8-bit nostalgia and the uncanny: Horror as critique in Twine games. Issue 2 (1st October 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Osborne, Heather
• Is Part Of: Horror studies. Volume 9:Issue 2(2018)
• Page Start: 213
• Page End: 230
• Publication Date: 2018-10-01
• Subjects: Horror in mass media -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Horror -- Periodicals; 700.4164
• DOI: 10.1386/host.9.2.213_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-3275

Abstract

As the video game medium has matured, nostalgia for earlier games and systems has grown, including through commodification of nostalgia by video game companies. Nostalgia contrasts a constructed ideal past in tension with an inadequate present. This doubled structure echoes how the uncanny distorts familiar spaces with unfamiliar dread. I explore how three indie Twine games create horror through their rhetorical and mechanical appeal to nostalgia. Tom McHenry's Horse Master (2013) problematizes players' empathy in resource sims; Michael Lutz's the uncle who works for nintendo (2014a) examines the dangers of over-immersion in video games; and Christine Love's Even Cowgirls Bleed (2013) critiques violent gameplay mechanics by taking them to their horrific extreme. These games' aesthetic, mechanical, and thematic appeal to players' nostalgia leads to a defamiliarization and ironization of the familiar, resulting in an uncanny horror. As a result, these games use the horror genre to critique unproblematized and commodified nostalgia in the video game community.