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| Edited screenshot from Lim, by Merritt Kopas |
This post is in response to Blogs of the Round Table. Trigger warning for street harassment, passing anxiety, rape culture.
Here in
videogameland we relish fear like children relish Halloween.
Actually, we relish Halloween like children relish Halloween.
But our uses of fear are essentially escapist, even hedonistic: we
lust after the adrenaline rush of shocks and frights and cathartic
thrills like the psychologist in Psycho who has a little too much fun delivering the denouement. Games
are very good at fear, too, though when we mention this it's usually
just before we note how bad they are at ~*love*~. But that primal,
animal emotion, that evolutionary hangover that cross-wires nuclear
bombs with teeth and claws, is good for more than rollercoasters. It
has political uses. By harnessing fear we can trap even the most
privileged players in the frightening subjectivity of another. The scariest things are not the ghosts and goblins of seasonal kitsch, but the hidden, suppressed suffering our society produces as if it were a machine specifically constructed for that purpose.
