Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate

The “Active v Passive” Fallacy

With respect to these understandings of “fear” and “horror” in both cinema and video games, as one side of the “passive vs. active” argument goes, ludic activity/agency creates greater identification with diegetic characters (avatars) through a physiological connection to them via the game controller, and therefore, heightens the player’s experience of horror. This reduction emerges, perhaps from the ludic anxiety defined by Anderson, in the discourses of video games more broadly. Anderson states that the discursive “focus on video games’ unique characteristics leads to generalizations about the technology’s ability to make meaning,” and that “[e]ven when engaging in a close reading of a game text, such as in Drew Davidson’s essay on the game The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the qualities of the text itself are swallowed by generalizations” (Anderson 294). Indeed, on both sides of the active-passive debate, most of the contributors to Perron’s compendium (save Perron himself, interestingly), as well as gaming theorists more broadly, largely take their position as a priori and leave it there.

For example, in Amanda Cote’s Gaming Sexism (2020), her valuable contribution regarding the hegemonic oppression of female gamers in game culture is necessary and accurate, but even Cote’s language is inflected with assumptions that understand gameplay as active and spectatorship as passive. In the context of 1970s–80s arcade game culture, Cote (2020) reports that one of her interviewees stated, “[t]here were very few girls. ... The ones that did play were good. …you just barely saw one [woman playing]. […] The rest of them were cheering their boyfriends on or they were on the side” (qtd. in Cote, 2020, p. 119). In this example, according to Cote, “[w]omen were primarily spectators to arcade culture, with only a few becoming active participants” (Cote, 2020, p. 119, italics added). Of course, this perspective is sensible. Cote’s project is to examine specifically the culture of gameplayers more than the world of spectatorial cultures that surround them. However, in Cote’s construction, the very active spectatorship of the women described by her interviewee is coded as passive in its distinction against the “active participants” in gaming. Who is to say that the social engagement of these female “spectators” was not “active” to them? As unfortunately gendered as the spectatorial culture might have been, surely it was replete with activity that was socially relevant to its own participants. Indeed, Cote later cites Janice Radway’s understanding of the uses and gratifications of such social practices. “By prioritizing women’s lived experiences, Radway explained how they managed their media environments in active ways and used romance novels, despite their culturally trivialized nature, as important tools for navigating gender roles, patriarchy, and power” (Cote, 2020, p. 12). Of course, the type of spectatorship that Cote surveys is not cinematic, but it would certainly not exclude the viewing of the gaming screen. Cote otherwise offers no significant examination of the active social or perceptual mechanics of spectatorship. Similarly, in her contributions more specifically concerned with the act of gaming itself, Katherine Isbister (2016a) argues that “[p]layers project themselves more deeply onto game avatars than protagonists in other media because avatars offer action possibilities at multiple psychological levels” (p. 12). However, throughout Isbister’s corpus of theory, both video and textual, she systemically offers only anecdotal examples in the place of theoretical evidence.

Theorists in the specific realm of horror might be even more guilty of an uncritical embrace of the passive-active fallacy on both sides of the debate. This debate is perhaps best exemplified in two essays by actual game designers. On the passive-reception side of the debate lie some indirect assertions made by Thomas Grip in his article “Game Design Deep Dive – Amnesia Sanity Meter.” Referring specifically to the act of gaming, he states that sometimes “focusing [too much] on ‘fun’ can often destroy certain [horror] aspects of a game.” Also seemingly on the passive-reception side of the argument, Grip concludes “that when you no longer have a strict and simplistic [gaming] system driving it all, the player’s imagination is free to roam, and the [horror] experience can become much more powerful” (Grip, 2014, n.p.). From the active-ludology side of the debate is Richard Rouse III’s “Match Made in Hell” (2009) in which he claims that “[w]ith the player fully immersing himself in the [game] world, fear becomes much more intense” (p. 20). In apparent support of such a position, Baran and Davis (2015) rehearse arguments from media scholars that observe the phenomenon of “interactivity” (p. 181). They explain that “players are much more involved in the on-screen activity than are television viewers. They are participants, not merely observers, in the violence” (Baran & Davis, p. 181).Rouse (2009) further argues that

Two of the most obvious of [the] emotions [generated by horror], in both games and films, are tension and fear. Games provoke these better than other media because there’s actually something at stake for the player. In any non-interactive media, the audience is seeing unfortunate events or life-threatening occurrences happen for another person, and the audience’s own tension is only possible through empathy with that character’s plight. In an immersive game, the player actually projects himself into the experience [“which Gregersen and Grodal call primitive action (P-action)” (Perron, 2009, pp. 138-9)]. The most extreme example of this is a near-miss projectile in a first-person shooter, which may actually cause someone to shift to one side in their seat while they play. With the player fully immersing himself in the world, fear becomes much more intense (p. 20).

However, while these assertions duly note the notion of “immersion,” they might not otherwise stand up to either empirical testing or theoretical scrutiny. Rarely in Perron’s compendium are such assertions accompanied by any sort of significant psychological theorization, or even significant case study, to verify their claims.

Overall, the defense of “active ludology” in the horror video game debate often summarily overlooks both the psychological mechanics of perception and the nuances of horror and “agency.” Telling in this regard is the astute transposition by Roux-Girard (2011) to “the videoludic experience of the gamer” (p. 194) of Hans Robert Jauss’s (1982) observation that “The analysis of the literary experience of the reader avoids the threatening pitfalls of psychology if it describes [merely] the reception and the influence of a work within the objectifiable system of expectations” (p. 22). Indeed, Tanya Krzywinska does not so readily absolve the discourse of such an examination of “psychology.” “Viewers constantly engage, rationally and irrationally, with the material presented onscreen; as Bruce Kawin puts it: ‘we interact with the signs in the generation of meaning and … our attention is selective.’ The horror film often plays more overtly with the viewer’s inability to affect the action, however, which is the key to some of its pleasures” (Krzywinska, 2002, p. 19, italics added). However, in the discourse surrounding video games, the ability to affect the action in a horror game is the crux upon which the active argument depends.

Indeed, all of Krzywinska’s understandings of the mechanics of “passive” and “active” media reception, like Habel and Kooyman’s outlined below, and Murray’s distinction between agency and immersion invite application of such theories as those derived by M.C. Green and T.C. Brock, especially their explanation of the phenomenon of “transportation,” “a convergent process, where all the person’s mental systems and capacities become focused on the events in the narrative” (p. 701, emphasis added). They go on to argue that “transportation may make narrative experience seem more like real experience” (p. 702). Such a perspective is almost surely derived from the theories of Christian Metz who described a similar process in which he observed a state of such mental immersion that the experience of a cinematic narrative was akin to the experience of dreaming. In his seminal The Imaginary Signifier (1984), perhaps the most salient theoretical contribution to the debate, borrowing the neo-psychoanalytic language of Jacques Lacan’s triumvirate of human subjectivity comprised of the overlapping arenas of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, Metz argues that the experience of cinematic transportation derives from the symbolic interpretation of images within the mind rather than upon the screen as such. He theorizes an inverted pathway of repression, in which repressed desires do not merely travel back from the unconscious into dreams, but also in from the symbolic images of cinema as they, in turn, activate repressed desires. All of his compelling theory relies heavily on his description of the mechanics of perception required to accomplish identificatory sympathies, which he explains depends on an almost dream-like passivity to have effect. However, while Metz adds much to the understanding of the nature of (ostensibly passive) cinema perception, his contributions to this perceptual process, or at least the type of perceptual analyses that his work implies, are conspicuously absent in the established discourse on ludic transportation.

Moreover, while “film is less able than games to build into their deep structure a concrete experience of being in control and out of control of on-screen events,” Krzywinska (2002) further argues that “[n]one of this means that the film viewer is entirely ‘passive’ in the reception of the film, however (a rhetorical trap that game-critics often fall into when discussing the differences between gaming and cinema)” (p. 19). Indeed, Habel and Kooyman (2004) are prompted to reformulate the somewhat simplistic definition of “activity” upon which these contradictory opinions depend. “[F]ilm is not simply a passive medium whereby viewers absorb images and narratives from an omnipotent auteur/narrator ... Horror film is an especially good example of the interactivity of spectatorship, and the shifting, multiple gazes that spectators inhabit” (p. 11, emphasis added). This notion of interactivity is key to the construction of the useful taxonomy of a horror of participation and a horror of transportation.

The “Horror of Participation”

Largely due to the active-passive reduction, within the category of specifically horror video games, the distinction between what we refer to as the “horror of participation” and the “horror of transportation” is poorly understood. The horror of participation is perhaps most closely related to what Habel and Kooyman (2004) seminally refer to as “agency mechanics” which they derive from Janet Murray’s famous definition of “agency” (so regularly invoked in the discourse) as “the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (Murray, 1997, p. 126). In this argument, the death of the avatar (physiologically “connected” to the player as described above) ordains that the player has more invested in their demise, especially since it was in some way the player’s choices (rather than of an otherwise autonomous character in a movie narrative) that resulted in the death. Moreover, the loss or control of agency, so fundamental to the demise of characters in horror cinema narratives, can be viscerally experienced by the player in their agential choices, increasing the “actual” experience of such characters (cf. Weise, “Procedural Adaptation”). While this may be true to a certain extent, the argument overlooks the fact that such “horror” fundamentally depends more on the inclusion of horror aesthetics than upon any loss of agency. In a Mario game, for example (which we will assume here is not a form of horror for most people), a loss of agency can be frustrating, but is not “horrific” in any generic sense. The horror of the loss of agency that the argument depends upon only manifests when the loss of agency is accompanied by the type of monstrous threat described by Noel Carroll as the sine qua non of “art-horror” or by some sort of uncanny experience generated by various types of game characters or unsettling environments.

Perhaps the most compelling argument contrary to such an assertion occurs in Pinchbeck’s (2009) astute articulation of “presence” and “flow,” which echo Rouse’s notion of shifting in one’s seat (p. 83). “Essentially, in this context, flow represents an optimum psychological state of play, where activity is seamless, highly engaging and highly rewarding. Likewise, presence suggests the player is focused upon the contents of a representational system, rather than the system itself” (Pinchbeck, 2009, p. 83). Similarly, Katherine “Isbister describes choice [similar to Murray’s conception of “agency”] and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media ... She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players' emotional experience” (Isbister[abstract], 2016b, n.p.). This emotional experience, however, is one of ludic enjoyment, not narrative transportation. Presence and flow are not equivalent to the psychological “transportation” engendered by cinematic narratives, but rather to automaticity, and function as the necessity of ludic objectives. At least “flow” might be considered akin to driving a stick shift: I can learn to change gears with near-perfect automaticity without any affective investment whatsoever in the success or failure of the actions of my transmission. If my transmission “died,” I would simply replace it. My transmission will always have “an extra life,” as anthropomorphized as I may perceive my car to be. However, if the failure of the transmission caused me real injury or death, my emotional investment would be horrific. Moreover, Juul (2013) reports how “[g]ame developers similarly talk about balancing, saying that a game should be ‘neither too easy nor too hard,’ and it is often said that such a balance will put players in the attractive psychological state of flow in which they become agreeably absorbed by a game” (p. 5). If flow is necessarily “attractive” and “agreeabl[e],” then it is fundamentally contradictory to the experience of horror.

What these arguments overlook in their application of “agency” is the implications of Murray’s counter-distinctive notion of “immersion”:

A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us. …Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience …: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, … that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus (Murray, 1997, p. 98).

This immersion, like “transportation,” is unlike “flow” in that it is the narrative in which the viewer’s mental attention is immersed rather than the automaticity of ludic mechanics. Clearly, this concept of immersion, set in contrast to agency, is closely related to Metz’s notion of passive cinematic reception upon which the related definition of “transportation” is built. As with Krzywinska’s observation that inactivity may be fundamental to one type of experience of horror, it seems that activity may be contrastive to the transportation necessary to realize it. Immersion and transportation can certainly occur in games, and may be fostered by flow, but are not necessarily caused by it.

Moreover, the very active nature of ludic engagement may work to evacuate the transportation necessary to an experience of horror. While Anderson, for example, reports that “[w]hen I played [Amnesia], I was genuinely frightened,” in his gameplay, he took an active approach that actually evacuated his fear (p. 290–1). He explains, “I acted against my [fear] instincts by walking towards the monster [in the game] in order to face my fear,” but “the closer I got to the monster, the less anxious I felt. When I attempted to examine the unknown beast, I became less fearful, and I could see the situation as it is: I was in no real danger” (p. 290–1, italics added). Lankoski (2011) makes concerted efforts to theoretically overcome this conundrum with the relationship between what he refers to as more narratively oriented “regulating goals” to more ludically oriented “subgoals” (p. 297). “This relation allows us to predict the probable affective reactions to game events ... When regulating goals are presented as the goals of a PC [player-character], the emotions of the PC and the player will be correlated” (p. 297). Lankoski concludes that “[s]hared goals are a mechanism for empathy, as goals and goal-status evaluations correlate the affects of the player with the PC” (p. 299). Notable here is Lankoski’s repetition of the verb “correlate.” Lankoski does not fully explain these correlative mechanics, nor does he specifically delineate what these “affective reactions” comprise. However, he does indicate that this correlative is not a direct transposition of the fear that the PC is experiencing in the narrative.

Another related contradictory assertion that lies within the category of the horror of participation also ignores the fact that with games there is usually an infinite number of attempts to play out a ludic scenario, manifest in the number of “lives” a player has accrued or can rejuvenate by starting the game over. As Matthew Weise (2009) explains, playing the “procedural adaptation” (p. 238) of a horror film genre will “allow players to try and try again in such familiar fictional worlds, to face their iconic dangers via the safety of computer simulation” (p. 263, italics added). Similarly, in his explanation of why we enjoy games that necessarily require failure, Juul argues that “while we dislike failing in our regular endeavors, games are an entirely different thing, a safe space in which failure is okay, neither painful nor the least unpleasant. The phrase ‘It’s just a game’ suggests that this would be the case. And we do often take what happens in a game to have a different meaning from what is outside a game” (Juul, 2013, p. 4, italics added). As to this paradox against horror, Lorentz (2014) interprets Juul’s work thusly: “Although successful gamers incorporate negative emotions into the overall experience, they are less likely to perform any suffering or pain as they are aware of being in charge of the creation of the story and its outcomes” (Lorentz, 2014, para. 3, italics added).

This last assertion is a clear indication that it is the very phenomenon of agency that supersedes, or at least diminishes, the anxiety of failure/death. In fact, Juul observes that gaming is only pleasurable when a player feels responsible for failure. However, this remains merely a gaming mechanic, not a horror experience. In Juul’s final analysis, he argues that the function of death/failure in a video game is to identify and prompt improvement against a “personal inadequacy” in ourselves (Juul, 2013, p. 7). In this context, he makes no mention of empathy for characters or avatars.

Thus, it seems that the primary limitation of gaming mechanics is the nigh insuperable effort to create a proxy for the anxiety of death, when the very mechanics of gameplay render death impossible or irrelevant. In cinema, this anxiety is achieved through passive transportation into the narrative, a transportation that cannot occur in video gameplay due to its active nature. In cinematic narratives, even if the connection is not heightened by physiological connections and narrative choices of actions, the death of a character with which the viewer may be sympathizing, or “connected,” is usually absolute. If a character is to be revived in a cinematic narrative, it constitutes a self-reflexive technique that interrupts the experience of “transportation,” and draws attention to the artifice of cinema. The unlimited “lives” during gameplay, just as intuitively, effaces any serious emotional investment in the avatar’s death. Like cartoon characters, they are simply revived, albeit with some sort of ludic consequence.

These ludic limitations to gamer anxiety foreground the very conundrum horror game designers face in attempting to make mere game “consequences” work as an emotional proxy for the violent death that horror experiences depend upon. In one discussion in the Horror Video Games course I (David) led at the University of Victoria in 2020, then student Sam Condy (2020), part of a group responsible for a game demo of SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015), argued that its monsters posed no significant threat—a player can quite simply go around them or avoid them—and that they only seem to be present in order to mildly enhance the visual anxiety that might arise from conventional horror aesthetics, contra Noel Carroll’s understanding of the art-horror monster necessarily embodying some sort of threat. Indeed, such an observation distinctly echoes Anderson’s description of his experience of Amnesia adumbrated above. With no agential consequences for death in a horror video game, other than having to return to a previous area or start the game again, anxiety at the level of horror is correspondingly evacuated.

In fact, Lankoski functionally separates goal-oriented ludic mechanics from his very useful notion of empathic engagement and its three sub-structures: recognition, alignment, and allegiance. In his interrogation of the argument that player-character identification depends on a sympathetic “evaluation of the PC,” Lankoski explains that “goal-related engagement can block empathic engagement via simulation and mimicry, so that affects such as pleasure and fear are based on successes and threats. In this case, affective mimicry and simulation[notions that echo Carroll’s ideas of viewer mimicry manifesting actual fear] has little role in engagement” (p. 304). This description oddly aligns with a concept of games as “guided tours” rather than as arenas of true agency. Drawing on an argument from Carr (2006), Siapera states “that most games incorporate straightforward elements of narrative in that they have a given story line, with characters whose attributes are already ‘written’” (Siapera, 2017, p. 241). Under these conditions, “[p]layers … have the ability to manipulate characters, to an extent subverting or altering the narrative. However …, this flexibility has limits: in the end, you need to score points and win the game” (Siapera, 2017, p. 241). Lankoski agrees that in a game like Ico, for example, “all players typically generate similar subgoals, because the game leaves little room for alternative subgoals and choices” (p. 297). Ultimately, Lankoski is just as explicit in his description of the anti-immersive effects of goal-oriented ludic activity: “High cognitive load in controlling a character in a high-speed action situation (such as shooting at enemies) can prevent affective mimicry and simulation” such that “gameplay affects rely exclusively on the goals of the player. This means that when decision making and motor functions stress a player’s cognitive capacity, the affects expressed by the PC has little or no role in engagement” (p. 299). Indeed, “Cognitive load” here is not superseded by “flow.” The automaticity of gameplay does not override the player’s awareness of their ludic goal. “Goal-related engagement is fundamentally an ‘I’ experience: It is about the players acting to reach their goals. Empathic engagement, on the other hand, is essentially about reacting to the character’s actions” (Lankoski, 2011, p. 306).…reacting to, but not necessarily sharing. Tellingly, in all of Lankoski’s horror-inflected language of “shadowy” aesthetics embedded in the sub-goals of the game Ico, he makes no mention of emotion, just of ludic mechanics (p. 297). Summarily, Habel and Kooyman conclude that, effectively, Lankoski “argues that ‘goal related engagement’ ultimately trumps empathic engagement” (Habel & Kooyman, 2004, p. 7). The horror-anxiety of the threat, or realization, of (violent) death, effected by proxy through transportation in cinematic narratives, is, in fact, nullified by the necessity of ludic “objectives” and multiple “lives.” In this context, there is no significant or compelling evidence that the agency that a player exercises over the avatar in the game world improves or even generates any sort of heightened emotional identification with that avatar, the very effect that is so often touted as the precondition for increasing the experience of horror.

However, Lankoski’s “empathic engagement” still works as perhaps the most compelling argument explaining the ludic generation of horror qua “participation.” In the game Pathologic 2 (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2019), for example, the player takes on the role of a doctor who returns to his childhood town at the request of his father only to find him dead. The player-character must then take over his father’s strange unfinished work to discover what he feared and what he was thinking. After a few days, the player discovers a plague sweeping the old town and that there is no way for the player-character to arrest its metastasizing effects as the town’s only doctor. The game presents the player with status meters such as “hunger” and “thirst” which may be filled by acquiring appropriate items within the diegesis. These meters naturally make the player feel the need to keep up with their requirements. However, there is also an immunity meter. It gives the player something of a shield against the plague; if the character has immunity, he/she will not become infected. Nevertheless, the plague is so widespread that the immunity meter is narratively largely redundant; the plague will drop the immunity meter to 0 rather quickly if the character encounters the plague in any significant way, which is, of course, inevitable. The psychological fear generated in the player emerges in that they are compelled to maintain this meter at all times, having been duly conditioned by the less anxiety-driven sustenance meters. The player invests hard-earned diegetic money and resources to acquire protection benefits that assist with keeping the meter at a tenable level such that when they encounter the plague and see the meter drop dramatically, it instills the player with panic and anxiety, but not fear per se.

Nevertheless, for all of the aforementioned rejection of the “horror of participation,” Lankoski offers one “game-changing” example that redeems it as a vehicle to horror. In the radical horror game Silent Hill, the main character/PC is the very troubled young woman Heather Mason. In an explanation that echoes of Carroll’s description of the generation of horror through mirror mimicry of the staged emotional reactions within the diegesis, Lankoski explains how:

a NPC [non-player character] claims that Heather has been killing real people, not monsters; but after seeing Heather’s horrified look, he politely expresses that it was just a joke. This cutscene is used to weaken (or reverse) allegiance with Heather and to amplify the horror atmosphere (she might not, after all, be as morally desirable as seen before). … The importance of [both] these scenes and playable parts can be understood best in the context of allegiance: The game amplifies the horror atmosphere by manipulating allegiance (Lankoski, 2011, p. 305).

Again, this is not an example of sharing Heather’s horror, but of the uneasy feeling that comes with having participated in the horror of her killings.

The “Horror of Transportation”

Even more so, however, this broader notion of the “horror of participation” is rarely distinguished from the more compelling “horror of transportation,” and both are subsumed under the generic category identified by the term that each shares. The horror of transportation is a psychological more than a physiological phenomenon and is perhaps best understood through Thomas Grip’s description of the “insanity metre” mechanic that he and his team originally developed for the Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010) that so frightened Anderson, and which has been taken up by many game developers for its effective impact in generating fear in the gamer, an experience that transgresses the screen between the diegetic and the real. Because of the effect that ludic activity has in effectively reminding the player of the screen (as part of the horror of participation), it may compromise psychological transportation from a cinematic perspective. However, it may also amplify an even more horrifying experience of heightened transportation that is buttressed by the phenomenon of “flow.” While cinematic transportation according to Metz is largely an unconscious process, he indicates that it is different from dreaming in that the viewer remains aware of the real world outside of the narrative on some level. With this awareness sustained by ludic activity, the sensation of collapse between the horror of the game narrative and the reality of the gamer will be all the more terrifying. Indeed, the horror generated by the loss of sanity and the effects of so-called insanity more readily transcend the screen than do the more physiological acts performed by a player-character, but this distinction is not explored significantly within the discourse regarding the generation of horror in games.

Eternal Darkness (Silicon Knights, 2002) exemplifies well the horror of transportation to which we refer, and its dependence on an affective sensation of insanity. It is a horror game that has become a cult classic, well known for its employment of such a sanity meter. The game’s story is told through the eyes of not just one protagonist, but multiple characters who exist in different points in history: Roman soldiers, a modern-day woman, and a Khmer Slave woman, among many others. Each part of the story is told as chapters in the “Tome of Eternal Darkness”: a book that is first seen when the modern-day woman acquires it. Most of the stories end with an encounter with ancient artifacts or an ancient god. More chapters of the original tome must be discovered in order to find out the meaning of all of these tales, each of which challenges the character’s sanity. As the character loses sanity, various concomitant effects prompt the player to question their own sanity and effectively induce fear. Many of these aspects are relatively insignificant, for example, passing a painting and then seeing it again with something on it changed, but they add up. While most games that include a sanity meter include such minor changes, Eternal Darkness has a range of over 40 different effects and events that can occur depending on sanity. One of the effects that startlingly transgresses the reality/game boundary screen occurs when the game inexplicably reduces or mutes the game volume. Such effects leave the gamer disoriented and wondering if something from within the game has managed to manipulate the external hardware somehow.

Similarly, and echoing Metz’s language of passive dream reception, Lankoski gives yet another compelling description of Silent Hill, cited at length here as a self-contained case study to our own argument:

In general, the information offered to a player [in Silent Hill] about the game world is sometimes contradictory. The dialogue of a NPC in some cutscenes, for example, tells how the NPC has been experiencing the same nightmare world as Heather. The information offered by the game contains inconsistencies that make the game world feel dreamlike or nightmarish. Thus, the playable events in the game seem to represent more about Heather’s mental states rather than about being ‘‘real.’’ Associating the ‘‘other world’’ to Heather’s nightmare (the monsters and places are encountered later on in the game) strengthens this kind of interpretation and feeling; the game world starts to work metonymically and presents Heather’s mental state (Lankoski, 2011, p. 301).

What Silent and Eternal have in common is the conceit of breaching the screen, both literal and metaphoric, that separates the player from the world of the player-character, and breaching the screen takes “transportation” to a new level that finally effectively supersedes the goal-oriented distraction of “activity.”

Perhaps the most (anti-)spectacular example of otherwise “passive” psychological horror transcending the diegesis of the game occurs in Doki Doki Literature Club! (Team Salvato, 2017). In Doki, the player names and takes control of a student at a school where he joins the literature club with a childhood friend, Sayori. After joining the club, and trading on the player’s assumed gender-based desires, the player-character meets its other members, including Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika—all beautiful, if not cartoonish, young women. As the game progresses, the player learns about each character, who they are, and with what they struggle in life. Eventually, the player-character is able to take steps to pursue a relationship with Sayori, Yuri, or Natsuki. Sayori reveals that she has depression and very quickly thereafter the player finds that she has hung herself. It is in this startling and unexpected narrative development that the game begins to betray its psychological horror elements. After Sayori’s death, the game abruptly and inexplicably restarts, but even more unsettling is the way in which the continued narrative entirely excludes any further mention of Sayori, as though she has not only ended her life in the diegesis of the game but has somehow even managed to end her “life” as a data packet within the game software. Rather, as the player moves through the re-started game, the narrative development more significantly follows Natsuki and then Yuri. Both will end up confessing feelings for the player and both just as abruptly end up killing themselves. This leaves the player in something of a state of shock as it seems the player goes through the game each time only to have one of the love interests end their life. While shocking, it remains relatively unexpected from a horror game, and implicates the player as part of the cause of suicide for these increasingly realistic representations whom the player has now invested hours getting to “know.”

In the last playthrough, the player has run out of the game’s potential love interests. The side character Monika takes the player away to engage them in a private conversation. This is where the diegetic narrative and the safety the player feels from the separation of the screen are shattered. Monika explains how she manipulated the game to “change” the other girls and even delete them from the game. Most importantly, Monika, instead of addressing the character with the name the player installed for the avatar, addresses the player directly using their actual name. At this moment the horrifying diegetic narrative of the visual novel seems to transcend the screen and, along with the aforementioned unsettling eventualities, assaults the player’s sense of distanciation. The player is dragged from the comfort of their chair and into the characters’ “reality,” all of whose suicides the player has had a hand in motivating. Even more unsettling, Monika will not let the player leave the game and she uncannily confesses her feelings for the actual player and how these feelings are free and not programmed. The situation comes to a climax as the only way to end the game is to do to Monika as she did with the other girls. The player must go into their computer game files and delete the Monika file from the game. This astonishing horror creativity evacuates any sense of safety the player has from the distinction between computer-generated diegesis and computer data. Even though the player is no longer “in” the game and just simply going through their computer files, it feels as if the player is still within the game being manipulated by Monika in the real world, and that not even their computer is safe.

Doki is a near-perfect example of the ways in which a game can transcend the diegetic narrative. While other games have broken the fourth wall before, it is one of the rare examples that do it with such convincing and unsettling precision. It is noteworthy that the animé images that comprise the avatar and characters are so far from the realism that other horror games have attempted to master in their pursuit of authentic horror; even the ostensible distanciation that should be accomplished by such cartoonish representations is evacuated as the player is drawn into a sense of panic when the game seems to speak back to him/her with more knowledge of the player’s real private person than it should have. It is also relevant both that the original Doki Doki Literature Club was released only for the PC and that it was marketed as a happy visual novel. In this evacuation of the generic expectations of horror, the player is left vulnerable to the unexpected and unsettling emotional manipulation that the game deploys. In fact, a re-iteration of the game, entitled Doki Doki Literature Club Plus, was released in 2021, and while it adds some new side content, it takes away other important material. Expecting the player’s familiarity with the original, this newer version openly refers to itself as a psychological horror and loses the generic expectation vulnerability. The biggest drawback is that since it was released on consoles (Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch), it loses the most unsettling part of the “game,” in which the player must delete files from their computer. In a makeshift effort to maintain this effect, the console version sets its diegesis within a virtual desktop, essentially a game within the game. However, when it comes time to delete the computer files, these actions remain within the diegesis of this game within the game, and largely lose their punch. However, at least for the original version, in particular contradistinction to the loss of agency fundamental to the horror of active participation discussed above, there is no real loss of agency in the sense of active ludic gameplay in Doki, but rather a terrifying sense of the game transcending its diegetic limits. This is not mere “flow” or automaticity in operating a “joystick” while fully “immersed” in gameplay, but a higher-order psychological effect in which a game like Doki perceptually and perhaps emotionally pulls the player through the screen.