Home’s young lovers,

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forced to hide in the marginal spaces of the heterosexual family home. It is the final point of interrogation and investigation. And yet, across Gone Home, some enigmas appear unresolved. What happened to Lonnie’s school locker, and why is Sam’s in her bedroom? Has Sam’s family accepted her sexuality, as implied by the friendly tone of later messages found in the kitchen? What precisely happened between Janice and Ranger Rick? Janice’s feelings for the co-worker are evident, but the carelessly discarded Earth, Wind & Fire ticket implies the concert was ultimately an experience she did not consider worth cherishing. Rick’s marriage to his long distant girlfriend indicates Janice’s feelings were not reciprocated, although the gift of the Walt Whitman collection would say otherwise. A letter from Janice’s friend, one of few second-hand insights into the mother’s motivations, advises that she may be reading too much into their friendship, as the player may be reading too much into the artefacts they uncover. The manuscript of Terry’s final trilogy instalment lies completed in a drawer, entitled The Accidental Human, but its potential for publication remains uncertain. A letter to his publishers, themselves a rather obscure organisation specialising in bizarre fiction for a small but dedicated readership, is yet to be sent. Terry himself acknowledges they are not in the business of commissioning new works. More significant to Terry’s tale is the question of past events and his obsession with the Kennedy assassination, the historic moment which preoccupies his fiction. It is unclear what collective meaning is to be derived from the height chart found in the basement, showing the year Terry last visited the house as a child, the fraught letter in the safe from Oscar to his sister referring to ‘transgression’, ‘temptation’, ‘absolution’ and ‘forgiveness’ for some non-specified crime, and a wooden horse lying in the dark woodshed. The title of Terry’s third novel echoes Oscar’s plea to be considered human, although there is little evidence Terry or anyone else has opened the safe, despite the simple solution to its combination. The precise nature of Oscar’s indiscretions is never clarified. The pharmacist might have been a homosexual, a paedophile or a crossdresser, although there is little indication the man’s self-imposed exile was the consequence of anything sexual in nature. It remains possible that Oscar may indeed have come back from the grave to communicate with his great-niece. The message beside the Ouija board might well be supernatural in origin, rather than resulting from two teenage lovers scaring each other by candlelight. The location of Sam and Lonnie’s séance room, behind the final panel in the hallway, positions it as the penultimate location the player visits, providing a last note of supernatural uncertainty which Gone Home’s fragmented narrative refuses to put to rest.

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What Remains of Edith Finch

Animating the family curse of Edith Finch Exploring Gothic traditions within a North American context, Eric Savoy identifies a central paradox of the cycle’s consistent popularity. The Gothic is steeped in medieval iconography, characterised by preoccupations with a European past, featuring supernatural beings, monstrous creatures and sadistic religious zealots. Such qualities appear quite at odds with the modern, forwardfacing, scientifically-informed secularism seemingly characterising American national identity. Why then, Savoy asks, has a literary style apparently opposed to the optimistic, progressive philosophy of ‘the American dream’ ‘stubbornly flourished’ across North American literary history? Complicating simplistic explanations that the Gothic represents some marginal, oppositional ‘dark nightmare’ to that dream, Savoy asserts ‘the odd centrality of Gothic cultural products’ to US national culture, is ‘a strain of literature that is haunted by an insistent, undead past and fascinated by the strange beauty of sorrow’ (2010, 167). What Remains of Edith Finch exemplifies these melancholy qualities, alongside many Savoy identifies in much early nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Its eponymous heroine is the last remaining member of the Finch dynasty. Edith returns to her ancestral home to uncover the truth about the curse which has plagued her family since its arrival on American shores. Like many horror titles, the game unfolds within a house, home to the Finch family for generations. Like many Gothic games, its departed residents assume a spectral presence within this virtual space. A prime example of environmental storytelling, each dead Finch’s bedroom has been sealed, preserving these areas as emblematic of their distinct personalities and preoccupations. Play involves moving along secret passages connecting room to room. Once inside these mausoleum-like spaces, players replay the ambivalent stories of successive Finches, variously drowned, poisoned, crushed, decapitated and flung to their death throughout the family’s sorry history. Each Finch family member’s death is replayed through a brief interactive vignette. These participatory flashbacks effectively depict, record, and illustrate the family members’ final moments from their optical perspective, transporting players into their shoes for the last minutes of their lives. Tales of the long departed coming back to life, in some form or DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-5

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another, characterise the Gothic template. Edith Finch dramatises such narratives of the dead returning, through the first-person videogame apparatus. Players effectively inhabit the bodies of successive doomed Finches, bringing about their end through their movements and interactions with prescribed environmental elements. Shrine-like displays stand in each Finch bedroom, alongside a painting of the dead relative. Here objects relating to their life are accompanied by a document of some description: a journal, a letter, a report, a poem. These manuscripts initiate transition into the past, seen from the subjective perspectives of a girl suffering fever dreams, a young boy on a swing, or a baby playing in the bath. Despite the apparent authenticity of these photorealistically-rendered sequences, the veracity of what players play often remains unclear. Documents narrating these scenes frequently tell of events where the author was not present, has only speculative understanding of what happened, or were themselves suffering some mental dysfunction. The game world exists within a journal Edith herself has written, chronicling her investigation of the family home. This framing device renders the game a wholly mediated experience, read through the eyes of a character only revealed in the game’s final shot. In this manner Edith Finch reflects on Gothic fiction’s meditation upon the difficulties experienced by those inhabiting the present to truly understand the past, the tenuous relationship between history and historical documents, and the inability of the individual to truly understand their own origins. The first-person position through which each relative’s last moments are experienced, produces a similar ancestral ‘meshing of the author’s subjectivity’ as Savoy identifies in early Gothic American fiction (ibid., 176–7). With the activation of every shrine document, Edith’s optical perspective segues from investigation of the family home to the moribund moments of a deceased ancestor, and back again throughout the game’s course. This creates an often dream-like tapestry of tales, many more fanciful than factual, involving metamorphic transformations, telekinetic powers and escape into delusional fantasy. Edith Finch accords with Savoy’s description of American Gothic fiction as historiography rather than literal history, preoccupied with the process of telling, rather than the authenticity of past events. What results is a fascination with stories, often convoluted, unclear, incoherent and non-linear. This fiction is obsessed with ‘the personal, the familial, and the national pasts’ implicating the individual in ‘a deep morass of American desires and deeds that allow no final escape from or transcendence of them’ (ibid., 168–9). Players assume the position of the reader of Edith’s journal, of Edith Finch herself, and of the Finches whose accounts she discovers. They must occupy a procession of identities, becoming implicated in an array of subjective experiences, engaging with a range of interfaces, observing events mediated through different media and testimonials, detailing the Finch family history in an ambivalent and obscure manner. The sense of playing authored documents, rather than actual events, is underlined by the conspicuous narration accompanying Edith’s investigation of the house, and every flashback she encounters within its walls. This appears as a soundtrack voiceover, and as three-dimensional words

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superimposed across the landscape of the game’s environment. This unusual storytelling technique aligns Edith Finch with the ‘allegories of reading’ which Savoy sees as characterising key American Gothic authors, pivoting on ‘a “ghosting” of the text and its interpretive certainty’ (ibid., 179). The often poetic, speculative, fanciful account of Edith’s indoor journey, and the stories the heroine uncovers along the way, emerge like spectres themselves, materialising out of nowhere, across walls, ceilings, skies and surfaces, resurrected by the voice of the narrator and authors, only to crumble, peel and fall away as though dissolving into dust. Howard, among many authors, notes the ‘“multi-voiced-ness” of Gothic texts’, a quality of the mode’s generic indeterminacy (1994, 17). Throughout Edith Finch, players encounter the self-penned accounts of Molly, Walter, Milton and Edie Finch, Edith’s maternal great-grandmother, in diaries and journals reflecting the handwritten account framing the game itself. Sam has written an essay about how his twin brother, Calvin, died. Edith’s mother, Dawn, tells of her own brother’s death in a poem. The scene where infant Gregory drowns emerges from a letter following his death, sent by his father to his mother on the legal documents officiating the couple’s divorce. As Lloyd Smith notes, in its peculiar postmodern tradition of pastiche, Gothic literature incorporates many forms into its fiction, including folk tales, graveyard poetry, travel guides and religious texts (1996, 11). As an audio-visual medium variously characterised by remediation, Edith Finch builds upon the potential formats incorporated into Gothic storytelling. Odin’s death is revealed through a slide viewer, Sam’s through photographs taken on a hunting trip, while Milton’s sequence plays as a flick book. Complementing these different voices, forms of writing and visual communication, playing each story means players must familiarise themselves with different methods of interaction. As Calvin, they must use the twin sticks to pivot the character’s legs back and forth, causing his swing to rise and fall. In Gus’ story the joypad causes the boy’s kite to gather words from the sky, while in Lewis’s sequence, they chop fish in a tuna cannery while navigating an imaginary figure round a fantasy world. Edith Finch presents its tales through multiple interactive formats. This effectively translates the ‘proliferation of narrative strategies’ Miles observes in early Gothic literature (2002, 150) into the many potential gameplay configurations offered by the videogame medium. Punter and Byron describe Gothic fiction as ‘a mode within which we are frequently unsure of the reliability of the narrator’s perception’ (2010, 293). Many stories encountered throughout Edith’s investigation, presented as subjective sequences, appear quite impossible. Gregory can control his bath toys telekinetically. Gus’ kite influences the weather. Barbara’s story, the most unreliable of all, ends with a host of fictional horror film characters descending on the young woman. Unreality permeates many flashback sequences, enhanced by the often-tenuous relationship between events and the documents evidencing the last moments of each Finch. Such devices epitomise the confusion of perspectives within Gothic literature, whereby

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‘history and plot … are so disturbed by the ontological uncertainty of the subject’s experience as to make them finally inextricable’ (Miles, 2002, 124). Many stories unfold through the eyes of children, or those experiencing abnormal psychological experiences induced by hunger, sensory deprivation or drug withdrawal. The child and the neurotic, Punter notes, are believed to possess particularly untrustworthy memories (1996b, 179). Framing game sequences through juvenile or psychotic figures contributes to the ambiguity of what is being played, even as its tangible, interactive, audio-visual qualities would authenticate their experiences. Apart from its final shot, nothing emerges from an objective, omniscient or third-person perspective. Edith Finch presents itself as a procession of stories, detailed in a handwritten manuscript, within the imagination of the unseen protagonist who opens Edith’s journal as the title begins. Everything is mediated through the mind’s eye of this character, interpreting the interpretations of Edith’s investigation of the home and the secondary sources comprising her family history. This effects a parallel between the unreliable document and the unreliable narrator, author, speaker, first-person register of many Gothic testimonies. The world of Edith Finch, like the Gothic world, as Day would have it, assumes ‘a world of utter subjectivity’ (1985, 22), filtered through the optical perspective the player assumes, as the reader of Edith’s journal, as Edith herself, as the relatives encountered in her quest. Bloom considers death a central obsession of Gothic fiction. Such a morbid aspect pervades Edith Finch’s aesthetics, design and structure (2010, 64). The Finch residence is defined by sealed and preserved rooms commemorating each departed family member. These closed off spaces precariously expand into successive domestic extensions. Several rooms have peep holes drilled into their doors, allowing a glimpse into what lies within, a foreshadowing insight into the dead people their décor and contents represent, whose physicality players will subsequently assume. The heroine remarks upon how these inaccessible chambers were a constant presence throughout her childhood, a domestic reminder of the Finch family’s tragic history and her own uncertain future. The room shared by twins Calvin and Sam continued as the surviving brother’s bedroom, a red rope cruelly cordoning off the dead child’s half. Symbols of death proliferate throughout the Finch estate. Edie’s room contains many empty cages containing candles and paintings of birds, echoing the portraits standing on the shrines of the dead Finch members. As Edith wryly remarks, the Finch family plot was built before the house itself. Death in Edith Finch is both a theme of the narrative and a core dynamic, a grizzly reflection on death’s pervasive presence across videogame culture. As Krzywinska highlights, players are frequently agents of death within virtual environments, but also the victims of death which functions as a gameplay mechanic punishing failure. ‘The player dies, yet does not die’, Krzywinska observes, pointing to the ambiguity and liminality of this common structuring feature (2002, 219). In completing each interactive flashback, players are obliged to participate in the deaths of successive Finch adults, teenagers and children, working through the actions required

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to bring about their last moments. As such, death becomes a necessity, rather than a pitfall to be avoided. Death assumes the status of a goal, an objective, a sign of progress rewarded by the game, meaning another Finch might be crossed from the list and sketched into Edith’s journal. Death is also depicted in a more dramatically tragic manner than the commonplace deaths frequenting traditional gaming experience. Each death returns the player to the shrine, commemorating the child, teenager or adult in whose demise they have just participated, displaying small tokens representing their life, loves and achievements. Ambiguous family curses occur throughout Gothic fiction, from the earliest publication to those of the Victorian era (Punter and Byron. 2010, 29). As with many aspects of the genre, the trope has changed throughout its history to accommodate developing cultural, medical and psychological perspectives. Incorporating both natural and supernatural explanations, the family curse in Edith Finch reflects the ambivalence of the game’s many stories. Frequently the heroine speculates whether these tales of death are themselves responsible for their family’s tragedies, a self-fulfilling process within which she finds herself uncomfortably implicated. The curse’s true nature remains unresolved. Edith Finch hovers between early Gothic fiction’s investment in malicious forces, and later ‘enlightened’ dispositions towards the same narrative tropes. Discussing the incorporation of supernatural and medical explanations for ancestral maladies in mid-nineteenth-century novels, Mighall emphasises the importance of forgetting. If the ancestral prophecy is an ‘idée fixe’, an obsession contaminating the minds of family members driving them to their death, then logic dictates, were its existence wiped from cultural memory, the curse would effectively lose all power (2007, 101). Similarly, Edith suggests the curse’s perpetuation results from the tales told of its inescapable influence. The obsessive morbid gloom this mythology creates effectively condemns the Finch family to lives of misery, despondency and eccentric behaviour. Odin died sailing to the ‘New World’, hoping to escape its power. Walter is hit by a train after emerging from a bunker he built to protect himself. Sam dies teaching his daughter survival skills. Lewis commits suicide following his brother’s disappearance. Ironically, despite this self-awareness, Edith and the player proceed to uncover narrative after narrative of family misfortune, penetrating the sealed rooms, resurrecting the ghosts residing within. The titular heroine is herself maintaining the curse’s memory, and its potential impact on future generations. Halfway through the game, the narrating voiceover and the journal it dictates are revealed as a testament directed towards Edith’s unborn child. The mother-tobe therefore rejects the potential of escaping the ancestral curse through forgetting its existence, denying future Finch members the escape Mighall (ibid., 115) sees in later psychologically informed developments of the trope. In considering the influence of Gothic literary themes on horror and suspense cinema, Day concludes: ‘the Gothic story – a fable of disintegrating identity in a chaotic world of transformation and metamorphosis – has not changed’, only ‘its audiences and the orthodoxies of that audience have’ (1985, 164). Edith Finch translates such fascinations with disintegration and transmogrification,

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for new audiences and for players of ludic media. Day’s description neatly captures Molly’s story and its telling, using techniques unique to the videogame. Here players inhabit a sequence of shifting, transforming, impossible bodies. A young girl, sent to bed without supper for some unspecified misdemeanour, turns into a succession of beasts: a cat, an owl, a shark, and finally a sea monster. In a chapter exploring ludic zombies, Krzywinska argues videogames offer players unique opportunities to experience ‘the Other’, a recurring theme of horror culture, not in the form of the monster, but in the gaming apparatus itself (2008, 167). This potential for inhabiting unnatural and unfamiliar bodies could represent the medium’s most significant contribution to Gothic culture. In broader digital contexts, Punter identifies a contemporary ‘morphological uncanny’ whereby, through electronic media, users choose their own physical appearance, severing traditional links between the psychic self and body. In such a situation of uncanny dislocation ‘our bodies, as relayed through the electronic media, become strictly “supernatural”, engineered ghosts of our physical selves’ (2007, 133). Early in the Edith Finch experience, Molly’s story showcases this phantasmagorical potential that this title exploits. In escaping her bedroom, and assuming these increasingly exotic creatures, Molly becomes the strange, fugitive self of American Gothic identified by Savoy, who draws together the work of Kristeva, Freud and D. H. Lawrence. Starting as a naughty child banished to her bedroom, Molly progressively becomes the ‘thing’ that is abjected, thrown off, excluded, repressed, which nevertheless returns. The shapeshifting figure, one of witchcraft and superstition, has no place in the ‘house of the American ideal’, but nevertheless comes full circle, back to perform an act of ‘primordial violence’ on the girl who awakened it (2010, 170–1). Having climbed trees, flown through the air, swam the sea, the creature that is Molly emerges as a monstrous tentacle, dragging itself inelegantly along the wooden floor of a fishing boat, consuming its crew and captain. The creature Molly assumes finally returns to the Finch family home, crawls through the sewage pipe, emerging in the young girl’s bedroom where it waits under her bed. An enduring paradigm of American Gothic, one in direct opposition to the nation’s founding principles, ‘repudiates the autonomy of the individual’ (ibid., 172). What Remains of Edith Finch ludifies such perspectives on human agency. Across the game a disquieting fit exists between ‘the deterministic structure associated with the theme of the ancestral curse’ (Mighall, 2007, 124) and the determining structure of the digital experience. Playing Edith Finch entails directing the eponymous heroine, along with interactive sequences where successive doomed relatives meet their respective ends. The ‘moral occult’ structuring Gothic videogames assumes the title’s defining mechanic. Completing Edith Finch requires players knowingly setting into motion actions that only conclude with each character’s demise. This may mean investigating a spooky basement, breaking out of a bunker, flying a kite, or switching on a bath-tap. Exploring the paradoxical attraction of horror, Carroll turns to critical work discussing tragedy, where the ‘rhetorical framing’ of melancholy events is central to their pleasure. This results in a narrative fascination with ‘how certain forces, once put

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in motion, will work themselves out’. As such, ‘it is not the tragic event in itself that imparts pleasure, but rather, the way it is worked into the plot’ (1990, 179–80). The ambivalent enjoyment of Edith Finch involves employing various interactions, and discovering how these unique affordances lead to the inevitable conclusion of each scene. These may start with a child on a swing, a baby in a bath, or a teenager slicing fish heads in a tuna cannery, but they always end with death. As players animate the various Finch family members and their surroundings, they also animate the curse itself, resurrecting stories of death and gloom, that Edith suspects would be better left hidden. Players thereby assume the extra-dimensional forces fated to bring about each character’s demise. Without player input, every Finch would theoretically go on to live an infinite, if inert, digital existence. Savoy writes of the shadowy self that characterises the unknowable creature of American Gothic fiction (2010, 170–1). Consistent with Savoy’s psychoanalytic alignment between this monstrous entity and the unknowable Real, through the game’s first-person perspective, the monstrous shape Molly finally assumes is never fully revealed. It exists only as an eellike appendage extending into the screen, moving across the ground, dragging the player in its wake. This monster may symbolise the Finch curse itself, real or imaginary. And the player’s role is to direct this ambivalent thing into the young girl’s bedroom where she predicts, with unsettling resignation, that very soon it will eat her too. The interactivity of the videogame, the subjective effect of the firstperson perspective, and the player’s drive for completion, combine to animate the dead Finch member, their final moments, and the family curse for which the player is disquietingly responsible.

Media and morbidity Adding to the sealed and preserved room, the family curse, and the atmosphere of death, another Gothic dynamic Edith Finch incorporates is the secret hidden document. As Punter and Bronfen note, the earliest Gothic story was replete with half-hidden, mysterious, enigmatic messages (2001, 10–11). Similarly, this game is organised around accessing a succession of ambivalent texts, prominently displayed inside each Finch family member’s locked bedroom. The painting which accompanies each document is another Gothic feature. Wright discusses the significance of portraits as a particularly potent element of one late eighteenth-century Gothic novel. Here, two melancholy heroines, separated from their parent, are consequently ‘forced to project love and desire through works of art’. The result is protagonists who ‘internalize paintings as the real representations of the objects they have lost’ leading to ‘a displacement of the individual self’ whereby the heroine becomes ‘lost in the power of the object to which she has surrendered herself’ (2004, 21–2). Striking parallels exist between Edith Finch and the Freudian processes of desire, internalization, displacement, surrender, and the tragic significance of family paintings Wright describes. The paintings Edith encounters often depict relatives who died before she was born. Edith expresses a fixation upon these images, a focus of loss and

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longing for the family she never knew, and the fragmented family history she endeavours to assemble. These paintings combine sadness for the relatives they represent, and the artist who painted them, Edith’s namesake, for whom she expressed clear fondness. Edith’s great-grandmother, Edie Finch created these works. Young Edith continues her artistic legacy, sketching each family member into her journal. Her artwork constitutes another example of ancestral repetition, and an indication of the inescapable impact of hereditary traits upon the individual. These painted portraits combine with the forbidden document, conjuring up vivid flashbacks, where Edith assumes the gaze of successive dead relatives, a process often synonymous with identification itself. Like Wright’s Gothic heroines, encountering these family likenesses leads to a ‘reanimation of the dead’ (ibid., 23) as each Finch is brought briefly back to life, made to walk, crawl, fly, swing back and forth, play with bath toys and decapitate fish, until their final moment. Much writing concerns the role of media and mediation in horror and Gothic fiction, and in horror and Gothic videogames. The patchwork storytelling Edith Finch effects accords with familiar Gothic devices. Documents are central to both the authentication of the narrative being told, as events appear supported by authoritative reports, and the complication of tales presented through numerous, sometimes contradictory personal voices. Through this strategy Gothic fiction manages its own internal contradictions, conveying supernatural accounts to audiences beyond such superstitious beliefs by assuming the discourse of documentary evidence, while also explaining the unexplainable through the disputable subjectivity of its speaker, writer, author. Such stories situate their protagonist as only partially knowledgeable of the facts, unreliably deranged, or themselves disbelieving the very tale they tell. Because of these self-conscious textual negotiations, Gothic literature regularly thematises processes of storytelling, documentation, authentication and testimonial. Similar preoccupations occur throughout Gothic videogames. Virtual spaces are often scattered with journal entries, newspaper clippings, photographs, paintings and devices playing short video clips. Mighall notes how discovered documents within Gothic novels allow the past to intrude upon the present (2007, 113), and media within horror games serve similar purposes. This is a key aspect of Taylor’s ludic-Gothic formulation. Like Edith Finch’s collage of unreliable texts, anachronistic media in survival horror games emphasise processes of miscommunication, underlining the significance of textual materiality, while also serving as ruptures in temporality (2009, 53). Gothic videogames also use such methods to inflect their digital stories with authenticity (Kirkland, 2009a, 116), while simultaneously negotiating the problematic relationship between narrative and gameplay (Kirkland, 2009b, 67), which has been the focus of much discussion within game studies. Exploring these ludic-Gothic trends, Christian McCrea observes a playfulness and self-reflexivity in titles incorporating photography, video, notes, tapes and databases into their worlds, drawing attention to the formal conventions of the videogame medium (2009, 220–1). Analogue media affords not only ghostly manipulation of chronology, a ‘hauntological’ dynamic whereby the

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dead are captured and displayed, but a similar generic tension between agency and helplessness as Krzywinska’s essay explores (ibid., 224). Alignments between death and representational technologies recur across horror studies, implying a Gothic shadow infects these modes of expression, despite their location within modern practices of culture and communication. Chion, as noted, observes a ‘funerary quality’ to voice recording technologies (1999, 46). Hanson writes of the extent to which ‘an ambivalent attitude to imagistic representation’, dating back to ancient commemoration of the dead, emerges through paintings in Gothic cinema (2007, 92–3). Similarly, Curtis notes how hauntings in haunted house films are often prefigured by images, statues, mirrors and portraits. In particular, Curtis writes of the ‘uncanny technology’ of photography, the ‘necromantic vocabulary’ which surrounded the medium, the ‘supernatural quality’ of its ‘phantom images’, their participation in discourses of doubling, mirroring and shadows (2008, 128). McCrea references Friedrich Kittler in exploring relationships between media technologies and images of the dead. Modernity’s historical fascination with depicting the deceased continually surfaces in processes whereby ‘each new technology captures and represents the dead, fakes the dead, and fools the incredulous’ (2009, 222–1). The zombie’s recurring presence throughout videogame history, across genres, platforms and franchises (Kirkland, 2016), continues this trend. Edith Finch both reflects upon and participates in such practices, as different media activate the flashbacks animating each departed family member. Despite many contemporary multimedia adaptations and translations of the genre, literature remains the foundational Gothic medium. More than that, the Gothic appears preoccupied with the act of writing, recording and telling stories. Lucie Armitt described the genre as a ‘book-ish form’ (2011, 62), a fixation which recurs throughout Edith Finch. Like those narrating the earliest work of Gothic fiction (Savoy, 2010, 172), the game’s protagonist is herself a traumatised writer. The documentary artefacts activating each death scene echo how Gothic fiction enshrines forbidden knowledge in imposing books (Punter, 1996b, 39). Edith Finch opens and closes with the heroine’s handwritten journal. The Finch family members present themselves as a highly literate family. Stacks and shelves of books proliferate throughout their crowded house, expressing the interests and preoccupations of its inhabitants. Many stories players play are brought to life by the literary work of other Finch family members, such as Sam’s essay about Calvin, Dawn’s poem about Gus, Gregory’s father’s letter to his wife. Edith’s mother has evidently published a study on education, while her great-great-grandfather, true to theme, authored a book on death. Bibliographical qualities inform the routes between rooms and mechanisms required to open passages connecting one story to the next. The key in Edith’s hand as the game begins, received upon her mother’s death, does not fit the literal doorway to the family home. Instead, it unlocks a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70). This opens a door, allowing players to pass from Walter’s to Molly’s room, the first sealed chamber to be penetrated. A pop-up book reveals the secret passage between

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Edie’s bedroom and Calvin’s. This evocation of juvenile literature is appropriate, given how many characters the player inhabits are themselves children, and the fairy tale-like magical realism informing the world of the game. Further emphasising the title’s literary qualities, the final forbidden space is the family library where, in a flashback to Edith’s last childhood evening in the house, the heroine discovers the journal of her great-great-grandmother. Observing such content, Mona Bozdog and Dayna Galloway argue a literary quality informs Edith Finch. This includes the adaptation of literary genres and techniques, the aesthetics of written text, and the incorporation of written artefacts into its storytelling processes. Drawing on Astrid Ensslin, they argue the title belongs to the generic category of ‘literary games’ (2019, 3). Edith’s narrative provides a walking commentary on players’ exploration of the house and its grounds. Flashback sequences are narrated by their respective texts written by Calvin’s brother, Gus’ sister, Gregory’s father, and finally Edith herself. Players are constantly reminded they are inhabiting a story narrated through Edith’s journal and the accounts the writers describe. Emphasising the extent players are experiencing a series of written tales, the words narrators write emerge on screen as they are spoken as a conspicuous element of the gamespace. As Edith, this device creates the impression that the Finch home produces the stories the protagonist records in her journal. Frequently these words indicate where players must move, following the trail of sentences as they comment upon Edith’s experiences. Many critics write of the power of language in Gothic literature. ‘Words’, Bruhm writes, in a chapter on contemporary Gothic, ‘the building blocks of stories, rise and fall in consciousness, constituting horrifying returns and traumatic suggestions’ (2010, 270). In Cavallaro’s terror stories, words become ‘ghostly substitutes for the real’ to the point, in one famous example, ‘the acts of writing and reading, could be compared to the experience of dealing with ghosts’ (2002, 104). The animated fonts narrating Edith Finch’s many stories capitalise upon associations between Gothic words, the traumatic and the ghostly, substituting for each absent Finch family member, encouraging players to repeat their final movements before leading them to their untimely end. Media in Edith Finch’s frequently contribute to uncertainty surrounding the events they frame, while drawing on the authenticity and inauthenticity associated with their remediated modes of communication, representation and artistry. No story is so playful, ambivalent and self-reflexive as Barbara’s. Child star in a successful monster movie, Barbara was a one-hit wonder who faded from popularity in later life. A sense of artifice pervades players’ encounter with the character, beginning with her bedroom. This space’s mise-en-scène reflects the woman’s childhood career. Its walls are painted with a mythological Hollywood skyline, the dream factory, expressive of the fantastical unreality consistent with many Finch bedrooms, and the mood of many flashbacks. Barbara Finch’s profession contributes to the game’s knowing disposition towards storytelling and popular entertainment conventions, expressing the awareness Gothic media frequently has towards its own theatricality, superficiality and

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hyperbole. As Hogle observes, the ‘Gothic’ remains inherently artificial, originally a pre-medieval civilisation, now referring to post-medieval, post-Renaissance culture, employing an aesthetic self-consciously combining the ancient and the modern (2010, 1). This artifice incorporates frequent features of Gothic novels including animated statues, spectral paintings, supernatural figures based on representations and simulations, serving to confer inauthenticity upon their fictional monsters (ibid., 15). As Armitt observes, artificiality, play and pastiche characterise a mode, ‘always “retro”, always “fake”, always a copy without an illusion’ (2011, 6). Barbara’s famous film, My Friend Bigfoot, resembles a camp, hokey, drive-in, monster movie. Its poster features the young starlet caught in an exaggerated scream, resembling a famous Expressionist painting, or promotional material for an early-1990s home invasion family film. Young Barbara screaming reduces the terrorised Gothic heroine to family-friendly kitsch, more monster sitcom or Saturday morning cartoon than dark literature. The child star is herself a figure preserved and animated through the uncanny technologies of celluloid. Yet Barbara did not die as a child, but as a teenager, and her tale is not told through cinema, but through a graphic novel. Reproducing an unmistakable sense of Gothic pastiche, Barbara’s death story unfolds in a Tales from the Crypt-style comic, Dreadful Stories, narrated by a hammy Crypt-Keeperlike pumpkin-head figure. Stilted and exaggerated voice acting reproduces the performances of low budget B-movies, or horror videogame cut-scenes. Bold saturated colours, flat surfaces and visualised sound effects remediate the aesthetics of a 1950s EC comic book. Barbara’s tale is stuffed with well-worn clichés, including a hook-handed man escaping a local asylum, a terrorised babysitter and an ineffectual boyfriend. The story takes place during Halloween, a season of plastic ghost masks, fake pumpkins and manufactured shocks. Other self-aware narrative elements include Barbara’s career as a horror movie actor, her apparently iconic scream, and a monster movie convention that may consist of actual monsters. Moving through the comic book panels, players periodically assume the first-person role of Barbara, following her suspense-filled descent into the basement, attacking the escaped lunatic, and knocking him seemingly to his death. In positioning Barbara as a Final Girl figure, Edith Finch references the Gothic heritage of the slasher movie identified by numerous scholars. The story of Barbara Finch’s death therefore emerges through multiple layers of media and generic artifice. Unlike other vignettes, the tale’s location in a cheap juvenile publication bestows no documentary authority upon the narrative. Far from it. The outrageous ending, which sees a squad of horror movie monsters descending on the star, provides no clear indication of how Barbara died or what might have been responsible. In contrast, Sam’s story is revealed through photography, evoking Gothic fiction’s use of faux documents to confer authenticity upon fantastical tales. An envelope of pictures lies on Sam’s shrine, narrating a fatal hunting trip taken with Edith’s mother. This technique capitalises upon the medium’s status as a visual record of objective reality. According to Susan Sontag, the photograph, existing in an entirely different register to the cartoons of the comic book,

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represents ‘incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened’ (1979, 5). Similarly, Barthes refers to photography as purportedly ‘a mechanical analogue of reality’, an image which expresses an ‘analogical plenitude’, or masquerades as ‘a message without a code’ (1977, 18–19). ‘The objective nature of photography’, André Bazin argues, ‘confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making.’ In contrast, printed drawings, paintings, sketches, and other means by which the Finch family and their deaths are illustrated, entail representations that are ‘always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity’ (1984, 12). Except, in a ludic-Gothic play with documents’ status as reliable records of events, any authority to Sam’s story is undercut by the element of interactivity. As Edith leafs through each photograph, players are transported to the instance they were taken, positioned behind the camera lens, as either Sam or Dawn. Progressing gameplay involves focusing on correct features of the landscape, pressing the trigger to take the appropriate photograph Edith now holds in her hands. The player’s view switches from Dawn’s behind the camera, to Edith holding the resulting photograph in her hands, and back again. This dynamic complicates the medium’s function as a temporally frozen, objective record of history. Instead, in typical Gothic style, past and present are uncannily conjoined. Sam became a military photographer after leaving home. Proximities between guns and cameras feature around the old man’s room, where weaponry and photographic equipment, images of warfare and hunting trophies, stand side by side. Such parallels also impact upon Edith Finch’s otherwise benign employment of the first-person perspective for the photography sequences, a mode commonly associated with warfare simulations. Like domestic photography, the videogame owes a debt to military technological developments. Dawn’s shooting of a deer, the sequence’s climax, is initiated by the player. Sam photographs the animal as his daughter presses the trigger, preserving the moment when the bullet pierces the creature’s skull. A depression of the joypad button thereby takes the photograph, along with the animal’s life. The death of Sam himself is similarly put into motion by setting a photographic timer. This clicks as the wounded creature rears, throwing the old man off a ravine. Evidencing the ‘hauntological’ qualities of modern media that McCrea sees many videogames exploring (2009, 224), photography in Edith Finch assumes a morbid dimension, a theme considered by several authors in the field. Bazin’s discussion of the medium opens with a consideration of mummies, observing similar embalming qualities in pottery and painting, alongside more modern formats (1984, 9). Sontag also discusses the nostalgia, pathos and mortality of the photographic subject, the photograph itself producing a technological memento mori (1979, 15–16). Photography’s ghostly associations inflect many images of dead family members throughout the Finch household. Emphasising the embalming aspects of the medium, photographs of military and hunting activities exist alongside taxidermies of animals throughout Sam’s room. These include a bear rug, a duck posed in flight and a cat, possibly the family pet Edith mentions earlier, named after Molly. The ‘phantomlike’ properties of the photographic family portrait, observed by Bazin (1984, 14), haunt a particularly large framed

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image showing Dawn, Gus, baby Gregory, and Edith’s grandmother Kay, kneeling over a dead deer. The image of camouflage-clad adults and children. all smiling, is an ironic juxtaposition of life and death, all the more so because, as Sontag remarks, the only thing remaining of the modern extended family is its photographs (1979, 8–9). Gothic media and culture encourage the dissolution of boundaries between reader and text, audience and character, player and playable protagonist. As Punter writes, contemporary Gothic is a process of ‘not merely describing but inhabiting the distorted forms of life, social and psychic, which follow from the attempted recollection of primal damage’ (1996b, 178). This encapsulates the game’s penultimate tale, which allows not only the inhabitation of a different body, but also a divided mental state. The story of Lewis Finch, Edith’s brother, is narrated by the young man’s psychiatrist. It tells of a teenager, experiencing ‘primal damage’ following the death and disappearance of successive relatives, traumatised, suffering survivor’s guilt, becoming increasingly withdrawn from his repetitive job at the local fish canning factory. As the psychiatrist narrates Lewis’s gradual submersion into an imaginary fantasy world, players must enact the mundane task of chopping fish heads, while simultaneously directing Lewis’s other self around an increasingly colourful, lively, three-dimensional imaginary environment. The unique division of subjectivity necessitated by this bisected gameplay, a ludification of the doubling and splitting of Gothic fiction, has players continuing to perform the mundane task of Lewis’s factory job, while also experiencing the inner life in which he imagines himself a monarch exploring a mythical landscape. Lewis’s fantasy world unfolds like a series of evolving videogames, from dungeon crawler to role-playing game, to detailed first-person experience. Barbara’s story’s mobilises comic books’ relationship with pulp horror and fantastical narratives to generate a sense of unreliable Gothic pastiche. The photographs narrating Sam’s sequence capitalise upon the medium’s authenticating function, technological proximities between the camera and the gun, and the photograph’s morbid role in symbolically embalming the deceased. Similarly, Lewis’s story evokes Gothic images of videogame players as withdrawn, detached from reality, zombified by their absorption into the screen. While not assuming a literal diegetic videogame, the parallel is underlined by the games console in Lewis’s pungent drug den. Edith notes, with characteristic irony that her brother was no expert gamer, and like the player of Edith Finch, would die a lot. ‘Part of horror gaming’s pleasure,’ McCrea writes, ‘is that the media being remediated the most is gaming itself’ (2009, 221). Just as Gothic novels draw attention to processes of literary narrative, a practice in which Edith Finch with its floating typeface also engages, Lewis’s story reflects on mythologies of videogame play, drawing attention to the ludic practices players are engaged in an eminently Gothic manner.

Going home As a possible consequence of the game’s literary orientation What Remains of Edith Finch is a title which incorporates and ludifies a broad range of Gothic

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tropes, themes and traditions. Like Savoy’s American Gothic, it tells stories of madness and melancholy, history and psychopathology, characterised by ambivalence and lack of resolution (2010, 173). Within American Gothic fiction, Crow discusses the uncanniness of childhood locations, nostalgically regarded and returned to in adulthood. Reproducing the experiences of her literary equivalents, Edith’s childhood home has, in her absence, ‘turned into a kind of haunted house, inhabited by ghosts of the past’ (2009, 76). Its story is inconsistent, incoherent, fragmented, and frequently interrupted. No sooner have players understood each segment’s interactive requirements than its character’s demise brings the sequence to an abrupt halt. Through this process, Edith Finch defamiliarises gameplay, draws attention to the controls, and according to Taylor’s ludic-Gothic formulation, functions to ‘question the relationship of the gamer to the game’, ‘subvert typical play’, and ‘challenge conceptions of game interface design and game design, questioning the materiality of the text itself’ (2009, 52). Miles identifies Gothic fiction’s concern with origins myths, which retain their power despite their questionable status (2002, 185). Edith’s quest is orientated to discover the truth about her family’s history and the curse surrounding its members. In a typical confusion of form and content, Miles observes how Gothic romance’s preoccupation with protagonists’ lineage is reflected in questions surrounding the origins of the Gothic tale itself as authentic historical record (ibid., 99–100). Edith Finch similarly plays with the reliability of the protagonist’s journal and the documents they reference, alongside the genealogy of Edith and her unborn child, who, as the ultimate ‘narrator’, embodies the tale’s true author. As the story about a young woman returning home following the death of her mother, Edith Finch fulfils a specific tradition of Gothic woman’s fiction. A motherless woman, Edith fits the conventional brand of heroine identified by Heiland (2004, 101). Like the Gothic heroine, described by Hoeveler, players are tasked with finding some secret concealed within an extensive series of walls and locked doors (1998, 21–2). Both Edith and the subjective position of the player bear traces of the female Gothic protagonist as ‘an investigative figure’ required ‘to navigate a series of positions conditioned by her speculation about, or knowledge of, events at different moments in that story’ (Hanson, 2007, 53). Ellis notes how much feminist Gothic studies focuses on absent mothers (2012, 464) and many Finch mothers have a peculiar, even ghostly, off-screen presence. Molly’s is heard admonishing her daughter through the bedroom door, and subsequently glimpsed from Molly’s perspective as she peers through her parents’ bedroom window in feline form. Calvin’s off-screen mother calls to her son as he sits on his swing, gazing out across the ocean. Gregory’s mother, Kay, briefly tends the baby before allowing him to drown in the bathtub. In Edith Finch, like much Gothic fiction (Kilgour, 2006, 202), blame appears laid on the mother. Dawn seems similarly distant. Edith’s mother’s face remains unseen as she argues with her daughter on their last night, and in the later sequence depicting her death. This takes place in a hospital, where players simply slide Edith’s gloved hand into Dawn’s, at which point her life support machine

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flatlines. The player, as Edith, is effectively guilty of matricide. But, as Miles notes, in relation to classic Gothic Romance (2002, 179), despite their shadowy existence, absent mothers exert considerable influence. The Finch household appears a matriarchal one, haunted by successive generations of women. This impression is enhanced by the rather ludicrous depiction of Finch father figures, who die stubbornly drowning on a sinking houseboat, or constructing an ill-conceived dragon-shaped slide. The Finch house was built by men, but the home remains defined by Finch women. Returning to the house, Edith says how, as a child, the building ‘made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t put into words’. This family home is a space both familiar and unfamiliar, friendly and forbidding, soothing and unsettling. Freud famously attempted to nail the psychoanalytic meaning of this equivocating sensation, a task subsequently taken up in more substantial studies by Anthony Vidler (1992), Castle (1995) and Royle (2003). The protagonist’s unease expresses the famous shift Freud traced between the homely and the unhomely, the way something safe, secure, cosy and comforting might simultaneously feel discomforting, dark, sinister, hidden and secretive. Curtis writes of the importance of the opening tracking or zooming shot where the haunted house is dramatically revealed (2008, 31). Edith Finch begins with players effectively directing this sequence, navigating the overgrown forest surrounding the Finch mansion, until the house appears, accompanied by suspenseful background music. Edith’s monologue continues to evoke disquieting feelings, describing the sense of brother Milton being swallowed by the house itself, the building’s relationship to memories and dreams, and the mysterious forbidden rooms contained within. Edith’s younger brother, whose missing posters surround the house, introduces the theme of the lost child, childhood loss, and lost childhood. This young woman seems drawn back to her old home through a combined desire for comfort following her mother’s death, a sense of homesickness, and an ambivalent curiosity concerning her own origins. The ungainly architectural structure players encounter through Edith’s eyes, and through the eyes of her unborn child, becomes ‘a locus of dreams’ in the form of many imagined flashbacks housed within. Like the uncanny childhood home that Vidler notes, the Finch mansion is transformed into an ambivalent space through an unstable amalgamation of memory and nostalgia (1992, 58). Edith holds a heavily symbolic key, only this does not open the front door. Instead, in the game’s first locked room puzzle, entry is achieved via the side door dog flap. By gaining entry, both Edith and player disturb distinctions between inside and outside, between the overgrown garden and the house’s dusty interior, human and animal, owner and intruder. This ignoble homecoming defines the protagonist as an ambivalent interloper, despite her legal status as sole possessor of the family estate. Miles describes an unsettling experience of the Gothic, whereby ‘the self, finding itself dispossessed in its own house’ results in ‘a condition of rupture, disjuncture, fragmentation’ (2002, 3). The initial sense of exclusion, from the house itself, then from the rooms within, produces similar experiences of marginality. In addition, unlike games

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where players explore unfamiliar environments along with the playable character, there are unusual disconnections between the player’s ignorance of the house, and that of Edith who continues to narrate her investigation of the familiar/unfamiliar home. Analogies between the Gothic house and a face or body have, as William Moss notes, become something of a familiar trope in American Gothic fiction (2014, 181). Edith’s comparison of the house’s packed interior to ‘a smile with too many teeth’ perpetuates the uncanny impression of something ostensibly friendly and inviting becoming subtly sinister through some small but unnerving detail. Vidler also writes of architectural analogies between the human body and the building (1992, 70–1). For this author, changing cultural dispositions towards architecture signal a shift from the classically composed body, now regarded with a fond sense of nostalgia, into the more dismembered, fragmented and inharmonious corporeality of modern eras (ibid., 78–9). If the house of Edith Finch symbolises a body, it is a particularly unhealthy one. The interior is cramped and crowded. Internal sections are blocked and boarded up. The building’s exterior is covered with cancer-like growths, as bizarre extensions have been added to accommodate new generations. The Finch home’s sprawling, cluttered, lop-sided, precarious design suggests ‘the peculiarly unstable nature of “house and home”’ with which Vidler’s book begins (ibid., ix). In describing the building’s impossible ‘awkward construction’ Bozdog and Galloway write: ‘It looks like a child has precariously stacked various cubes atop each other with complete disregard for architectural rigor, structural logic, or gravitational constraints’ (2019, 7–8). Their assessment emphasises the building’s defiant stand against the potentially injurious forces of gravity, its fantastically impossible construction, and the sense it has been built by a child. This is appropriate, given the many children whose bizarre stories the building contains. The mansion’s eccentric, asymmetrical, potentially unstable existence, reflects those of its cursed residence, rendering the estate an exemplary Gothic location. Like the Gothic castles and mansions Punter describes, it is a building ‘without a total plan’ (1996a, 174), seeming to have extended spontaneously in response to each passing Finch and the closed-off chambers they left behind. As with the castle, a central setting of the classic Gothic novel, the house resembles both ‘a labyrinth, a maze, a site of secrets’, ‘a site of domesticity’ and a testimony to cartographical collapse, symbolising ‘the failure of the map’ (Punter and Byron, 2010, 261–2). An improbable habitat, riddled with secret passages, hidden rooms, concealed entrances and exits. As with entry to the house, players are denied the more usual, dignified, legitimate movement through space and between spaces. Instead, passing from sealed room to sealed room requires locating the elaborate mechanism permitting Edith to travel from one to the next, crawling, climbing and creeping across roofs, between walls, along tunnels, through windows and hidden hatchways. Approximately halfway through the game, Edith notes her own physical discomfort with this unconventional mode of perambulation, observing that she might have reconsidered the visit had she known she was pregnant. It is the first reference to the young woman’s unborn child, the baby in her body aligned with the heroine’s own awkward location within the family home.

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Like the haunted house discussed by Curtis, and the stuffed spaces of Chess’ hidden object games (2015, 391), the Finch mansion is ‘cluttered and excessive’ (Curtis, 2008, 66), crammed with abandoned objects pertaining to dead family members, in need of a good clear-out. As Edith herself says, ‘there was just too much of it’. The Finch residence combines what Baldick considers the essential formula of Gothic: ‘a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space’ (2009, xix). Like the mansion of Gone Home, across this packed and overdetermined habitat, virtually every object relates to its inhabitants’ life, death and obsessions. Each sealed bedroom approximates a museum scrupulously curated to exhibit their former inhabitants, capitalising upon every inch of wall and storage space. A familiar theme of Gothic fiction, the house/home has become symbolic of its residents. The family portrait, a frequent feature of such stories, is a device Mighall argues which ‘makes this conflation between architectural fabric and “blood” visible’. The image of each family member, painted on a circle of wood, connects the trees from which the house was constructed with images of Molly, Calvin, Gus, Milton and the rest of the children who lived and died within its timber walls. The cross-sections represent a literal expression of how the paintings ‘function rather like geological “growth rings” for the mansion itself, testimony to the antiquity of the house (building) and of the House (family)’ (2007, 85). Withered plants bearing the children’s names stand outside the classroom where Dawn home-schooled her three children. Here a display, authored by Edith herself, details the family curse. The young girl’s workspace is scattered with coloured cards bearing names of dead family members. The Finch children, under the tutelage of their mother, appear consistently reminded of their grim lineage and the morbid stories surrounding their dead predecessors. Like the families of Punter’s early American Gothic, curse or no curse, these characters are dying of ‘isolation and atrophy’ (1996a, 175), trapped in the suffocating house filled with grizzly reminders of the family’s fateful history and of their own truncated futures. Howells writes: There is nothing confident or optimistic about Gothic fiction; its main areas of feeling treat of melancholy, anxiety-ridden sentimental love and horror; it is a shadowy world of ruins and twilit scenery lit up from time to time by lurid flashes of passion and violence (1978, 5) Melancholy, Bloom notes, is a recurring quality of Gothic writing (2010, 69), one Savoy considers in relation to Freud’s work on the subject. In American Gothic, the practice whereby a subject identifies with a lost object, has the effect of ‘bringing the dead back to life’. Like such protagonists, Edith is torn between disavowal, rejecting her family and its curse, and identification, seeing it as defining her fate (2010, 173–4). The game’s fundamental dynamic entails ambivalent processes of investigation, discovery, resurrection, identification and

What Remains of Edith Finch 101 ejection. Edith’s journey is part exorcism, part reanimation. The heroine hopes to reconcile her family’s past by unearthing its history, thereby setting its stories to rest. In a seemingly throwaway line, while discussing the uncanny in postcolonial writing, Punter writes of an attempt ‘to recover – or to recover from – the exigencies of past history’ leading to a displacement of origins (2007, 133–4). This play with words, a tendency of both psychoanalytic and Gothic criticism, encapsulates contradictions inherent in the ambivalent therapeutic exercise in which the sole remaining Finch engages. Returning is both a recovery of family history, and the curse which plagues its stories, and an attempt to recover from that history and the debilitating impact it continues to exert. Ironically, these two incompatible aims are impossible to achieve through the same means. Consequently, Edith finds herself caught in a cycle of recovery and loss, as successive family members are brought back from the grave, only to return to the ground once their short stories are complete. For all its seductive powers, Boulter argues, videogame play constitutes a double encounter with this experience of loss. First, the player’s sense of self is temporarily suspended upon entering the game. Then, returning to the real world involves a falling back into reality, the ejection from a cyborgian paradise, a loss of imaginary mastery and control. Consequently, the player ‘stands between two dialectical senses of loss: the loss of the sense of the majesty of the real world and the inevitable loss of the simulated world that occurs as the game ends’. This dynamic inflects the videogame apparatus with a melancholy resonance which Boulter, consistent with many Gothic critics, relates to concepts of mourning, melancholy, trauma and the sublime (2005, 63–5). Such avatarial ruptures occur repeatedly across Edith Finch. The protagonist loses herself in the family narratives she so vividly relives. With every document accessed, the player loses control of the familiar avatar in favour of another. Players are wrenched from body after body as they become lifeless and uninhabitable, resulting from the player’s own performance. The first-person perspective videogame becomes the perfect format to enact these successive moments of loss. Loss of the real, loss of the simulated, loss of the Finch. Ultimately the game narrates a temporary reclaiming and subsequent loss for Edith’s son, reading his mother’s journal, following her own death. Of course, the main object of loss within psychoanalysis, and the body most frequently associated with the family home, is that of the mother. Vidler writes of the uncanny unhomely home’s association with, among other Freudian fixations, the ‘impossible desire to return to the womb’ (1992, ix–x). Edith’s journey to the old Finch mansion is precisely such a mission. It opens with a tentative return to the childhood home and ends with the Gothic heroine lying in the snug starlit space of her bedroom at the end of her investigation, achieving the symbolic desire to re-merge with the infinite. The game’s final moments stage a more literal achievement of the unachievable return to origins for Edith’s unborn child. Exploring survival horror from a psychoanalytic perspective, Santos and White argue videogames engage with processes of psychoanalytic repression relating to the Freudian death drive. This unconscious nihilistic desire of returning to the maternal body

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leads to an end of consciousness, identity and subjectivity (2005, 69–70). In her melancholy state, following the death of her mother, and the discovery of her own pregnancy, Edith is a figure consumed by such morbid desires. This explains the character’s masochistic obsession with her fated family, wallowing in their stories, investigating their relic-filled rooms, seeking to animate the curse she believes may claim her own life. More dramatically, an actual return to the womb is realised in the final stages of Edith Finch. Players experience life through the eyes of Edith’s soon-to-be born child, floating in the womb, amniotic fluids swimming with words and sentences. Contrasting with other flashbacks players have experienced, this penultimate moment resembles one of life. It is the moment of birth for Edith’s child as players steer their way through the mother’s birth canal. Except, this is also a moment of death, as the game dynamic implies Edith herself dies in childbirth. For a final time, players find themselves compelled to bring about the demise of yet another Finch family member, helping all that remains of the dynasty to exit from his mother’s womb. The moment echoes the earlier moment, when players steered the protagonist through the dog flap to enter the Finch family residence. If, as the psychoanalyst argues, such domestic spaces represent the maternal body, this final interactive experience effectively enacts a reversal of that early sequence. Hopefully, leaving the uncanny womb means an escape from the debilitating influences of the family curse. Childbirth, Royle claims, in a tortuous attempt to unpick Freud’s arguments, can be considered the ‘canny moment’ of departing the ultimate uncanny space (2003, 144). Edith thereby lives out the desire of the death wish, returning to the womb and relinquishing her subjectivity in the process, as the shot from Edith’s baby segues to his optical perspective as a young man holding Edith’s journal in his hands. Of course, if Edith’s suspicions are correct, and the curse is itself perpetuated by the stories told about the deaths of previous Finch family members, the book she leaves behind, the reading of which the player has effectively performed, is itself a death sentence. Except that Gothic literature would assert that Edith had no control over the matter, compelled by fate to do what she did, just as the player of Edith Finch must have led every previous relative to their doom in order for these events to ever take place.

5

Night in the Woods

Gothic tales of Possum Springs As Krzywinska points out, applying the label ‘American Gothic’ to a videogame is a far from straightforward process of categorisation. Game development is often a collaborative enterprise, complicating efforts in ascribing a unified national voice to any finished product. Games frequently target international audiences, leading to a necessary dilution of nationally-orientated character. The confidence with which a single-authored novel or short story might be labelled American Gothic thereby seems less sustainable within contexts of videogame production, marketing and reception (2014, 504). Nevertheless, possibly more than the focus of this study’s previous chapters, Night in the Woods can be considered part of the literary and cultural strand recognised as American Gothic. The title’s fictional setting of Possum Springs appears unmistakably North American in location. Nationally-specific signifiers include the town’s rail car diner, subterranean pretzel stand and shopping centre. The clothing of the characters, designs of the buildings, landmarks and murals, references to historical, economic and cultural events, all contribute to the impression of a specific geographical orientation. Its young cast speak with the familiar, laconic, ‘like’-peppered affectation of so many independent American film protagonists. In addition, Night in the Woods chimes with various themes of literary criticism associated with this genre. The game features distinct settings of American Gothic fiction, namely the woods, the small town and the urban ruin. These variously represent sites of fear, danger, escape, melancholy, awe and wonder, responses associated with traditional Gothic spaces, which more contemporary writers have applied to the districts of North America. The title also explicitly comments on economic relations, particularly the legacy of America’s industrial development and labour movements, and the decline of many manufacturing regions over recent decades. Its protagonist is Mae Borowski, a troubled 20-year-old who returns home after dropping out of college. Other young characters include Gregg, a fox working at the local convenience store, his boyfriend Angus, and Bea, a crocodile taking care of her family’s hardware business. They are occasionally joined by a small bird named Germ, a fan of their band. Mae herself is a black DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-6

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cat. Despite these characters’ anthropomorphised design, aligning the game with Aesop’s fables, children’s picture books and illustrated whimsy, this is a title consciously located in the ominous realm of American Gothic, frequently engaging with dark aspects of the nation’s culture and history. Playing Night in the Woods combines spatial exploration, engaging in conversation with non-playable characters, and following a loosely structured branching narrative with tangential ludic and storytelling components. Unfolding from a third-person perspective which scrolls and flips in flat two dimensions, the title nevertheless enjoys similarities with the first-person walking simulator, structured around an ambling succession of days in Mae’s life. Each starts with the protagonist waking in her attic bedroom, possibly talking to her mother, before heading into town aiming to complete some social or domestic chore: attending band practice, arranging a lift to a local party, or purging her computer of viruses. Completing these tasks is a necessary requirement for progression, which provides a linear and sequential backbone to the game. Between leaving Mae’s house, achieving each modest goal, and returning at the end of the day, players can explore the town, enter buildings, meet and chat with local residents by selecting dialogue options which hang above the avatar’s head. Investigating certain environmental features results in the protagonist providing brief internal monologues, pondering her relationship to the town, its history, and her childhood spent living there. As days progress, different areas open up, new characters emerge, old characters reveal more about their lives. Players might ignore many of these distractions, but the conversations they pursue, along with other interactions, potentially impact on developments later in the game. Krzywinska suggests this ‘open world’ videogame model seems unsuited to the structured, controlled pacing and tight linearity necessary to generate dramatic suspense associated with Gothic storytelling (ibid., 510). Despite the apparent freedom players enjoy, this is not a game without direction. Gameplay, dialogue and events are organised around an emerging story, involving a severed arm, a mysterious ghostly figure, and a secret cult at work within Possum Springs. Once some early obstacles are overcome, the small town represents a relatively open space for exploration. However, many activities its streets and buildings afford have little impact on the central game, featuring minor scenarios which may never become important, or pursuits which barely constitute side quests in the traditional videogame sense. This ludic structure expresses the protagonist’s unremarkable and directionless nature. Mae is a particularly unmotivated videogame heroine, seemingly content with days spent shooting the breeze with strangers, hanging out with friends, wandering the sidewalks, rooftops and telegraph wires. The undemanding life Mae prefers is echoed in the slight, almost comical, ludic opportunities presented to players. Interactive sequences necessary for progression include such mundane activities as picking up a soda can, opening a window, taking a slice of pizza, stealing a salted snack or piece of jewellery. These underwhelming distractions demand little-to-no skill from the player. With no rewards or fail states, their very status as minigames is debatable. The lack of control Mae experiences over her life, and the

Night in the Woods 105 seeming triviality of her existence, are thereby expressed through gameplay. Krzywinska proposes games be understood as ‘input/output’ devices, providing players with feedback in response to the micro-transactions of interactive decision-making. Such responses deliver important commentaries on players’ progress (ibid., 506). Night in the Woods presents multiple opportunities for dialogue decisions, features to examine, characters to spend time with, activities to choose from. But interactive conversations, even between main characters, are often rambling and tangential. The dialogue players choose is frequently limited to interchangeable responses. Entire buildings can be explored or ignored with little evident impact. Pausing to talk to a strange animal in the street might provide an entertaining distraction, but no tangible reward. Deciding to hang with Bea over Gregg, or Angus over Bea is followed by no clear indication of impact upon the player’s narrative trajectory. Night in the Woods’ ludic combination of openness, restriction and inconsequentiality, matches the circumstances of its protagonist, whose life seems drifting uncontrollably and inevitably towards some tragic, potentially violent, Gothic conclusion. Moments where players decide between two conversational responses, both of which lead to Mae embarrassing herself or hurting her friends, feel all the more inevitable for the illusion of choice. Mae is a troubled individual, and there is no escaping that. Whatever she does, she is bound to screw up. Many gameplay aspects position Mae Borowski as a contemporary Gothic heroine. Jenkins’ (2004) often-cited concept of ‘environmental storytelling’ is significant in defining the character. The protagonist’s personality emerges daily through her responses to the town, its inhabitants, and the changes her childhood home has undergone since her departure. A familiar ‘aesthetics of loss’ thereby pervades Night in the Woods, similar to that which Milbank sees across classic Gothic fiction, closely connected to sensations of melancholy and the sublime (1994, 151). Often Mae expresses sadness, at the closure of a pasta restaurant, the mothballing of a favourite mascot, the derelict condition of a childhood playground. Numerous moments of bittersweet nostalgia, a debilitating condition associated with the melancholic heroine, connect Night in the Wood with Gothic sensibilities. Subdued autumnal tones, rust reds, browns and faded yellow, characterise the game’s aesthetic. The season in which the game is set corresponds with the time of year when the original literary Gothic heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, discussed by Kilgour also returned to her family home. Autumn’s characterisation as a period associated with ‘a natural temporal process of loss and recovery’ (2006, 124), appears particularly suited to a protagonist attempting to overcome some undisclosed traumatic experience, which led to her leaving college. In returning home, rather than continuing college, in spending her days brooding on childhood memories with friends who are clearly trying to move on, Mae indulges in a somewhat masochistic practice common to many Gothic figures. Punter describes this as an ‘ambiguous attempt either to ward off the unpredictable future by celebrating past and passing beauty’ or else, ‘to derive a sense of glory from that very passing’ (1996b, 125). Mae’s personal nostalgia for her dwindling childhood intersects

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with broader national nostalgia for a seemingly more prosperous, productive, meaningful and secure era of employment for the residents of Possum Springs. The most striking idealisations of this industrial past are the dramatic murals throughout the town, showing miners returning from work. ‘Look,’ Bea remarks, with characteristic dryness, ‘jobs.’ If Possum Springs reflects Mae’s nostalgic fondness for the security of a dwindling past, a more sinister and disturbing gamespace seems to express the character’s unconscious turmoil. Dark interactive dreams begin soon after Mae returns home and provide an expressionistic insight into the protagonist’s inner angst. This surreal playable dreamscape is a disorientating and shadowy world, reproducing the horror videogame trope Simon Niedenthal identifies, whereby ‘visual obscurity related to darkness, atmosphere, and spatial occlusion’ communicates an experience of ‘awe and terror’ (2009, 173). Identifying the ambiguous quality of Mae’s nocturnal environment, Krzywinska refers to a certain ‘dreamlogic’ where ‘temporal order and agency become disordered’ within Gothic gaming. In many titles influenced by the mode, Krzywinska observes, light affords protection from the forces of darkness (2014, 508–9). Indicating Mae’s ambivalent status, the first dream tasks players with smashing streetlights and strip lighting, rather than relying upon them for safety. The destructive psychological force unleashed by the protagonist communicates the suppressed rage the heroine feels at her past and present circumstances. As Niedenthal’s assessment of Gothic videogame iconography suggests, Mae’s dreamscape approaches the ‘cosmic fear’ of weird fiction. Carroll relates this Lovecraftian concept to Burke’s philosophical discussion of the sublime. A combination of excitement and dread results from contemplating unknown powers on the edge of the universe, evoking ‘an exhilarating mixture of fear, moral revulsion, and wonder’ (1990, 162). Such sensations characterise Mae’s progressively uncanny night-time adventures, unfolding in a surreal two-dimensional space, a jumbled-up city of crooked buildings and irregular architecture, inhabited by ghostly musicians, flying fish, giant creatures and metal monsters. These sequences culminate in Mae encountering a giant catlike deity, with whom she engages in an existential discussion concerning the nature of the universe. The precise significance of this creature, and of the dreams themselves, aside from providing players with a more traditionally directed gaming experience, remain obscure. Following a day spent in harmless wandering, they serve to undercut any sense of comfort or security players may feel on the protagonist’s behalf. Complementing her dual status as nostalgic melancholy Gothic heroine, and mentally tortured Gothic protagonist, Mae also assumes the more assertive and respectable role of detective. Proximities between this figure and the videogame player, looking for clues and solving puzzles, have already been explored. With typical self-reflexivity, Mae knowingly assumes sleuth-like status, remarking upon the role at regular moments. The heroine’s gender, and age, are significant here. As Lynette Carpenter argues, Gothic heroine detectives express significantly more defiance and enjoy considerably more agency than traditional Gothic victims (2014, 202). This model of Gothic central character persists in the juvenile

Night in the Woods 107 literature and animated culture upon which Night in the Woods draws. The previously aimless protagonist assumes this role in response to a disturbance of potentially supernatural origin. As Mae’s days progress, a mystery narrative emerges, involving a sinister cloaked figure who vanishes into the darkness during a Halloween festival. The fake spookiness of the evening’s events contributes to the game’s Gothic self-awareness, while enhancing the uncertainty of the heroine’s experience, and the scepticism of the authorities towards her account. Subsequently, Mae and friends embark upon an investigation incorporating stock spooky sites of Gothic detection: a museum at night, a graveyard and an abandoned mine, where various suspense-filled scenes unfold. Gregg and Mae are chased by a mysterious unseen figure, Mae and Bea uncover a buried corpse bearing signs of foul play. Possum Springs’ mysterious cult has made the mine the focus of their nefarious activities. Gothic videogame detectives are tasked with piecing together and effectively interpreting signs which, within the game world, are required ‘to be read and decoded as indexical of a great hidden, occulted system’ (Krzywinska, 2014, 512). A trip with Bea to the library to investigate the town’s microfiche archives proves particularly illustrative of this ludic dynamic. Taylor mentions the ‘anachronistic technology’ of horror games as continuing Gothic literary techniques (2009, 53), and the outdated storage method’s arcane nature is not lost on either characters. Further details of Possum Springs’ expansive history are revealed. Players learn of a mining disaster where many workers died, the sighting of a rare albino groundhog, the building, and later demolition, of a giant Ozymandias-style statue commemorating the town’s founder, the activities of various business, real estate and municipal developments. Prudish concerns regarding young womenfolk’s behaviour exist alongside accounts of a massacre where striking miners and their families were shot dead. History is spread out before Mae, Bea, and the player, as a flat, unordered, non-hierarchical collection of reports, anecdotes, editorials and official announcements from different eras. Like the children of contemporary Gothic discussed by Bruhm, Mae ‘experiences history as mixed up, reversed, and caught in a simultaneity of past-present-future’ (2010, 267). Many story fragments relate to elements already encountered in the player’s investigation, indicating the haunting of the town by its own past. As Mae wryly remarks, ghosts are history that won’t stay history, although Possum Springs does have its own resident spook. The spectral miner ‘Little Joe’, referenced in several newspaper articles, is first mentioned as a familiar children’s game Mae encounters on her first day home. Another story concerns a street’s evacuation following collective hallucinations. An article tells of a woman talking to her dead sister, and a young child committing suicide after hearing music in his head. These seemingly supernatural phenomena are explained as mass hysteria resulting from build-ups in underground gases, but the case resonates with many strange stories circulating the town. Like most Possum Springs narratives, newspaper articles oscillate between banality and fantasy, the mundane and the horrific. This is a modern town, characterised by industry and civil activity, nevertheless haunted by apparitions, obscure creatures and violent class warfare, in a typically Gothic combination.

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Mae and Bea’s library visit is intended to uncover the mystery of Possum Springs and the sinister cult abducting runaways and vagrants, feeding them to the god believed to inhabit the town’s abandoned mine. Their research aims to identify hot spots of suspicious or supernatural activity, determining the next stages in the gang’s ghost-hunting investigation. However, alongside such ludic goals, exploring Possum Springs’ public records inevitably leads players to uncover a more mundane lore in the town’s various histories. Play involves piecing together, what Krzywinska might describe as ‘a rich tapestry of back stories’ from the written fragments and snippets the player encounters. Narrative in Night in the Woods is ‘a multidimensional assemblage of fragments and remnants’, which, contributing another Gothic dimension of self-reflexivity, encourages ‘a close engagement with the game as text’ (2014, 512–13). Such aspects are analogous to how more traditional Gothic novels foreground narrative and communicative modes and structure through a collage of voices and discourses. Distinguishing Night in the Woods from other games in this ludic-Gothic tradition, outside Possum Springs’ library, such narratives assume spoken rather than written form. This confers a personal dimension to these oral stories and a folklore status to the tales players uncover in their roles as detective, folk historian and mass observation archivist. Dialogue, accessed when encountering any one of the town’s particularly talkative inhabitants, reveals characters’ thoughts, histories and philosophies on life, as significant as the newspaper articles on public record. Miss Rosa by the Trolleyside News stand tells Mae of the time her grandfather vandalised his boss’s car in a fit of anger. Lori Meyers, a young woman experiencing social anxiety, morbid fantasies and body dysmorphic tendencies, confesses aspirations to become a horror film director. Mae’s former teacher, Selmers Forrester, is an amateur poet, ex-drug addict, prison convict and divorcee. Most days, when asked, she regales Mae with a short poem. Continuing Gothic preoccupation with manuscripts, journals and textual records, Mae, like Edith Finch, sketches the people and places she encounters in a book which accumulates over the course of the game. These scrawled monochrome images contribute to the range of voices running through Possum Springs, a place overshadowed by its own history, ‘a history that’, as in Savoy’s description of American Gothic, ‘insists upon being told, however indirectly’ (2010, 171). As Mae’s knowing disposition towards her sleuth-like status implies, Night in the Woods displays common elements of pastiche and self-awareness concerning its relationship to Gothic storytelling and popular culture. The bookshelf in Mae’s home contains examples of fake weird fiction, with titles like The Fancy Corpse, The Stoat of Gallows Hill and Ladyshark. The video store where Angus works, another outdated media repository, stocks Swamp Husband, Brain Eaters and Death Chills 3. Players can enjoy a retro dungeon crawler on Mae’s laptop. The protagonists are member of a metal band, a Goth subculture associated with sensational lyrics, dark imagery and Satanic moral panics. A regular Guitar Hero-style mini-game involves playing rock music with Gregg, Angus and Bea. Possum Springs is home to a trio of Goth kids, who send Mae on a side quest to locate three pentagrams. Mae’s return conspicuously coincides with the

Night in the Woods 109 Halloween festival. Contributing to this event, Mae cosplays as the mascot from Witchdagger, her favourite doom metal band. The protagonist also joins a public performance narrating the mythology of Possum Springs’ origins, introduced by Bea who assumes the role of narrator. With its rusty organ accompaniment, hammy delivery and exaggerated dialogue, the play echoes the very tendency towards self-parody Saglia observes in theatrical Gothic (2016, 80). Its story incorporates a witch, a cursed spring, the ghosts of two dead brothers, and a spirit of the forest. The performance represents another example of Gothic narratives within narratives. Consistent with Hogle’s discussion of the Gothic, Bea’s play involves ‘layer upon layer of falsity’, fictions constructed from ‘signs of already partly falsified signs’, a ‘recounterfeiting of the already counterfeit’ and, most pertinently, ‘ghostings of the already spectral’ (2012, 496–8). Bea, who is also the show’s director and script editor, admits the play has lost any pretence at authenticity. To make it even spookier, the story has been rewritten so many times its roots in tradition have become increasingly tenuous and obscure. The lack of gravity towards what ought to represent a revered founding myth is apparent in the protagonist’s lack of preparation for the role. Mae, like the player selecting dialogue with no indication of the correct line, is clearly improvising. Acknowledging the play’s artificiality, Mae calls it ‘fake history’ while Bea considers the performance more like a ‘bad remake’. Such a playful, ludic approach towards history and historiography, capitalising on the selective interaction of the videogame player, corresponds with Gothic fiction’s cavalier attitude towards the past and the many stories it generates.

Ghost town syndrome A noted paradox of American Gothic is that a nation so seemingly orientated towards cheery optimism, freed from the histories and horrors of the past, personified by democratic industrial capitalist modernity, should embrace a mode so painfully at odds with such qualities. This contradiction, among many characterising the genre, has not escaped the attention of literary scholarship. Crow sees the cycle representing a necessary counter to the celebratory disposition of a national culture whose dominant mythologies are ones of progress, expansion and improvement. Instead, ‘Gothic writers persisted in asking troubling questions about Americans and wilderness, and about Americans’ beliefs in themselves’ (2009, 17). A disquieting sense that the ‘European disease’ early migrants sought to escape has somehow followed them to the shores of the ‘New World’ is another trope identified by Punter (2014, 24), while Fiedler, who considers Gothic traditions central to the American novel, identifies a resonant narrative where departure from the ‘terror’ of Europe leads only to new guilts concerning racial exploitation and environmental destruction (1967, 31). Gothic horror, born of an older European imagination, migrates to American soil, where it assumes familiar forms based on more recent atrocities of the modern era: genocide, slavery and exploitation of natural resources. Rather than evading the shadow of history, America becomes a place where

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‘the past constantly inhabits the present’ (Savoy, 2010, 167), characterised by old and new terrors, assuming common and uncommon forms, repeating and deviating from established patterns of compulsive behaviour. This essential Gothic theme, of history exerting an omnipresent influence on the present, defines both American Gothic and Night in the Woods’ environmental storytelling. Spaces in Possum Springs narrate the backstory of its young protagonist, and the rich, strange, occasionally violent heritage of the town in which she grew up. The historical burdens of memorials, murals, founding pageants and mothballed float mascots are everywhere, available for interpretation by players prepared to investigate these hidden, secret or obscured features. Ghosts, metaphorical and literal, are everywhere. Even the Possum Springs Historical Society appears to be haunted. As Crow writes, America has its own horror stories. ‘The materials for powerful art, especially Gothic art, are about us in abundance in the New World; there is no need to draw upon stale European conventions for horrific events when our own history can provide them’ (2009, 13–14). Night in the Woods finds Gothic resonance in America’s labour disputes, in stories of hoboes losing limbs riding railroads, in newspaper reports of industrial cave-ins and explosions. Grizzly tales of sinkhole disappearances, workers’ revenge and gas-induced hallucinations are integrated into Possum Springs’ landscape, and gesture towards the macabre behind the everyday of American cultural history. The central mystery of Night in the Woods concerns its secret society, the kind of organisation which, as Kilgour illustrates, is the source of ‘no good’ in many Gothic texts (2006, 104). The cult of Possum Springs brings together cloaked and hooded figures from the local community, convinced their actions will return economic fortune to the town. As a symbol of former prosperity, the derelict mine around which they cluster has particular resonance. Punter understands this abandoned feature of the contemporary landscape as representing a forbidden and potentially dangerous source of fascination, a memorial to America’s past, and a symbolic entrance to the underworld (2014, 17). Oblique affinities between the creature in the mine and the entity Mae encounters in her dreams generate further layers of ambiguity. Other tangential stories woven throughout the game incorporate the spectre of Mae’s own grandfather, and a tooth hidden in the recesses of her family home. This fragment relates to another secret society, established by workers, decades ago. A macabre ritual was organised around the exhumed skull of a mine owner, whose teeth were forcibly removed as revenge for attacking an elderly employee. Mae, her family, and their shared history, are thereby implicated in the American Gothic of Possum Springs. The absence of supernatural content renders the story no less Gothic in its grizzly images of tortuous tooth extraction, night-time grave robbing, secret gatherings and clandestine ceremonies. As the title implies, Night in the Woods invests in a particularly prominent feature of Gothic American fiction, the wooded area. Lloyd Smith notes how colonial settlements often occupied the edge of a wilderness, a feature the author claims fed the frontier Gothic imagination (2012, 164). Similarly, Sivils

Night in the Woods 111 traces the sinister associations of woods back to Puritan times, when such areas became a source of physical and spiritual threat to early European communities. Paranoid narratives of ‘Native Americans’ kidnapping settlers and holding them hostage in these ‘dark forests’, Sivils argues, might be one of the nation’s first original literary genres (2014, 123). It is the wilderness, and the original people within it which, Arthur Redding argues, effectively ‘Gothicized’ the optimism and positivity of early settlers and the concept of manifest destiny (2014, 450). Acknowledging the forest’s presence in older European Gothic culture, Krzywinska observes the psychological significance of backwoods locations, ‘the unconscious with an American accent’ in Gothic games (2014, 508). This location features in Night in the Woods’ opening sequence when Mae, whose father has forgotten to collect her from the bus station, must walk home in the dark. The woods surrounding Possum Springs represent a sinister zone, filled with jagged silhouettes and obscure shadows. This primal space is simultaneously littered with incongruously discarded remnants of industry and contemporary consumerism. A shopping trolley and an abandoned bicycle emerge from the mud. The ground is cluttered with logs from an old sawmill. In a characteristic mix of commercialism, supernaturalism and postmodernism, Mae describes shopping bags as ghosts of grocery stores, a metaphor anticipating the derelict supermarket she and Gregg might later plunder. Woods surrounding Possum Springs are far from the uncivilised spaces imagined by early colonisers. Despite these tattered signifiers of civilisation, they remain no less discomforting and potentially dangerous. Climbing across the wreckage, Mae falls and remarks that she could have died. A possible Gothic allusion to the pervasiveness of death in traditional platform games, the protagonist seems more exhilarated than concerned by this prospect. Lacking the medieval ruins commonly associated with traditional Gothic landscapes, Crow notes how the wilderness provided alternative opportunity for American painters evoking a sense of the sublime (2009, 10). As Mae makes her way home, there is a picturesque beauty to the distant town lights, the silhouettes of trees and industrial buildings of the layered digital landscape. The animated train passing by makes Mae recall the comforting sound she’d hear from her childhood bed. A derelict nautical-themed play park is another melancholy Anthropocene element within the wilderness. In later sequences the woods become a location identified with dubious activity, a space of hidden pornography, teenage break-ups, procreative and recreational sex. Mae and friends venture into the woods to play knife fight, bounce on rotting tree trunks and shoot air rifles. A gathering where Mae gets drunk and publicly humiliates herself, while far from horrifying in the Gothic tradition, is nevertheless emotionally excruciating. Woods afford an escape from the urban, civilised, implicitly adult spaces of Possum Springs, the site of potentially diverting mini-games and idle philosophical rumination. Only in later stages do woods become a dark and dangerous landscape, although here the source of disturbance is more the abandoned mine, the symbol of the town’s industrial decline and focus of its sinister underground cult. The wilderness around Possum Springs comes to

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serve similar functions as the imaginary medieval within early Gothic fiction. A place of dark danger far from the comforts of civilisation, woods consequently offer refuge and renewal to those for whom contemporary civilisation feels alienating and uninspiring. Their mythical significance is enhanced by comments made by an enigmatic figure, the Janitor, who emerges at pertinent moments across the game. ‘We begin and we end, at night, in the woods,’ the Janitor pronounces, suggesting the title references a mystical, liminal space, before birth, after death. A profoundly modern American vocation, if the Janitor occupies a spiritual status, he resembles a particularly down-to-earth deity, a lowly proletarian servant who repairs, manages, maintains, and keeps things ticking over in the interests of the community. Night in the Woods also contributes to American horror literature’s preoccupation with the small town, the location of one title holding significant status in Gothic games studies (Kirkland, 2012a). Crow sees this symbolically loaded locale capitalising upon juxtapositions between the mundane and the terrifying, a frequent frisson within contemporary Gothic. Indeed, the author might be describing Possum Springs as they observe: ‘To the outsider, only the boring details of everyday life are visible. Any long-time resident, however, knows many stories of strange events, tragic accidents, hidden bits of family history, and crimes’ (2009, 66–7). Mae and Bea’s trip to the library reveals how Possum Springs is filled with legends, ghost stories and grizzly tales, tragedies, histories and accidents, played out against a backdrop of workaday banality. The town, as its young inhabitants frequently remark, is a particularly dull place in which to be stuck. Main Street contains a row of generic small-town establishments: a convenience store, a hardware store, a diner, a parking lot. As a ludification of this mundanity, Mae’s days are typically repetitive, organised around comparatively commonplace activities. However, as the curious player soon discovers, this dull space is filled with stories and characters keen to tell them. Mae’s mother has a playfully macabre tale of particular pertinence. Jenny was walking across a field with her daughter, when she inexplicably vanished into thin air. A moment of the Todorovian fantastic hangs suspended as mother pauses, before revealing the rational explanation behind Jenny’s disappearance. A hole in the ground, caused by a collapsing mine pillar, swallowed her up in a Gothic live burial. A body never emerged, but her fate is commemorated in the naming of the place where she was last seen, Jenny’s Field. This story leads to further ruminations, about the replacement of trees with electricity pylons, Mae’s mother’s life before becoming a parent, something her daughter finds hard to contemplate, and the breath-taking view from an old sunken lime furnace. Across Jenny’s Field, natural features are replaced by man-made towers. The ruins of industry, like those of the medieval era, persistently protrude from the earth, evoking an unsettling and ambivalent sense of the sublime. A young woman finds it impossible to imagine a time before her own existence. Rational explanation doesn’t make Jenny’s fate any less horrific. Indeed, the fact her death results from industrial enterprise renders it all the more grotesque. And decades after her death, Jenny’s story continues to haunt the picturesque landscape surrounding Possum Springs.

Night in the Woods 113 Lloyd Smith considers the absence of a feudal past with associated Gothic locations such as castles and monasteries as complicating the American adaptation of traditional Gothic tropes and settings (2012, 163). Many academics explore how writers, responding to this absence, transposed European ruins onto this ‘New World’ context. For example, Moss points to post-Civil War writers of the South identifying appropriate levels of dereliction in the region’s colonial mansions (2014, 179). Night in the Woods frequently evokes imagery of more contemporary ruin in the town’s landscape, in its boarded-up buildings and abandoned commercial centres. Many stores have closed down. A telephone call centre represents the only flourishing source of employment. Local officials struggle to attract new business and provide reason for young people to remain in Possum Springs. Mae’s father, personifying the town’s diminished circumstances, worked as a miner, then at a glass factory, and now in a grocery store. Night in the Woods consequently evokes what Martin Procházka identifies as the ‘ghost town syndrome’ in American literature. Ruins of the American landscape Procházka writes, in the context of Gothic fiction, ‘frequently unsettle the discourses of redemption, progress, and other ideological versions of histories and testify to the failures of modern economic or technological power.’ The locations Procházka describe encompass both early mining towns of the American West and, at the historical spectrum’s other end, the decaying centres of American cities (2014, 29–30). Complementing the abandoned supermarket and dilapidated playground, Night in the Woods’ textual organisation itself evokes the ruin. Stories emerge from the game as a series of narrative segments which both Mae and the player piece together. Regarding early Gothic novels, Baldick writes of the pseudo-medieval Gothic fragment, constituting ‘an incomplete narrative presented as if the result of an antiquarian discovery among partially destroyed manuscripts’. The Gothic novel’s tattered manuscript, sharing the aesthetic appeal of ruined architecture, implies ‘a lost whole which the reader’s imagination is then invited to reconstruct’ (2009, xvii). Gothic videogames reproduce the themes and processes of their literary precedents, in their crumbling architecture, dislocated storytelling, and the quasi-antiquarianism of the active detective player. Form and content coincide in the digital experience, connecting the ludicGothic of contemporary gaming with the earliest examples of Gothic print fiction. Bryan Alexander observes how Gothic literature’s expansion beyond Europe saw American authors translate tropes associated with old monarchical fortifications into new spaces such as the industrial city (2014, 147). Night in the Woods enacts a similar projection upon the post-industrial landscape. This coincides with the game developers’ adoption of the term ‘Rust Belt Gothic’ (Hudson, 2017), an addition to the list of American Gothic sub-genres, alongside Southern Gothic, New England Gothic and suburban Gothic. The Rust Belt refers to the former ‘industrial heartland’ of America which, according to popular narratives, in processes beginning in the 1980s, became increasingly run-down and impoverished due to automation and declines in domestic manufacturing. A recurring feature of contemporary Gothic involves the recuperation of sites of modernity,

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and postmodernity, as spaces imbued with the melancholy, uncanny, sublime qualities of antiquated Gothic locales. Seemingly at odds with the genre’s medieval heritage, such strategies coincide with Gothic dispositions towards crumbling architecture as a reification of bygone eras. Industrial modernity, in certain regions, looks to contemporary generations as distant as the Dark Ages. Subsequently, the shells of mills and factories assume similar ambivalent qualities as collapsing abbeys, ruined castles and decaying mansions, regarded by early Gothic enthusiasts with uneven fear, foreboding and fascination. Such ruins evoke the nostalgia Mae experiences in her childhood haunts, and the brutal horrors of industrial work, represented by Night in the Woods’ more graphic tales of trade dispute riots and workers’ revenge. Rust Belt Gothic seems an applicable term to describe certain imagery within Gothic media and videogames. Many horror titles contain aesthetics of industrial decay, dark and grimy corridors, abandoned machinery, rusty grilles and fan blades. Vidler gestures towards such iconography in contemporary uncanny architecture. In texts expressing ambivalence towards modern industrialisation and its discarded remains, Vidler writes of moments where ‘the uncanny erupt[s] in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l’oeil of simulated space’ and ‘the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture’ (1992, 3). These coincide with the simulated environments of Night in the Woods, from the car park on the boundary of Possum Springs to the Fort Lucenne Mall, from the pigeon-filled Husker Bee Ballroom to the Food Donkey to the abandoned Party Barn where Mae’s band play. Night in the Woods reflects on recent historic developments, associated with post-industrialisation, digitisation and the fallout from the early twenty-firstcentury economic crash, exacerbating decline in areas traditionally associated with prosperity and progress. Gothic literature is often considered a response to historic trauma, and many authors observe contemporary Gothic literature, popular culture and videogames as mediating recent equivalents. Writing in 2017, Faye Ringel parallels the rise of Gothic novels in late eighteenth-century ‘shilling shockers’ as expressing anxiety following the ‘end of empire’, with the popularity of zombie apocalypse narratives in response to the end of the Cold War and recent rises in global terrorism (2017, 22–3). Pedlingham argues the videogame Limbo (2010) expresses the traumatic aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center (2015, 157). Similarly mindful of how Gothic games engage with social anxieties and pressures, Riddle (2016) speculates that the crash of 2008 provides symbolic context for another horror-based narrative title. Night in the Woods more explicitly explores the impact of recent economic catastrophes upon those inhabiting certain regions of the United States. Following Crow’s description of American Gothic as representing a pessimistic counterpoint to the American mainstream’s cheery optimism (2009, 17), Night in the Woods’ Gothic register is painfully suited to express conditions when many promises of modern capitalist democracy, such as equality of opportunity, the pursuit of happiness, upward mobility, and a political system free of corruption, vested interest and foreign interference seem most strained. The frequent monstrosity of

Night in the Woods 115 industrialisation in these tales expresses antipathy towards modern progress, even during Possum Springs’ greatest era of prosperity. The price of current postindustrial developments, in the form of economic insecurity and diminishing career options, is evidently taking its toll on the residents Mae encounters. This is expressed in Selmers’ most bitter poem, ‘There’s no Reception in Possum Springs’, exemplifying the town’s exclusion from the nation’s political, economic and cultural centres. This angry tirade, notably delivered at the local library, following the characters’ investigation of the local microfiche collection, decries how ‘house-buying jobs became rent-paying jobs became living with family jobs’ as workers are made redundant by twenty-first-century automation in the form of mobile phone applications. This howl at the social and economic injustices of the contemporary world exists in direct dialogue with a Gothic tradition of social criticism, together with the literary tendency to incorporate multiple forms of communication and artistry. The poem ends with a chilling image of apocalyptic fury as Mai’s ex-teacher imagines riding a bus to Silicon Valley and burning the place to the ground.

At the end of everything … The tag line for Night in the Woods reads: ‘At the end of everything, hold on to anything.’ This oblique slogan has little clear relation to the game’s narrative. It nevertheless encapsulates a desperation and disenfranchisement suiting the title’s location and characters. A sense of finality haunts Possum Springs and its residents, suffering various historical post-traumatic stresses. People in this declining town inhabit a post-Enlightenment, post-modernity, post-9/11, post-financial crisis, post-truth era. Despite the absence of zombies, irradiated wastelands or alien invaders, the phrase’s apocalyptic sentiments coincide with many end-of-theworld narratives throughout American Gothic culture. Identifying a heritage of apocalyptic Gothic fiction within the nation’s literary canon, Redding notes American writing across the generic spectrum to be ‘relentlessly apocalyptic’ (2014, 450). Resonating with Night in the Woods’ commonplace setting, the author writes: ‘Apocalypse is not doomsday, it is just the everyday. The apocalypse has already happened, it is happening all about us, even as we gaze upon it, more or less unruffled.’ Written before the 45th American Presidential elections and the coronavirus pandemic, Redding cites the stock market crash, increasing civil unrest, unemployment, the destitution of suburbs and industrial centres, as evidence of contemporary commonplace apocalypse (ibid., 447–8). Like many, Redding draws on Sontag’s essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’. Here Sontag argued the ‘age of extremity’ within 1960s America produces two apparently mutually exclusive threats: ‘unremitting banality’ and ‘inconceivable terror’ (2001, 224). Night in the Woods’ protagonists find themselves trapped between these two apparently polarised responses to the end of everything. The former characterises the daytime world of Possum Springs with its quiet streets and inconsequential conversations, its mundane adventures and diverting mini-games. The small community reflects Crow’s discussion of American Gothic banality, albeit concealing dark histories and sinister secrets (2009, 66–7).

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In contrast, ‘inconceivable terror’ exemplifies the recurring dream sequences concluding Mae’s often mundane daytime excursions. This nocturnal zone is more traditionally Gothic: gloomy and dark, populated by bats, crows, ghostly musicians and shadowy figures. Many nights this uncanny moonlit world approaches the aesthetic Pedlingham describes in a game identified as responding to the attacks of September 11. It is a ‘ruined cityscape’ full of, ‘wrecked and crumbling rooftops’, ‘remains of buildings, hoardings and chimney stacks’, ‘vast industrial machines broken down and decaying’ and a ‘dilapidated hotel, its sign partially electrified’ (2015, 158–9). In oscillating between banality and cosmic horror, autumnal browns and Gothic shadows, porch step conversations and mechanical monsters, Mae’s waking and sleeping existences encapsulate binary responses to a very American apocalypse. As Sontag’s commentary would indicate, there is something cathartic, escapist, almost transcendental, in contemplating Gothic images of destruction and dissolution as an antidote to deadening experiences of boredom and banality. Introducing a collection on apocalyptic fiction, David Seed sees the apocalypse as underpinning both a contemporary sense of crisis, and a promised rescue from ‘the ultimate nightmare of endless, undifferentiated duration’ (2000, 3–4). Young people in Night in the Wood, trapped in their bleak and hopeless town, have been left no meaningful investment in the place’s past or present. The call to ‘nuke Possum Springs’, a line of graffiti crudely defacing a historic town mural, appeals to obliterate the town, its history, and its future. An expression of adolescent angst, nihilism and self-harm, the line is itself an in-world quotation, reference to an old school graffiti tag presumably originating in a bygone Cold War era, of which its contemporary author likely has no memory. The quote is also incomplete, disintegrating into a thick streak of black paint, as though the lacklustre vandal grew tired of their own plagiarised efforts at self-expression. The liminal age status of Night in the Woods’ protagonist, frequently commented upon within the game, is pertinent to their Gothic narrative. As young people of around 20 years of age, Mae and her friends might exist on a Gothic cusp (Miles, 2002, 29) between millennials and those who followed, Generation Z, a cohort whose labelling carries a finality brewing with apocalyptic implications. As representatives of innocence, Jarlath Killeen suggests, the children in Gothic fiction frequently assume an effective foil for adult male villains. Throughout the nineteenth century, children increasingly replaced the vulnerable heroines of female Gothic novels. Such moves capitalised upon current discourses of childhood as symbolising ‘a zone of innocence besieged by malevolent Gothic threats from the family and from social, religious and political institutions’ (2009, 61–2). Although hardly a child, Mae is a figure similarly beset by economic forces beyond her control, alienated from the education system, threatened by a shadowy religious order. Like the villains Killeen details, the Possum Springs elders kidnap and sacrifice young people for their own economic gain. Mae’s friend Casey has been captured and killed by the cult, who threaten the heroine with the same fate. Such murderous acts are a response to the members’ own end-of-days experience, characterised by the withdrawal of government support, the outsourcing of jobs abroad,

Night in the Woods 117 increasing regulations, and taxes wasted on lazy immigrants. Adding to such rightwing rhetoric, there are particularly oppressive generational dimensions to the vigilante activities of this ‘murder cult of dads’. While appeasing the old god inhabiting the now-depleted source of the town’s prosperity, the cult believes their actions are improving the community, ridding the place of undesirable juvenile elements. That Mae might be next on their list clearly positions her as a Gothic victim. Simultaneously, as a young adult, Mae is not that innocent. A college dropout and borderline delinquent, Mae reflects the duality of the child victim/ threat played out across so much Gothic popular fiction. Upon arrival in town, players learn that Mae is bad news. Local children have been instructed not to associate with her. Mae’s unexplained decision to quit college seems somehow connected with her troubled past, involving the hospitalisation of another child. The miscreant protagonist’s signature manner of traversing the town involves walking along telegraph wires, allowing clandestine investigation of rooftops, open windows and abandoned buildings. Routinely Mae indulges in petty theft, vandalism and trespassing. At one notable point, the sensitive Angus expresses concern that Mae is leading his boyfriend astray. Her behaviour is frequently destructive and selfish. Sue Walsh discusses the child as the ultimate uncanny: ‘the most intimately known to itself, and yet the most foreign’ (2007, 190). Something alienating resides in Mae’s design and movement. Her eyes are slightly too wide and staring, her look a touch deranged, her expression insolent and accusatory. Her ear twitches sporadically, neurotically, with hidden mental turmoil. The decisions she makes, the things she says, the sentences she offers players to choose from, are often not the best. Mae’s design as a black cat is not incidental, carrying associations of superstition and witchcraft. Drawing on fairy lore history, Killeen identifies overlaps between the child, the goblin and the primitive pre-human species of Victorian Gothic imagination (2009, 72). Connections between the child and the animal resonate with Night in the Woods’ anthropomorphised protagonist. Suggestions of childhood’s otherworldly qualities also find expression in the affinity Mae enjoys with the arcane creature in her dreams, the giant nonanthropomorphic cat with Lovecraftian god-like status, obliquely aligned with the cult’s mythical figure of worship. Considering the position of children throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, Armitt notes how ‘childhood advances towards a phase of increasing freedom and social protection’. Only, as the millennium approaches, in the wake of numerous concerns both real and imaginary, children find themselves forced into an existence of ‘fear and a stifling lack of freedom to roam’ (2011, 17). While Armitt’s reference points are largely British in context, in evoking such Gothic paranoia, Night in the Woods reproduces the anxiety and claustrophobia experienced by young people on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite Mae’s mobility, as a very outdoors Gothic heroine, the protagonist remains stuck within the few side-scrolling screens which constitute her hometown, conspicuously unable to move beyond its boundaries. As has been persistently demonstrated, the inescapability of fate and the inevitability of historical forces are effectively ludified in Gothic titles. Despite offering illusions of

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choice, freedom and interactivity, players’ actions are frequently channelled down particular paths towards unavoidable conclusions. Such qualities have been documented, in Haunting Ground where figures appear caught in cycles of pursuit and escape, in BioShock where the set route the hero follows is informed by unconscious brainwashing, in Gone Home where players’ seemingly unstructured investigation of the Greenbriar home is nudged towards particular narrative interpretations, and in Edith Finch where participating in each family member’s inevitable demise remains the only option. Literary scholars postulate that interactive Gothic adaptations potentially allow players to save the otherwise doomed characters of classic novels, for example, as Cutting suggests, preventing Miles from dying at the end of Turn of the Screw (2011, 160) as players elect to save Little Sisters. Yet such options are only available to players if built into a game’s affordances by designers. And games designers intent on producing Gothic experiences will refuse players such optimistic options. Gothic games are remarkably prescriptive in the opportunities provided for players, condemning them to cyclical gameplay, presenting lack of agency as the final plot twist, frustrating queer potential with linear experiences, determining players follow the footsteps of protagonists reliving past trauma. Like that of poor Miles, the fate of Gothic videogame characters is often sealed from the start. Accordingly, Mae does not leave Possum Springs. Neither does she succeed in rescuing or even locating the remains of her friend Casey. Players are offered a multitude of diverting pursuits throughout their days, but many have relatively little impact on the game’s progression. Branching plotlines always tend to converge into single outcomes. At the forest party where Mae makes a drunken fool of herself, players can do nothing to stop the protagonist’s increasing inebriation, or select dialogue which won’t humiliate her in front of her high school boyfriend. Like the reader of a novel or viewer of a film, they can only watch as Mae becomes progressively incoherent. The social critique of Punter’s Gothic ‘literature of alienation’ is intrinsically associated with various Marxist perspectives on capitalism. This includes individuals’ alienation from labour, from nature, from human-ness, and from themselves (1996b, 197). Night in the Woods’ troubled protagonist is eminently alienated, excluded from the self-determinism which capitalist modernity, youth culture and sandbox videogames promise citizens, consumers and players. Mae’s handler may themselves feel alienated from the protagonist they are tasked with directing, over whom they might have clearer insight than the frequently self-centred twenty-something. An evening at Bea’s proves painfully illustrative of overlaps between the lack of options available to Possum Springs’ residents, and the player’s ludic circumstance. Bea argues she has no alternative but to continue working, every day, to support her family. Players can select from two lines of dialogue for Mae to retort: ‘You always have a choice’ or ‘You can always choose’. The limited responses presented to the player not only ludifies the Gothic, but also the helplessness experienced by many living in twenty-first-century America.

Night in the Woods 119 Corresponding with the game’s banal interpretation of the apocalypse, Night in the Woods ends, not with a bang, but in a more subdued, unclear and uncertain conclusion. The game’s finale concords with Dryden’s observations regarding the ambivalence of Gothic closure. As the Gothic novel ends, indicative of the anxieties, intangibilities and hauntings of modernity, there remains ‘always something left undisclosed, or a sense that not all has been revealed, or is indeed capable of being revealed’ (2003, 20). Considering the nature of videogame textuality, and intertextuality, Jones points to the excessive, inconclusive qualities of videogame experiences as ‘hybrid, extra-linguistic, open-ended’ (2008, 6–7). Videogames have the potential to expand upon the Gothic lack of definitive closure. Branching story structures mean the one path taken precludes exploration of others ignored, overlooked or rejected. Trophies are awarded for completing particular tasks, and their absence on the game menu check list illustrates achievements yet to be achieved, encouraging repeated plays. In any playthrough of Night in the Woods, aspects of the town remain unexplored, characters and scenes not encountered, and relationships underdeveloped. It is possible, on first play, to miss out on the trip to Bea’s home, or building a dangerous robot with Gregg or meeting Sadie the saxophone player. This sense of incompleteness complements the pervasive impression, upon finishing the game, that so much remains unfinished and unsaid. The cult of Possum Springs has been defeated, left trapped in the collapsing mine. But the full extent of their activities remains obscure as do their ultimate fate, and indeed, their true identities. The reason Mae attacked a child in high school, and dropped out of college, it transpires, was due to an undiagnosed psychological condition producing a violent dislocation from the world around her. Although Mae begins discussing this with friends as the game nears its end, no clear or decisive plan of action is reached. The true nature of the creature in the mine shaft, apparently able to commune telepathically with Mae throughout the game’s final act, is left unexplained. The possibility remains that Mae’s altered psychological state genuinely brought her closer to the mystical creature. But equally, the impression remains that this sense of communion was a result of the character’s delirium and declining mental health. In keeping with Gothic tradition, whether the natural or the supernatural prevails is left unclear. Ultimately no magical solutions exist to resurrect Possum Springs’ diminishing prospects. Mae’s parents’ house remains under threat from the mortgage company. A newly opened Taco Buck has replaced Pastabilities, with implications Mae might apply for a job there. As a sign of renewal and optimism, this seems a highly limited option for the young protagonist. One cheap restaurant is replaced by another. Potential employment only exchanges aimless wandering for a job that seems similarly directionless. Three workers stand outside the telemarketing company. Attentive players will have witnessed their friendship progressively growing across the days. Finally, they decide to go for a night out together. In a bittersweet exchange, the phone operators realise such a social event is impossible. The irregular hours of their employment, the very thing which brought them together, means none of their evenings off work coincide. Nevertheless,

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despite its horrors, both economic, social and cult-orientated, Night in the Woods ends on a hopeful note. In the context of early industrialisation, Punter observes one function of Gothic fiction was to provide psychological reassurance for those whose world was transforming at such a frantic pace (1989, 11). Mae is another Gothic survivor in the face of persecution, a feature MacArthur identifies in both Gothic and detective fiction (2015, 10), and on the last morning she agrees to discuss with her parents the reasons she left college. In many ways, Night in the Woods narrates not so much the end of the world as the end of capitalism, a prospect which, for some, somehow seems even harder to imagine. The game presents some potentially constructive responses to this economic crisis. One material solution is worker organisation. In exchange for Mae’s openness, her father promises to talk more about the despondency he feels concerning his unfulfilling work circumstances. In response, Mae passes him the totemic tooth, symbolic of his own father’s role in the worker movement, suggesting the prospect of unionisation at his poorly paid supermarket job. In the game’s closing scene, Bea reveals she is taking online courses and belongs to the Young Socialists, a moment which further politicises the game’s depiction of class inequality. Considering high, late and post-Gothic periods, Killeen situates the literary preoccupation with occult happenings within a certain nineteenth-century ‘crisis of faith’. The result was a widespread challenge to the ability of orthodox Christianity to explain the universe (2009, 124). This led to what Killeen describes as ‘often bafflingly complex Gothic-occult “disciplines”’ which appeared to bridge science and religion, including phrenology, spiritualism, mesmerism, ghost-hunting, electro-biology and alchemy (ibid., 126– 7). Night in the Woods chronicles similar processes. Everywhere, the town is reverting to pre-modern, pre-capitalist understandings of the universe. Possum Springs’ shadowy society expresses an extreme occult response to the breakdown of faith, not so much in religious, but economic and political certainties. Botting identifies a brand of apocalyptic Gothic fiction which anticipates ‘the imminent arrival of a “new dark age” among the jagged ruins of industrial civilisation, sandwiching enlightened modernity between two different slices of gloomy, barbaric feudalism’ (2001, 1). If they had their way, the murderous cult would likely lead Possum Springs in such a direction. But while the secret organisation’s activities present a comparatively sinister articulation of folk beliefs, the majority are benign and restorative, a familiarly playful Gothic fusion of the arcane and the contemporary. Bea talks of dreaming, as a child, that God lived in the high glass ceiling of the local shopping mall. In the woods Greg creates a forest god for shooting practice, a chimera of metal and plastic targets. Feeding stolen pretzels to a family of rats living inside a pagan-like mascot allows Mae to unlock the trophy ‘Mother of Vermin’ and unleash an infestation across the town. The rejection of Enlightenment across Possum Springs can be mapped onto the environment’s various strata. Underground, Mr Salvi searches for trash in the flooded trolley car tunnels, discovering hidden, forgotten, subterranean realms of bats, buried treasures and forgotten murals, the sight of which causes Mae to lapse into awe-struck reverie. One of

Night in the Woods 121 the largest, brightest, least dilapidated spaces is the local non-denominational church. Here Mae’s mother works as an administrator, her daughter dreams of her dead grandfather, and a benign pastor cares for a local man sleeping rough. And high above the town’s rooftops stands Mr Chazakov, searching the skies for constellations, explaining their meaning, the mythological characters they depict and events they commemorate, using information gleaned from his mobile phone. There is no reception in Possum Springs, the old man assures us, but there is wifi. The amateur astrologist expresses the same twin preoccupation with stars and folktales informing Procházka’s Wild West ghost town stories (2014, 30). Their presence in twenty-firstcentury Possum Springs suggests an investment in such understandings have come full circle. Capitalist modernity has failed, and in the wake of its deterioration the small community is reverting to hybrid belief systems. A Gothic combination of ancient understandings, folklore, horror stories of industrial disasters, nostalgic childhood mythology and mascots, plastic bag ghosts, video store boogie men, retro dungeon crawlers and internet astrology. Gothic iconography functions to give meaning to the small town’s inhabitants’ own twilight existence, providing a strategy for keeping alive its fading past, and helping to reconcile its residents to an uncertain future.

Conclusion

Writing a book-length study is a consuming experience. The process entails a protracted period of intellectual immersion in a specific critical discourse, and the application of that framework to a chosen object of study. The consequent monomania this necessitates sometimes means everything the scholar encounters appears imbued with the qualities informing their current project. At times, the very act of writing this manuscript felt like a Gothic undertaking in itself. Preparation meant substantial and protracted research, the frenzied pursuit of so many dubious Gothic figures of literature. This meant poring over electronic archives, book indexes and periodical back catalogues, searching for elusive points of connection between Gothic novels and the digital titles whose content seemed indirectly inspired by such influential works of early fiction. Many literary scholars encountered through this investigation expressed their thoughts in an unfamiliar style, considerably more elaborate than the straightforward communication usually employed by contemporary media and cultural academics. Applying studies written in the 1970s, exploring books produced in the eighteenth century, to videogames made in the 2010s and 2020s, resembled the same incongruous combination of the arcane and the contemporary that is a foundational quality of the Gothic novel itself. Research was often a tortuous process, hunting for shadows, echoes, and uncanny doubles, between literary titles and their ludic equivalents. On many occasions it seemed as though the connections being uncovered were figments of an over-worked intellectual imagination. The work required in pulling this book together, a substantial portion of which was carried out in a small bedroom during the months of lockdown, was an often chaotic affair. Photocopied articles and book chapters marked with biro, coloured Post-it notes scrawled with hieroglyphic annotations, journalist notepads detailing obsessive accounts of gaming experiences, piled up in a confusion of scholarship and game manuals. Throughout this period, I found myself excluded from that most central of Gothic locations: the library. Uncovering some literary nugget of insight, corresponding to a facet of game culture, however oblique, was often a thrilling encounter. Other times, the task of bringing together two quite separate fields of culture and knowledge seemed utterly overwhelming. On such nights, moonlit walks provided a much-needed escape from the possibility of being buried alive in paperwork. Asserting coherence over such a furious collection of DOI: 10.4324/9781003026501-7

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material involved stitching together arguments and observations, suturing one point after another, grafting exhumed literary scholarship onto fresh game studies. As it progressed towards conclusion, the project assumed certain haunted qualities. There was a doubling of documents, as folders became filled with multiple versions of the same chapter. Sentences from one section began to materialise in others, necessitating digital exorcism or amputation. One file, used to store unused content from the penultimate case study, was labelled ‘What Remains of What Remains of Edith Finch’, a title which quickly became more confusing than funny. Finally, these fragments of articles and chapters, ruminations, walkthrough notes, arguments and observations were organised and distilled into the publication before you. Much lies on the laboratory floor. Many darlings were murdered before this project was eventually abandoned to the good people at Routledge. Further to the games conspicuously played in aiding this study, others more casually encountered throughout the period seemed equally imbued with Gothic resonance. This may be symptomatic of the psychological projection described above, or this particular player’s consistently macabre taste in gameplay. But such observations support the central thesis, that there exists a comfortable fit between the Gothic and the videogame. Black Mirror (2017), like Haunting Ground, seemed explicitly inspired by traditional Gothic literature. A young man returns to his ancestral home and begins investigating his father’s suspicious death. Along the way he encounters family portraits and photographs weirdly reflecting his own appearance, an old woman imprisoned in an attic, ghostly replays of incidents from the past, and suggestions of insanity running in the family. Much gameplay, in survival horror style, entailed solving elaborate puzzles while exploring a decaying Scottish house, whose library includes the work of Walpole and Poe. A distinctly different title, the comedic Psychonauts (2005), has players stepping inside the mindscapes of various colourful characters to cure their neurosis through a combination of action and puzzle solution. A late horror-themed level took place in a derelict asylum, strewn with rusted wheelchairs, beds and mattresses, all angular corridors, deformed architecture and rooms which descend into darkness. Exploding rats proved a particularly pernicious adversary. The final stage enacted an Oedipal battle with a monstrous imaginary version of the protagonist’s father. Despite the cartoon aesthetics, Psychonauts manifestly depicted varying mental states and subjectivities, most notably involving an ability which allowed players to observe events from another’s psychological perspective. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), something of a classic Gothic game, included such familiar aspects as tension between darkness and light, an insanity effect, running away and hiding, investigation of ruinous and gloomy medieval spaces, and graphic accounts of torture and cruelty. Illustrating the broader significance of Gothic-themed design, the platform game A Hat in Time (2017) featured a spooky forest level, complete with rotting mansion haunted by a regal ghost. Oxenfree (2016) was more narrative-based, telling a tale of teenagers exploring an abandoned military base aided by a radio allowing communication with ghosts. Other outdated technology included public address speakers, reel-to-reel magnetic tapes, and aesthetics

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of static and distortion accompanying spectral occurrences. The game featured objects and music strangely referencing characters’ childhoods, repetitive looping sequences where the protagonist became trapped in time, and moments of architectural uncanniness. The Christmas game of 2019 was Tetris Effect (2018), a virtual reality version of the classic puzzle game which successfully evoked a profound sense of the digital sublime. Another recent title evidencing Gothic tropes’ significance to mainstream games was Control (2019), a big budget action adventure set in The Oldest House. No crumbling castle or dilapidated monastery, this modern building’s brutalist grey architecture nevertheless conveyed a sense of grandeur, authority and decay. This was home to an FBI-style, X Files, Federal Bureau of Control. In common with many Gothic game spaces, much of this bureaucratic stronghold lay in a state of ruins. By the protagonist’s arrival its architecture had become infected by ‘The Hiss’, an ambiguous entity which possessed agency personnel, turning them into zombies and flying demons. Banal office spaces were transformed into cave-like environments, incongruous desks and filing cabinets protruding from crags of mould and fungus. Much gameplay concerned the investigation and containment of occulted artefacts, combining the surreally mundane with the monstrous. These included a rubber duck which drives its victims insane, a fridge that inflicts pain on anyone who looks away from its battered exterior, a swan pedalo, a Christmas tree, a pink flamingo. Arcane media included a Bakelite telephone, a black-and-white television set, a jukebox and a slide projector. One level had the protagonist wearing a ‘Pony’ Walkman as protective headgear. The game has its sublime moments too. On entering a quarry, a landfill dump, a model of the heroine’s home town, the protagonist seemed impressed by the scale of what The Oldest House holds, much like the implied player. The ability to levitate was a particularly dizzying experience. The ‘Ashtray Motel’ boasted morphing corridors that always lead the player back to the start, in an architectural expression of Freud’s uncanny. An unsettling Easter Egg, a mock children’s TV show called The Threshold Kids, contained unnerving puppets and sinister storylines, recalling creepypasta tales of forgotten childhood television programmes. Another uncanny effect was presented by the game’s false ending. Following the completion of a particularly trying mission, credits rolled before gradually disintegrating across the screen, whereupon the heroine found herself trapped in an altered version of the gamespace, downgraded to an intern, forced to undertake repetitive administrative tasks until escape presents itself. A more contemporary uncanny resonance emerged from characters’ frequent reference to lockdown, and posters advising FBC employees to wash their hands to prevent the spread of mould. As this study illustrates, the Gothic constitutes a particularly rich and varied mode, subject since its inception to numerous transformations, adaptations and appropriations. Videogames are also an extremely diverse brand of popular culture, and Gothic elements have infiltrated the medium throughout its history. Survival horror game Haunting Ground draws upon early examples of Gothic Romance, playing on scenarios of persecuted maidens trapped in

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labyrinthine castles, pursued by dastardly villains. First-person shooter BioShock engages with later Gothic concerns regarding the transformative impacts of modern and industrial forces on definitions of humanity. Walking simulator Gone Home playfully mobilises the ghost story format, whereby an ambiguous haunting entity brings to light some past crime or act of social injustice. What Remains of Edith Finch is organised around a family curse narrative, depicted with a degree of ambivalence expressing tensions between the supernatural and the explained. Exploration game Night in the Woods is an American Gothic story. Situating these titles within certain sub-categories of Gothic literature affords insight into their features and functions, as they perpetuate a cultural form permeating centuries of novels, films, television and visual art. Such perspectives explain Riccardo’s monastic design and Leonardo’s unsettling transformation, the ruinous state of Rapture and the vampire children creeping its corridors, the spectral quality of Sam’s story as narrated by a disembodied young woman, the indeterminate qualities of the interactive comic book illustrating Barbara Finch’s death, and the story of Jenny’s Field. Fiona’s equation with dolls and marionettes, the status of carnival in Rapture, references to dodgy electrical wiring in the Greenbriar household, the presence of books throughout the Finch mansion, and the spaces Mae and her friends investigate on their ghost hunt, echo tropes and traditions within Gothic fiction, across various historical periods and national cultures. Several recurring themes characterise these exemplary Gothic videogames. As laboured throughout this study, each title imposes a heavy degree of control, at odds with both the self-determination of Enlightenment philosophy and the promise of videogame interactivity and narrative freedom inherent in choosing your own adventure. The survival horror game commonly imposes a tight linear progression on players, and Haunting Ground follows this framework with sequential tasks, puzzles and orchestrated boss battles. The player of the first-person shooter may assume centre-stage within the genre’s optical universe. But, as numerous commentators observe, BioShock’s defining moments are predicated on exposing the illusion of self-directed gameplay. Despite the Greenbriar residence’s seemingly random organisation, objects scattered throughout the house tell a clear and determined story, one fixed, unchangeable, and spatially arranged according to principles of narrative structure and chrononormativity. Players cannot save the lives of any Finch family members. No matter which actions are performed when controlling these characters, they cannot stop Walter from being hit by a train, or keep Gregory from drowning in the bathtub. And although Mae, like the other residents of her hometown, might be free to choose her own branching dialogue pathways, the interchangeable options available render the results inevitable. Other similarities emerge. All titles featured characters returning home, in some form or another. Fiona finds herself in the ancestral Castle Belli, and Jack in Rapture, the place of his conception. Katie arrives at the new Greenbriar residence, Edith at the Finch estate, and Mae returns to Possum Springs. Consequently, themes of family relations recur across these games. Fiona is pursued by various lascivious

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paternal figures. Jack’s odyssey involves discovering the identity of his industrialist father and chorus girl mother. Katie investigates the secret lives of her parents, including her father’s hidden pornography, and her mother’s workplace crush. Edith, who shares her great-grandmother’s name and interest in genealogy, is effectively chronicling the unfortunate history of the Finches for future generations. Much of Mae’s time can be spent chatting to her parents. The ghost of her grandfather is a recurring presence throughout Night in the Woods. At the same time, certain aspects of Gothic literature appear less present in gaming culture, and the case studies throughout this book. The issue of inheritance is an occasional feature, but certainly not ludified in the manner of other Gothic tropes. Similarly, narratives of marital Gothic, in which the heroine comes to suspect her husband’s villainous intentions, a component of Chess’ (2015) Ravenhearst series, are absent from these titles. Haunting Ground approaches the territory of such domestic Gothic traditions, reproducing many of its components, but the game does so selectively, and largely in the service of survival horror’s hide-and-seek dynamic. BioShock self-consciously references Frankenstein, facilitating what Parker (2017) describes as the title’s bid for prestige status, while engaging with the novel’s philosophical themes in a manner which might seem superficial and self-serving. More compelling is Gone Home’s evocation of the ghost story and the confusion of haunting and haunted enacted through the invisible first-person protagonist, Edith Finch’s impossible vignettes’ resemblance to Gothic narration and narrators, and the parallels Night in the Woods draws between the lack of options available to the player and the contracting choices open to Possum Springs’ townsfolk. Another omission from this book, and the translation of Gothic themes in its case studies, concerns the issue of race. This appears particularly conspicuous for its absence in chapters exploring American Gothic. Ringel, in the first contribution to Weinstock’s collection on the subject, identifies two ‘America’s Gothic secrets’, namely the obliteration of native cultures by European settlers, and African slavery (2017, 15). The author is not alone in emphasising the significance of genocide, enslavement and segregation to the country’s Gothic history, culture, literary canon and academic criticism. Krzywinska makes reference to indigenous people, sacred ground, and the desecration enacted by white settlers in one American Gothic game (2014, 514), evidencing such themes are not beyond the remit of the ludic-Gothic. The Suffering (2004), an action horror game depicting America’s legacy of incarceration and execution, includes a level set in a ruined slave ship. Graphic details of the inhuman conditions endured by those transported, and the cruelty of their captors, are depicted and integrated into the gameplay. No such histories are addressed in the games explored in this book, and so this publication has admittedly failed to engage with this important feature of American Gothic criticism. That so many Gothic elements discussed in this volume are a common and persistent quality of mainstream game history suggests an inherent Gothic dimension to the videogame medium. Games have always featured mazes, castles, ghosts, dungeons, and other aspects of the literature of terror. They have

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also entailed Gothic sensations, such as the collapse between protagonists and player, experiences of fear and tension, encounters with monstrosity and the grotesque, providing audiences with different bodies to inhabit and psychological states to experience. Games are full of death, repetition, transformation, conflations between magic, science and technology. Ludic devices such as the labyrinth, the ruin, the locked room, the secret passageway, the hidden document, have a persistent presence across contemporary gaming. Videogames present elaborate spaces for protracted exploration, three-dimensional encounters with sublime majesty and terror, dark and shadowy interiors filled with baroque traps, obscure artefacts and unsettling adversaries. Through their environmental storytelling, games exhibit Gothic techniques whereby rooms, spaces, cities become embedded with history and the characters of those living within their architecture. In sharing preoccupations with investigation, interpretation and detection, collating manuscript fragments explaining past events and present predicaments, uncovering solutions to tortuous riddles and puzzles, videogame protagonists and players resemble the heroines, heroes and readers of the Gothic novel. The automata-like avatar, the grossly violent figure of militaristic shooters, the spectral first-person body, the shifting ludic subject, the recalcitrant game character, all elicit different forms of Gothic identification and interpellation. Videogame pleasures, including the sadomasochistic thrill of persecution and persecuting, the carnival excitement of recreational destruction, the satisfaction of piecing together solutions to mysteries, the defamiliarising frisson of inhabiting different bodies, or the idle joy of wandering in the hope of discovering a diverting tale, all enjoy their roots in Gothic literature. Identifying such parallels may merely evidence this pervasive genre’s enduring popularity, and the Gothic qualities inherent to all media: the embalming photograph, the ghostly moving image, the disembodied audio recording, alongside the digital uncanny. Gothic shadows haunt all methods of recording, fixing, reproducing and representing versions of the world. Videogames constitute a more recent medium to continue this Gothic tradition, capitalising upon its own qualities and affordances, as well as its limitations, in generating ambiguous entertaining experiences of intrigue, terror, uncertainty, awe and wonder.

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Index

Aarseth, Espen 9, 11, 33–4 abjection 16, 30, 61, 64–5 Alexander, Bryan 113 Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) 38, 123 Ante-Contreras, Daniel 52, 55, 64–5 apocalypse 7, 115–16, 120–1 architecture 13–14, 19, 20, 21, 29–30, 47, 50, 51, 67–8, 69, 72, 77–8, 98–100 Armitt, Lucie, 92, 94, 117 avatars 23, 24, 33–5, 38–9, 44–5 Atkins, Barry, 23 Baktin, Mikhail 51–2, 60 Baldick, Chris 3, 7, 100, 113 Barthes, Roland 75, 95 Baudrillard, Jean, 20, 21, 63 Bazin, Andre, 95–6 BioShock 9–10, 46–65 Black Mirror (2003) 123 Bloom, Clive 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 57, 75, 87, 100 Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin 11–12 books 29–30, 70, 93–4, 108, 122 Booth, Paul 14 Boss, Peter 49 Botting, Fred 6–7, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 13, 16–17, 20, 21, 22, 28, 30–1, 50, 59, 120 Boulter, Jonathan 24, 44, 63, 101 boundaries, blurring of 10, 22–3, 24–5, 47, 55, 59, 62–3, 64, 68 Bozdog, Mona and Dayna Galloway 93, 99 Brabon, Benjamin A. and Stephanie Genz 36 Brantlinger, Patrick Brown, Patrick 48, 58, 64 Bruhm, Steven 18, 107

Carpenter, Lynette 106–7 Carr, Diane, 24, 33, 34, 41–2, 45 Carroll, Noël 23, 30, 89–90, 106 Castle, Terry 27, 39, 98 The Castle of Otranto 5, 15, 40 Cavallaro, Dani 19, 39, 51, 59–60, 61, 76–7, 93 Chess, Shira 26–7, 41, 81 children 58–9, 60–1, 87, 89–90, 116–17 Chion, Michel 74, 80, 92 Christmas duck 68, 74, 82 Clery, E. J. 5, 28 Control (2019) 124 Cook, James 55 Cooke, Arthur L. 19 Cornwell, Neil 3, 6, 30, 51 Cowie, Elizabeth 42–3 Crawford, Garry and Jason Rutter 21 Crow, Charles L. 7, 28, 97, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115 Curtis, Barry 13, 19, 66, 67–8, 75, 76, 77, 92, 98, 100 Cutting, Andrew 13, 118 cyborgs 5, 30–1, 33, 43–4, 45, 59, 62–4 Day, William Patrick, 18, 21, 23, 40, 50, 70, 87, 88 death 18, 87–8, 91–2, 95–6, 100–1 detective 13, 18–9, 82–3, 97, 106–7 Dovey, Jon and Hellen Kennedy 24, 63 Dryden, Linda 28, 59, 64, 119 Edmundson, Mark 7, 13, 42 Ellis, Kate Ferguson 29, 97 Ellis, Markman 6, 39, 69 environmental storytelling 20, 105, 110 families 17, 69, 70, 75–6, 78–9, 88, 100–1 Fiedler, Leslie A. 54–5, 56, 56–7, 57, 109

138

Index

Frankenstein 4, 7, 33, 48, 50, 51, 54–5, 55, 57, 62–3, 122–3 Frasca, Gonzalo 22, 40 game genres 48–9, 77–8, 77–8 gaze 35, 37–8, 40–1, 43–4, 44 gender 28–9, 32–39, 57–9, 64–5, 72–4, 97–8 ghosts 55–6, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72–5, 76–7, 83, 86, 93, 107, 109, 110, 123 Gone Home 66–83 Gothic: American 7, 16, 84, 85–6, 89–90, 97, 103–4, 108, 109–15, 126; cinema 10, 11, 12, 20–1, 40, 73–4, 76, 93–4; contemporary literature 5; definition of 2–4, 5–7, 19–20; early literature 4–5, 11, 27–8; graphic novels 10, 11, 12, 94; queer 7, 80; Rust Belt 113–15; sub-genres 6–7, 10–11, 36; theatre, 11, 12, 109 Halberstam, J. 18–19, 46, 47, 49, 50, 53, 60, 65 Hand, Richard, 39 Hanson, Helen 10, 12, 73–4, 75, 76, 92, 97 Haraway, Donna J. 62–3 A Hat in Time (2017) 123 Haunting Ground 27–45 Heiland, Donna 54, 97 Henthorn, Jamie 48–9, 58, 61 Hoeveler, Diane Long 20, 34, 42, 51, 60, 97 Hoffman, E. T. A. 6 Hogle, Jerrold E. 6, 10, 20–1, 21–2, 31, 71, 94, 109 Hollinger, Veronica 59, 62 Howard, Jacqueline 6, 7, 54, 55, 86 Howells, Coral Ann 35, 41, 100 Hurley, Kelly 55, 62, 64 Jameson, Fredrick 21 Jenkins, Henry 9, 20, 105 Jet Set Willy (1984) 1–2 Jones, Steven E. 9, 11, 24, 119 Kaye, Heidi 10, 11, 12 Kilgour, Maggie 6, 24, 29, 72, 97, 105, 110 Killeen, Jarlath 116, 117, 120 King, Geoff and Tanya Krzywinska 8, 9, 12, 18, 23, 39, 81–2, 89, 111, 126 King, Stephen 5, 71 Kirkland, Ewan 14, 16, 21, 41, 52, 91, 92, 112

Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greg De Peuter 21 Krzywinska, Tanya 14, 16, 17–18, 41, 43, 81, 87, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108 live burial 26, 100, 122 Lovecraft, H. P. 11, 14, 16, 38–9, 40, 106 Lloyd Smith, Allan 51, 60, 86, 110, 113 Luckhurst, Roger 7 MacArthur, Sian 19, 28, 48, 120 Madoff, Mark S. 19 Marx, Karl 60, 118 Massé, Michelle A. 32, 42, 43, 44 mazes 14, 36, 67–8, 99 McCrea, Christian, 91–2, 95, 96 Mejeur, Cody 51 melancholy 68–9, 90–1, 97, 100–1, 105–6 Mighall, Robert 7, 69, 88, 91, 100 Miles, Robert 8, 15, 23, 24, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 86, 87, 89, 97, 98, 116 Milibank, Alison 7, 105 modernity 4, 9, 18, 46–7, 51, 53–4, 56–7, 59–60, 64–5, 84, 99, 112, 114–15, 124 Modleski, Tanya 26, 41 Moers, Ellen 5, 19, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 78 monsters 46, 47–8, 49, 51–2, 55, 59–60, 61–2, 64–5 Moss, William 99, 113 Murphy, Bernice M. 7, 16 The Mysteries of Udolpho 5, 27–8, 105, 118 Newman, James 9, 34–5, 44 Niedenthal, Simon 106 Night in the Woods 103–121 Oxenfree (2016) 123–4 Palmer, Pauline 80 Parker, Felan 126 Pavlounis, Dimitrios 68, 69, 81 Pedlingham, Graeme 2, 114, 116 Perron, Bernard 14, 15, 16, 17, 39, 40, 41 photography 15–16, 56–7, 56, 92, 94–6 portraits 15–16, 75, 76, 90–1, 92, 95–6, 100 Procházka, Martin 113, 121 Punter, David 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 22, 23, 29, 41, 53, 59, 87, 89, 92, 96, 99, 100, 105, 109, 110, 118, 120 Punter, David and Elisabeth Bronfen 8, 17, 90

Index Punter, David and Glennis Byron 3, 6, 11, 29, 41, 63, 86, 88, 99 puzzles 29–30, 35, 53, 56, 65, 68, 92–3, 104–5 Psychonauts (2005) 123 queerness 67, 80–3 Radcliffe, Ann 5, 8, 11, 27–8, 39, 56, 58 Ravenhearst 26 Redding, Arthur 111, 115 religion 31, 56, 116–17, 120–1 repetition 18, 27, 41, 43 Riddle, Eric R. 16, 39–40, 114 Ringel, Faye 114, 126 Rose, Jason 39, 58 Round, Julia 10, 11, 12 Rouse III, Richard 15, 22 Royle, Nicholas 18, 24, 98, 102 sadomasochism 26, 41–5 Saglia, Diego 12, 109 Santos, Marc. C. and Sarah. E. White 82, 101–2 Savoy, Eric 84, 85–6, 89, 90, 92, 97, 100, 108, 109–10 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 26, 28–9, 39, 42, 80 Seed, David 116 sexuality 80–3 Silent Hill 13, 14, 16–17 Sivils, Matthew Wynn, 7, 110–11 Sloan, Robin 68 Smethurst, Tobi 17 Smith, Andrew 5, 60, 71, 73, 75 Snyder, Shane 68, 80–1 Soderman, Braxton 33–4 Sontag, Susan 94–5, 95, 96, 115 Spooner, Catherine 10 Stobbart, Dawn 14, 23, 38–9, 40, 42, 44, 49, 56 sublime 22, 24, 39, 41, 49–50, 106, 124 The Suffering (2004) 126

139

survival horror 39–40, 43, 48–9 Svilpis, J. E. 57 Sweet, Rosemary 56–7 Taylor, Laurie N. 15–16, 91, 97, 107 Taylor, Nicholas and Gerald Voorhees 33 Tetris Effect (2019) 124 time 30, 51, 68 Tinwell, Angela 22, 31, 74 Tomb Raider 23, 33–4, 41–2 Townsend, Dale and Angela Wright 8 uncanny 18, 22, 24, 30–1, 45, 61, 62, 64, 70, 74, 89, 92, 98–9, 101–2, 106, 114, 122, 123–4, 124 Van Elferen, Isabella 10, 13, 15, 24, 39 Veale, Kevin 68, 69 Vidler, Anthony 98, 99, 101, 114 videogames 96, 71, 108 walking simulators 77–8 Wallace, Diana 72–3, 78 Walpole, Horace 5, 6, 11, 15, 40, 123 Walsh, Sue 117 Warner, Marina 61 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew 72, 126 Weise, Matthew 40 Wells, Paul, 22–3 What Remains of Edith Finch 84–102 Whitehead, Dan 2 Whittaker, Jason 13 Williams, Linda 41, 43–4 Wisker, Gina 5, 7, 26, 28, 29 woods 110–12 Wright, Angela 28, 90–1 Wuthering Heights 5 Wynn Sivils, Matthew 7 Youngblood, Jordan R. 52 Zaidan, Sarah 51, 53