The Doors of Perception: Horror Video Games and the Ideological Implications of Ludic Virtual Reality

Introduction

With the recognition by Richard Rouse III of the ‘perfect marriage’ between the genre of horror and of video games has come a concomitant cultural studies discourse surrounding these games. Such a perspective as Rouse’s is perhaps best exemplified in Bernard Perron’s edited compendium of essays regarding horror video games subtitled Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (2009). In it, much of the argumentation orbits debate regarding the definition and creation of the experience of horror compared between an ostensibly passive cinema reception (from whence the games take most of their conventions) and the ostensibly more active reception of ludological horror. As the argument goes, ludic activity creates greater identification with diegetic characters and therefore heightens the player’s experience of horror (Christopher and Leuszler, ‘Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive’ Debate,”’ forthcoming). The problems with this specious contention notwithstanding, the reduction of the debate to these terms ignores the larger cultural studies issues of the production or reproduction of status quo ideology that these games may engender. Thus, our question is tripartite: we ask how the eradication of the screen, perceptually, in a VR setup alters the nature of horror experiences; what the phenomenon of VR can add to this analysis and what new questions, sui generis to VR, emerge; and then further interrogate the larger ideological identity implications of such an altered perceptual immersion as they relate specifically to the horror genre.

From a theoretical perspective, drawing on previous scholarly studies concerned with the psychological mechanics of perception and their relation to the ideological and identificatory effects of horror, as well as horror games themselves, we examine the ways in which both ostensibly reactionary and progressive ideological elements have migrated into horror video games and the implications of VR on this phenomenon. In doing so, the investigation reveals that it is not character identification – either passive or active – that fundamentally fosters the experience of horror and its concomitant heightened ideological impact. Experiments in VR reveal that the experience of horror is more a function of the genre than of any essentialist reduction to active gaming or passive cinema reception, a distinction that is entirely subjective to the individual ‘audience’ member in any case. Moreover, while the practice of gaming itself may be more immersive than cinema reception, in both cases there remains the perceptual interruption engendered by the screen that each medium employs. ¹ The phenomenon of VR supersedes the screen and demonstrates that it is primarily the ‘environment’ of a horror experience that seems to be the most salient. As such, we note the unabashedly phenomenological aphorism vaguely credited to celebrated dystopian author Aldous Huxley: ‘There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between there are the doors of perception.’ Indeed, the VR environment is not experienced as the ‘frame,’ ‘window’ or ‘mirror’ of the screen, but as a doorway into Baudrillard’s (1994) ‘hyperreal’ (p. 2) where we should be terrified, horror or not, by the mere uncanny nature of the environment and the apocalyptic erasure of ‘reality’ it implies.

More broadly, the present study occurs at the nexus of feminist scholarship on horror, cultural studies in general, and the implications of the digital and virtual on the very perceptual processes that Huxley’s statement implies in the particular context of horror video games. While Carol Clover insists that identification through the perspectival screen is poorly understood, she seminally argues that slasher horror in particular allows for more progressive gender identifications. More broadly, and somewhat conversely, Carly Kocurek observes the most reactionary effects of the horror genre’s reduction of cultural ‘others’ to monsters and the problem with their prurient dispatch in video games. Lastly, Tammy Lin argues that the experience of virtual reality (VR) significantly heightens the experience of horror. In concert, these imply that VR should heighten the ideological effects and gender identifications identified by both Kocurek and Clover, for better or for worse. In this paper, we will argue that the advent of VR in horror games not only changes the coordinates of the debate surrounding active ludology and passive cinema-reception, but that it also both heightens the experience of horror through perceptual immersion and further demonstrates an alarming shift in the ideological implications of horror video games towards a reactionary social identity politics that, in the very age of the mass-shooter, may have serious real-life consequences. While Clover looks at what horror (specifically slasher) representations and narratives could do, progressively, Kocurek looks at what it is doing in terms of troubling hegemonic ideological cultivation. Summarily, Sky LaRell Anderson paraphrases Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter (2009) in arguing that ‘games aimed at recreating reality, what he calls virtual games, reinforce … ideological frames’ (Anderson, 2013, p. 295–6). If there was any doubt about this effect, Noble (2018) reports on the very digital algorithms that re-produce an alarming racism culled from its parent society, although not specifically in video games (p. 1–36).

In our previous collaboration (forthcoming), we developed an argument that effectively evacuates the ‘passive-active’ debate by exposing its logical fallacies and introducing the contradistinctive notions of the ludic horror of participation and the ludic horror of transportation using examples of games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Eternal Darkness, Pathologic 2, Silent Hill and Doki Doki Literature Club!. All of these deploy versions of narrative mechanics that transgress the screen in some ways, and generate fear/horror by causing the player to question their own sanity. Doki, especially, masters this mechanic by deploying direct address to the player from within the diegesis in which the game seems to know more about the player’s private person than it should, and in which the player becomes implicated in the visceral and emotional horror visited on diegetic characters that, although cartoonish, have become genuinely sympathetic through a player’s psychological investment. In these games’ decidedly non-active forms of game-play, their horror is not generated through mere ‘flow’ or automaticity in operating a ‘joystick’ while fully immersed in the ludic experience, but rather through a higher order psychological effect in which games like those listed above, as well as such notable examples as Undertale and Lost in Vivo, perceptually and emotionally pull the player through the screen, rendering the passive-active debate redundant, if not simply inaccurate.

Gaze Theory and Its Subjective Discontents

Beyond the active passive reduction, but related to it, is the logical fallacy that makes the leap from perspective to identification. The nominal distinction between activity and passivity tends to adapt its fallacy from screen studies’ gaze theory, often ascribing a passive experience to the third-person perspective and an active experience to the first-person or ‘subjective’ view. Many theorists of horror video games make the often unqualified and even dubious assertion that first-person perspectives (which cinema can also do) inevitably create stronger sympathies with the character, and therefore heightened horror towards the threats they face. The old argument here, for film or game, is that by positioning the viewer behind the eyes of a character, a subjective view heightens first-person identification. Rouse III (2009), for example, takes the position that players ‘project themselves into the main character much more than in any other medium. This is especially true in first-person games’ (p. 21). Unfortunately, there is very little satisfying evidence of these contentions offered throughout the compendium in which Rouse’s contribution occurs, neither theoretical nor anecdotal.

An exception to this propensity is Habel and Kooyman’s more nuanced turn to Tanya Krzywinska’s ‘Hands-On Horror’ in their argument.

It is quite possible that the use of first-person perspective ‘facilitates a more benign connection between player and heroic avatar … [whereas] the connection between player and avatar is diminished by use of a third-person perspective’ (Krzywinska, 2002, p. 213). This is a fairly standard position; it stands to reason that if the player is seeing ‘through the eyes’ of the protagonist, they are more likely to identify with their experience and share their terror (Habel & Kooyman, 2004, p. 6).

Their use of modalizing language (‘quite possible’), however, significantly implies doubt. Indeed, in the arena of cinema, feminist horror theorist Clover (1997) more summarily dismisses the first-person thesis: By representing ‘the killer’s point of view’, for example ‘we are forced, the argument goes, to identify with the killer. In fact, however, the relation between camera point of view and the processes of viewer identification are poorly understood’ (p. 90). Clover proceeds to give examples of so-called ‘subjective’ views from the animal point-of-view in movies such as Jaws or The Birds ‘to suggest either that the viewer’s identificatory powers are unbelievably elastic or that point of-view shots can sometimes be pro forma’ (p. 91). While several critics observe that the mechanics of the first-person perspective is far more tenable, or at least more common, in games than in cinema, Habel and Kooyman (2004) describe how it is just as likely to disrupt transportation in its cinematic form: ‘The reason for this rationing of first person in film is undoubtedly both the technical challenges it poses and the fact that the aim of film, at least in its classical Hollywood form, is to seamlessly immerse viewers in the fictional universe, and first-person composition inevitably draws attention to itself as a cinematic effect’ (p. 6). In games, under the conditions of what Habel and Kooyman call ‘agency mechanics’, this effect is just as likely to reduce player “flow” by limiting information about the avatar’s surroundings required for competent game-play.

Perron (2009) further argues that, even in games, a third-person perspective might be better at generating an experience of horror that depends on the anxiety of death discussed above (p. 132–3). Since games cannot reproduce well the physical violence that they try to signify from a first-person vantage, a third-person viewing of the indignities visited upon the player-character’s body, even if only in a cut scene, allows a player to more deliciously view the violence of ‘their own’ death (see Silverman qtd. in Clover, 1996, p. 105; Perron, 2009, p. 132–3; Habel & Kooyman, 2004, p. 7). Quite clearly this latter argument privileges what might be understood as a fundamentally cinematic/passive viewing experience. Indeed, Krzywinksa indicates that much horror depends on the viewer’s ‘inability to affect the action, … the key to some of its pleasures’ (Krzywinska, 2002, p. 19, italics added). A widely shared cliché of the nightmare is experienced as being incapacitated from running or unable to scream. Just as in the perspective described by Perron, the horror of this inability to act is staged in countless films in which all that a character, or a viewer that sympathizes with characters, can do, is helplessly watch their own (or a loved one’s) evisceration. Only under these conditions of the inability to act does a first-person perspective heighten the experience of horror, and only if the assailant is endowed with the aesthetic trappings of horror. Otherwise, as Habel and Kooyman, and Jesper Juul variously argue, it is just a frustrating game. First-person perspectives, or third- (both available to both cinema and video games), do not adequately account for the radically subjective nature of differing ‘activities’ that either cinema reception or ludic engagement comprise.

However, beyond what the player merely sees, Petri Lankoski offers an even more sophisticated analysis that more satisfactorily implicates the effects of first-person perspective into the realm of psychological sympathy and character identification. ‘Half-Life (Valve Software, 2001) demonstrates that players do not need to see the PC [player character], Gordon Freeman, to perceive personality. The game invites a player to [heuristically and narratively] construct the Gordon Freeman [identity] via NPCs [non-player characters]’ in a process through which they address the player-character directly to the player’s first-person perspective (Lankoski, 2011, p. 301). ‘This is in conflict with Rouse (2005) claim that Gordon Freeman has no personality whatsoever. On the other hand, another game using the first person point of view, Doom (id Software, 1993) offers almost no basis for recognition of the PC of the game; hence, Doom does not afford empathic engagement (Lankoski, 2011, p. 301). Lankoski’s argument suggests that the first-person perspective may be irrelevant to the physiological connection of the player to the character. However, it also indicates that direct address to the player (in the case of Half-Life, via Gordon, effected by a first-person view) is a vehicle for strong residual affect. This direct address can also be instrumental in the generation of horror by ‘pulling the player through the screen,’ through what Green and Brock (2000) refer to as “transportation” (p. 702) or what Murray (1997) defines as “immersion” (p. 98).

Janet Murray’s definition of immersion (which is notably distinguished from ‘agency’ in her text) is particularly instructive. While she claims that 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’, she is clearly using the term ‘virtual reality’ metaphorically (Murray, 1997, p. 98). ‘Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water’ (Murray, 1997, p. 98). She defines ‘a psychologically immersive experience [as] the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus' (Murray, 1997, p. 98). It stands to reason that if this immersion into a ‘virtual reality’ was perceptually literal rather than imagined, its effects would be heightened.

The Revelations of Virtual Reality

If pulling the player through the screen, so to speak, generates horror more effectively, then, even moreso, the implications of virtual reality seem to render the active/passive debate further redundant. As Lin (2017) observes, ‘the previous literature operationalized media interactivity as playing versus watching’, whereas her own ‘categorization of VR games based on theoretical constructs provided researchers opportunities to further test “interactivity” in detail, such as the levels of plausibility of the player affecting events or the levels of plausibility of events affecting players’ (p. 359). Lin reports on an experiment with a group of people recruited to play a pre-release of the zombie-horror VR game The Brookhaven Experiment. Drawing on the work of Mel Slater, Lin (2017) seeks to quantify participants’ fear reactions to ‘the place illusion (PI) and the plausibility illusion (PSI), two distinct characteristics in VR’, along with their coping strategies, their immediate experience of fear, and any lingering game-related anxiety the participants experienced the next day (p. 352). PI is ‘the strong illusion of being in a place in spite of the sure knowledge that you are not there’ (Slater, 2009, p. 3551) which, according to Lin, ‘allows players to perceive the virtual environment as reality’ (p. 352). PSI ‘is the illusion that what is apparently happening is really happening (even though you know for sure that it is not)’ (Slater, 2009, p. 3553). Participants in Lin’s experiment indicated a willingness to play a horror game and were shown the game trailer to have some idea of what they were going to experience. They were exposed to the first wave of five in the game as a tutorial demonstrating how to operate the VR and such game mechanics as how to aim, shoot, and reload guns, amongst others. Participants would then play for four continuous minutes and then complete a survey with questions around the PSI and PI elements of the game, along with self-reporting as to the level of the fear and the coping strategies utilized.

I (Aidan) tried to recreate this experiment to the best of my ability, even though, unlike most of the participants in Lin’s experiment, I am an experienced gamer having almost compulsively played countless games for many years. The second thing to note is that I am also familiar with playing a multitude of games in VR. In the original experiment, only 18.6% of participants indicated that they had played a VR game before. Nevertheless, I played for the 4 minutes, as the experiment stipulates, and then I followed it up by ranking my fear based on the PSI and PI elements listed in Lin’s tables. The results were interesting. To the question requiring participants to rate fear elements from one to seven, I found that most of my scores were lower than the median. For example, while most participants rated not being able to control the weapons at an average of 5.14 for fear, I rated this fear as a mere 1. Similarly, participants familiar with FPS games reported an average fear rating of 3.30, and participants with an avowed preference for horror games reported an average fear rating of 3.30 (Lin, 2017, p. 355), both higher than my own self-rating. Lin makes no mention of whether or not participants were familiar with video games more broadly. However, there are indicators that suggest that many participants had not had much exposure to video games in general, let alone to VR. Clearly, familiarity with the narrative genres and aesthetics of horror, the lucid mechanics of FPS, and the experience of VR are important factors in the efficacy of VR horror, but this is not particularly relevant here.

What is important is the relative fear that I did experience; I certainly found this gaming experience more frightening than similar games that are rendered on a 2-D screen. The main fear generators that I experienced that were shared with the original study group were: zombies getting close, feeling vulnerable, zombies virtually attacking me, and frightening environmental noises. Aside from the environmental noises which is a PI fear element, the rest of my fears fell into the PSI fears categories. With these fears came attendant physiological reactions. Lin reports many different strategies for dealing with fear from the experiment participants, but most fell into three categories that Lin describes as an avoidance sort of strategy, a self-help strategy, or an approach strategy, respectively. Someone who is scared may employ avoidance by taking off the VR headset to directly get away from the fear, or use a self-help strategy to talk their way through the experience by reassuring themselves that it is neither real nor present. Lastly, people who were defined as sensation-seekers or as qualitatively brave tended to more actively face the zombie attacks, planning on how to eliminate them and acting appropriately–an approaching strategy. While playing myself, I found that while I was frightened, I employed more of a self-help strategy to give myself comfort by screaming or trying to voice my plan to deal with the assault.

Lin’s experiment provides an excellent foundation for studying fear in VR Horror Games. Amongst its findings, the study (and my own experiment) reveals that PSI elements are the more frightening. Arguably, PSI elements generate the most fear because they affect the specific moments of gameplay, they are dynamic and their effects are immediate. This also explains why someone like myself (Aidan) who is an experienced horror gamer can still share the same fear elements as other less seasoned players. More broadly, if Lin is correct – and pretty much any horror VR experience verifies that she is – it is the nature of the environment, or at least its perception, upon which ‘horror’ depends (a notion echoed in so many texts about the dream-like state of cinema reception in the popular age of the movie theatre.) One anecdotal example of this is the experience I (David) had in attempting to tolerate the ‘DreadEye’, a VR Horror Experience that was available at a kiosk in the Bay Centre in Victoria in 2019. There is no active ludic element to the experience, but even as a mere viewer, I was readily able to watch the animated video of the scenario on YouTube; ² in contrast, I was simply too terrified to do it in VR: the very lack (contra loss) of agency, inherent to cinema, was far more terrifying, like being paralysed, a representation the experience does not fail to impose on the viewer as subject within the diegesis.

Lin’s experiment reveals what we might understand as a heightened haptic proximity to the horror, and this heightened affect of horror under the conditions of VR betrays the need for a new perceptual metaphor. It is no longer a frame, mirror or window, but rather a door through which the faculties of perception cross-over to within the diegesis of the digital realm. Lin points out that it does not matter if an individual is consciously aware of the digital artifice – perceptual immersion amplifies the horror. Thus, the so-called ‘suspension of disbelief’ phenomenon upon which cinematic realism trades in its creation of ‘transportation’ becomes irrelevant; it is only the immersive nature of the viewing experience that matters. Moreover, the ludological connection to the “avatar” transcends the need for identification as it is understood in the conventional debate. Under the conditions of first-person VR, the perception of the player merges with the physical space of the avatar without a screen of separation–window, frame, or mirror. This is not simply a re-validation of the first-person perspective argument, but rather an entirely amplified situation of immersion over spectatorship/gaze. Or, by contrast, the mirror metaphor is turned in against itself as the player no longer needs to recognize an ‘other’ (via the avatar) as themselves. They embody the other: a mirror within the VR environment should return the visage of the actual player (a tech trick that I’m sure will be developed soon enough to further amplify the uncanny perceptual spatialization).

Such an illusion-within-the-illusion has been the horror-inflected subject of many cinematic narratives such as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), or Josef Rusnak’s The 13th Floor (1999), or via the “holodeck” in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994). However, even cinema has not been able to return the mirror image of the viewer beyond its intra-diegetic characterization, a fact made obvious in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009). Although the narrative is offered up mostly from a first-person perspective, when the otherwise subjective character peers into a mirror, the image returned is that of the face of the diegetic character with whom the viewer must externally identify at one remove. By contrast, with the digital visual scanning technology available to video games, VR may soon be able to accomplish such a first-person image return of the visually condensed player-character as the image of the actual player, thus allowing viewers to virtually transcend the screen and step through the doors of perception. Indeed, in describing the experiment which resulted in his coining the terms PI and PSI, Mel Slater (2009) reports that

The [VR] environment was rendered with real-time ray tracing in an HMD [head-mounted display], so that when the participants moved they could see shadows and reflections of their virtual body move in correlation. ... In a between-groups experiment we found that arousal and anxiety (as measured by skin conductance, heart rate and heart rate variability) were higher for the group that experienced the shadows and reflections than for the other group (p. 3554).

In the psychoanalytic terms of ‘bodily identification’ that such an experimental ‘mirror-stage’ invokes, the perceptual effect of the VR conflates what Silverman (2013) distinguishes as ‘exteroceptive’ and ‘proprioceptive’ integration of an ‘other’ (p. 11–12, 14–15). Silverman explains that exteroceptive identification involves the visual integration of the desired subjectivity to within the psychological coordinates of the perceiving subject, whereas proprioceptive identification involves sensational and physical integration. In psychoanalytic terms, it seems clear that the most symbolic example of such would involve penetrative sexual intercourse. The most literal would involve cannibalism. Eating the desired ‘other’ necessarily involves the perception that the other has physically been subsumed by, literally become, the subject, evident in Silverman’s odd metaphor of the ‘idiopathic’ snake devouring the ‘excorporative’ squirrel (p. 24). While Slater (2009) understands the effects of VR as a mere ‘correlation between proprioception and visual exteroception’ (p. 3554, emphasis added), in the context of perceptually embodying the game avatar, they are surely better understood as a full collapse of proprioception into exteroception. Regardless of which of these might return a more violent or stronger identification or incorporation of the subjectivity of the perceived other, when they collapse into each other under the conditions of VR, they would simply amplify by the multiple of the power of the other. More broadly, and more importantly, these experiments in VR reveal that it is no longer a question of what creates more fear (passive reception or active agency), but of where creates more fear (perceptual immersion).

It is more the environment of the player (more akin to the dream-like state of a cinema viewer than to objective-oriented ludic activity) that generates the fear that might be experienced from a horror video game. This fact is perhaps best exemplified by Phasmophobia, a recent independent horror game that has become incredibly popular. While the game has no real story mode or lore to mention, it does have at least the premise that the player-character and three others are ghost-hunters and must enter houses to learn what kind of paranormal activity they hide, much like the spate of recent reality television shows that operate with the same conceit. The game is comprised of several features relatively uncommon in horror games, including its four-player co-op which, on the surface, seems counter-intuitive to the horror genre which has traded so significantly on conventions of isolation and helplessness. In cooperation, players choose a haunted location, equip themselves with limited gear, and must foil the ghost before it becomes aggressive and hunts the team down.

The most interesting (and salient here) feature of Phasmophobia is the fact that it can be played in both VR and non-VR modes – there can even be a mix of players playing in VR along with others playing in non-VR – providing an opportunity for the immediate comparison of horror experiences. Arguably, and perhaps for the reasons outlined above, the VR experience engenders a significantly amplified level of fear since the player-character is no longer safeguarded by the screen but is rather immersed within the haunted house. In his personal review of the game, online gaming virtuoso ‘Fluffy Furret’ explains that

It’s not scary when you’re looking through a screen. You’ve got to play it in VR for it to be scary. It is infinitely scarier in VR. It’s really a perspective thing. The more immersed you feel in what you’re playing the more potential the game has to make you feel anything, really. This isn’t set only to horror. A game you feel very immersed in can make you feel happy, it can make you feel sad, it can make you feel a lot of things (personal communication, October 3, 2021).

As Lin and Slater have amply demonstrated, the knowledge that it is merely a game does not absolve the player from the fear that a ghastly ghost might suddenly appear and then hunt the player-character with the intention to catch and kill. In the screened rendering, a player might simply look away (avoidance strategy) and the fear of the threat will be gone, but a VR player must invest more in the avoidance strategy of removing the VR apparatus. In the VR experience, there is no more screen, but both a perceptual and narratively-represented door that must be traversed; much like the door one must open to enter a haunted house, by entering the game in VR the player must pass through a perceptual doorway into the game. No longer is the player simply controlling a character and playing at being an investigator from beyond the diegesis, beyond the screen; now the player is the perceptual investigator, holding the spirit box and calling out to the ghost from within the immersive environment. Indeed, a player can follow a mission outside of VR and be relatively scared trying to collect evidence while avoiding getting killed by the ghost, but the same mission can then be replayed in VR and the experience will be decidedly more terrifying. This ingress into the game world is one of VR’s most important contributions to gaming in the past few years. It demonstrates how Christian Metz's (1984) ‘imaginary signifier’ supersedes active gaming in the creation of horror, and also explains why horror VR is so much more frightening – it controls the virtual environment of the player as well as the gaming elements within its diegesis. Ultimately, it is quite clear that horror is more about perception and reception than representation or so-called ‘active’ participation.

The Socio-Political Implications of VR and ‘Reactionary’ Horror Video Games

Unfortunately, as revealing as Lin’s experiment is with regard to evacuating the passive/active debate, it remains within the coordinates of functionalism, and primarily explores the ways in which fear is generated and the ways in which players cope with it, without exploring the larger cultural and ideological implications of horror, especially under the conditions of VR. In this immersive perceptual environment, assuming that it actually heightens the emotional experience of horror, it stands to reason that the less conscious ideological effects of representation within the immersive gaming environment should also be heightened. ‘This active involvement in the on-screen violence is problematic because, as social cognitive theory argues, “rehearsal” of observed behaviours greatly increases the amount of modelling (Bandura, 1994), and as Potter (1997) argues, identification and realism increase modeling” (Baran & Davis, 2015, p. 181). But just what is being modelled here?

In his seminal ‘Introduction to the American Horror Film’ (1979), Canadian film scholar Wood (2004) taxonomizes patriarchal-capitalist-determined representations of horrific identities in conventional horror cinema inevitably returning from a form of repression that is surplus to the normal repression explained by Freud (p. 108). Wood’s (2004) most hotly debated contribution, however, was his claim that horror films fall into two polarized categories: progressive and reactionary (p. 133). Reactionary horror films are ones in which monstrous identities are successfully vanquished before the narrative closure and status quo ‘normalcy’ is recovered, ‘the “happy ending” (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression’ (Wood, 2004, p. 113). Progressive horror cinema, by contrast, features narrative aperture in which the monster remains at large, is not re-contained by normalcy or repression, and is frequently an ambiguously sympathetic character, oppressed by a culture unwilling to recognize and satisfy its needs. As a genre, horror is subversive by its very nature – it almost always subverts standards of bourgeois morality and taste (progressive) – but it also tends to be highly misogynist and dehumanizing (reactionary) in its representations of prurient violence against women or other marginalized identities. The ramifications of the heightened indoctrination are of significance in that the reactionary ideology that particularly horror narratives engender might become all the more powerful and compelling in their attachment to the heightened emotional, visceral response to VR horror. In contrast, the potential benefit is that more progressive representations, particularly progressive gender identifications that might exist in a heightened form in the immersive nature of VR, should also be heightened.

In this context, Carol Clover argues for the potentially progressive social value of particularly slasher-horror films in that these encourage an identificatory gender-slide through processes of transportation, sympathy, and suture. Clover’s (1996) position regarding ‘poorly understood’ first-person identification mechanics notwithstanding, she explains that through a process of vacillating sympathies with the ‘final girl’, gender-binary male viewers can identify with the female character in her ‘masculinized’ defence against the ‘feminized’ slasher-killer (p. 90–1). This progressive perspective, especially when married to the techno-immersive conditions of the experience of VR, echo Donna Haraway’s (2006) metaphor of the “cyborg,” succinctly and usefully described by the York Graduate Film Student Association (2021) as the ‘increasing imbrication of subjective experience and technology under capitalism as “an imaginative resource” and a potential site for the transformative potential necessary to surmount our seeming impasse’ (para. 3). Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall further argues that ‘[p]erhaps, instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a “production,” which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (qtd. in Gittings, 2002, p. 256, italics added). Again, it stands to reason that if the experience of horror is heightened due to the conditions of perceptual immersion engendered by VR – states of high affect, fear and impressionability – so too should be the progressive gender effects described by Clover and implied by Haraway.

If, as Clover argues, horror invites greater opportunities for progressive gender identifications, and VR heightens the experience of horror through an immersive perceptual experience, then cultural studies need to take a close look at horror video games for their progressive potential. A game like Dead by Daylight, for instance, seems tailored to prove or disprove Clover’s thesis. In it, through an online server, players can choose to play as one of the various slasher-oriented killers, or as one of a team of ‘survivors’ attempting to escape the killer, all of whom are presented as gendered in various performative ways. In a VR rendering of such a game, the player would perceptually embody the character whom they are playing.

However, while it is possible that VR can even more powerfully realize some of the progressive potential in horror that is described by Clover, what if the opposite were also true. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming’, taken from their answer to the shortcomings of Oedipal psychoanalysis, which, in certain respects, preconceives the notions of progressive fluid social identities described above, in his discussion of digital Supercinema, William Brown (2013) argues that

to become x (as in, to become anything that in itself has a quantifiable, or fixed, identity, be it woman, animal, or art) is only positive to a certain degree. For to become something that is as fixed in its being as the former static identity from which one moves involves as much of what Deleuze and Guattari would term a re-territorialization within the bounds of fixed identity and meaning as it does a deterritorialization away from an initial and constrictive fixed identity. What is truly positive is not becoming x, y or z, but becoming in and of itself, as a process (p. 55).

Clearly, Deleuze and Guattari, in their efforts to subvert psychoanalysis and provide a truly radical model of subjectivity, are concerned with ‘process’. Such a perspective, indeed, implies the very shortcomings of Wood’s notion of ‘progressive’ within a closed system of subjectivity, but what is important here is merely the astute observation that ‘becoming’, even in a progressive direction, as Clover suggests horror narratives make possible, and we have argued that virtual video games can amplify, is not necessarily a positive thing.

In fact, according to widely accepted theories of media effects such as Joseph Klapper’s ‘reinforcement’ and George Gerbner’s ‘cultivation’ and ‘resonance’ (Baran & Davis, 2015, p. 113, 287, 290–1), ‘becoming’ as a process, is more likely to shore up the much more reactionary ideology that has migrated into horror video games. Indeed, Krzywinska reports that ‘[u]nlike their film counterparts, and in spite of an often simplified moral framework, horror-based video games create a complex interaction between bounded choice and determinism that reflects, to some extent, the way in which individuals interact with [real] social constraints’ (p. 22). More broadly, ‘[c]ultivation theory is built on television research, and attempts to explain to what degree media lead to a distorted perception of social reality, for example, through stereotyped perceptions. The theory has been less used in relation to video games; though there are certainly characters in video games that are based on ethnic or gender stereotypes, it is still uncertain what stereotyping, if any, video games can produce in the player’ (Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, & Tosca, 2019, p. 289). This last contention is odd in that it seems to ignore the very function of cultivation analysis to look at the long-term effects of repeated exposure that is not functionally measurable by direct effects research; its primary contention simply explains that there are effects.

Moreover, following the tenets of cultivation analysis, Carly Kocurek (2015) has done some of this work in relation to horror video games. Kocurek observes that many horror video game representations, compellingly heightened in their ideological effects by participatory play according to Kocurek, are broadly dehumanizing. ‘By dehumanising the victims of on-screen violence, alternative blood presents victims as monstrous; … a deliberate strategy … that invokes – purposely or otherwise – propaganda strategies that have long been used as a political strategy to justify the marginalisation, abuse and even extermination of populations marked as “undesirable”’ (Kocurek, 2015, p. 80). Again and again, Kocurek (2015) rehearses the astute observation that when violence enacted in video games is rendered ostensibly benign, merely a game, it has the dangerous double effect of trivializing (or even validating in the case of American militarism) violence in general, and even worse, of trivializing violence against the identities who these monsters may symbolically represent in a society replete with ‘othering’ (p. 80).

Indeed, many horror video games are troublingly reactionary in their ‘othering’ – misogynistic and intolerant in many ways while sort of blindly valorizing the status quo of Western machismo and consumer culture. Kocurek argues that even aesthetic ‘attempts to minimise game violence may enact a different type of rhetorical violence, echoing the strategies of dehumanisation employed in propaganda campaigns’ (Kocurek, 2015, p. 80). Bioshock, for example, quite garishly conflates stereotypes of disability and addiction through its monstrous ‘splicers’. More blatantly, in Bioshock, the player-character participates in a stylized consumer culture, complete with the ‘affordances’ within the game that advertising often absurdly promises in the real world. While this might seem to place the player-character amongst the dehumanized identities Kocurek identifies, it is an unsettling player strategy, part of the horror of the game, and really just ‘a different type of rhetorical violence’, as Kocurek describes it, that occurs within a narrative in which killing the other ‘humans’ for having merely done the same thing is both necessary and rewarding. Similarly, Resident Evil 5 is another game that participates in this strategy of dehumanization and layers misogynistic and racialized implications into its representations. In a narrative set in ‘Africa’, with very few exceptions, almost all of the monstrous zombies are black, while the only black heroine, a native African woman named Sheva, is ritually hyper-sexualized.

It seems only evident that the most reactionary elements of horror, under the critical gaze of scholarship aimed primarily at cinema, have migrated into horror video games as a haven for these bastions of conservative thinking, the new ‘low-art’ of ludology that is the new ‘unworthy of critical gaze’, and therefore, contra horror films, have become an arena in which such reactionary (rather than progressive or subversive) political ideologies can hide. Similarly, Wood (2004) has argued that horror films were originally ‘dismissed with contempt by the majority of reviewer critics, or simply ignored’ (p. 202). Brottman (2004) echoes this sentiment in her observation that the horror genre’s ‘dismissal as “inconsequential” or “lacking in value” allows it to exert a considerably progressive influence’, and therefore ‘the past quarter century has seen an increasing number of articles and critical studies on all kinds of horror films’ (p. 170). What followed was a virtual explosion of scholarship concerned with horror cinema, much of which argues for its progressive potential as a form of art that had flown ‘below the radar’ of the reactionary gatekeepers of ostensibly ‘high’ art.

Currently, however, horror video games even more effectively evade critical consideration under the double-helix of the ‘low’ art of horror combined with the ostensibly ‘low’ art of gaming. Indeed, Rob Cover (2006) observes the concomitant stigmatization and dismissal of video games in general and those who play them. After all, ‘It’s only a game’. Juul (2013) observes the ‘it’s just a game’ effect in the context of explaining a paradox of failure, why we take pleasure in the pain of failure necessary to the mechanics of video game play objectives (p. 4). ‘[G]ames are an entirely different thing, a safe space in which failure is okay, neither painful nor the least unpleasant. ... 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). However, in light of the ‘scholarly’ reduction of horror cinema as mere low-art before it was critically recovered as a significant cultural phenomenon, horror video games may also be hiding significant cultural phenomena behind their ‘mere-game-ness’. These effects can surely be either progressive or reactionary, if not mutually ideologically invisible, but, as Kocurek argues, horror is a form of game with deeply concerning representations of violence and alienating normativity, and with a huge cultural following.

A fortiori, it is arguable that VR may render Clover’s argument untenable. The types of sliding gender identifications she identifies are not necessarily progressive ones, but rather divergent ones, simply made possible by the governing dynamics of a perceptually immersive environment. There is no real embodied experience of the socially constructed nature of a different gender because the conventions upon which the gender slides Clover refers to are also socially constructed. The most such an experience can return is what Weise (2009) refers to as the consequence of a ‘procedural adaptation’ (p. 238) of a horror film genre into a horror game: ‘The core transmedial pleasure lies in the player getting to step into the Final Girl’s role and discover the emergent dynamics of her iconic peril for themselves. They get to finally discover what it is like to be the person they have mocked by shouting “Don’t go in there!” at so many times’ (p. 245). However, these are not real-life social identities so much as culturally constructed representational stereotypes. And while passive cinema reception may allow for the identificatory psychological processes necessary for progressive gender identifications, the objective-oriented ludic engagement, which supersedes identification to some degree (see Habel & Kooyman, 2004, p. 7) does not. Stepping into the ‘costume’ of a disenfranchised social identity, real or virtual, does not return the same experience as an actual social existence. However, stepping into the costume of a more oppressive and violent identity may well have ideological effects that reinforce the reactionary. Or, as Silverman (2013) reports, ‘In other words, like Lacan, Laplanche suggests that, far from being wide open to any corporeal imago, the normative ego allows only those which are congruent with its [perceived] form’ (p. 12). More broadly, while VR can heighten the experience of horror by rendering the passive-active debate redundant (which it may be anyway due to the radically subjective nature of the gaming/viewing experience) and creating immersive environments, it cannot heighten the progressive gender identifications that Clover refers to because a) the games are fundamentally ‘reactionary’ in their representations and social politics and b) the experience of the gender-slide which Clover outlines requires an entirely ‘passive’ reception to have any significant psychological effect.

Summary Conclusion

In the horror VR environment of heightened fear and affect, there is much potential for progressive ideological cultivation. Baran and Davis (2015) explain how fear appeals heighten receptivity and impressionability. ‘Focusing specifically on fear-arousing appeals, the Yale group tested the logical assumption that stronger, fear-arousing presentations will lead to greater attitude change’ (Baran & Davis, 2015, p. 103). However, they also note that while ‘[t]his relationship was found to be true to some extent, … variables such as the vividness of the threat’s description and the audience’s state of alarm, evaluation of the communicator, and already-held knowledge about the subject either mitigated or heightened attitude change’ (Baran & Davis, 2015, p. 103). To this latter list, we might add the immersive perceptual effects of VR, or at least recognize them as a vehicle through which to heighten any one of these elements that foster attitude change.

Under the conditions of VR, ‘although the participants know that the game is not real, the brain still sends signals for danger and threats (such as height, the edge of a cliff) and the participants still react as they would in reality’ (Lin, 2017, p. 359). More frighteningly, and perhaps most salient here, are telling questions, posed somewhat dismissively by Lin, that imply heightened schadenfreude as an effect of horror VR (possibly to be aimed at the ‘dehumanized’ social identities listed by Kocurek): ‘Why are we so afraid of playing VR horror games for ourselves but enjoy others’ fright reactions so much? What is the appeal of seeing someone frightened to death in a VR horror exploration, as has been featured in movie marketing activities?’ (Lin, 2017, p. 359). In addition to the frightening implications of these questions to human nature, we submit that in an era of digital doorways it is at least necessary to keep a close eye on an industry of media conglomerates with such a direct connection to the perceptual unconscious with the tools of the heightened effect of Horror VR and ludological connection at their disposal.

The screens, frames, mirrors, and windows of traditional video games, movies, and their ‘marketing activities’ tend to keep the contents on either side of their perpendicular axes separated to some degree (although we understand that what one brings ideologically to the perceptual process is projected into whatever is on the other side, and that content certainly travels its ideology back into the viewer/player, consciously or not). However, the perceptual ‘doors’ of VR even more freely allow passage in both directions, and as interested as the discourse on horror video games has been with what we bring with us into the virtual world (how much fear entertainment we can attain), we should also be very concerned with just what we bring back out with us.