ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a genre that has received a lot of attention from videogame scholars: ‘survival horror’. But where past accounts of horror games have invoked film theory and Freudian psychoanalysis to account for their unsettling qualities, a different approach is proposed here. Tracking the course of the genre from 2001’s Silent Hill 2 through the Siren/Forbidden Siren series to 2014’s Alien: Isolation, the chapter argues that a key aspect of survival horror games is the way that they draw players into close relationships with networks of artificially intelligent non-player characters, using gothic tropes to mediate anxieties about our place in a culture of cybernetic circuits and autonomous machines. Building on Chapter 2’s discussion of the survival horror game Shattered Memories, the chapter argues that the scary thing about horror games is not that they expose us to the nightmares that dwell in the recesses of our own minds, but the way that they manipulate us and lay bare our more machine-like tendencies.
