Survival Horror (Resident Evil 7)

I didn't play Resident Evil 7. I watched a YouTuber play it (ChristopherOdd, who was fantastic). I heard great things about the Resident Evil series, but seeing as I get terrified playing First Person Shooters, I felt like it was...unlikely I would make it through more than a scene of RE. And yeah, I had trouble even watching the playthrough. Gory, terrifying, Southern American Gothic meets biohazardous infestation indistinguishable from literal demons.

The Resident Evil series is, along with Alone in the Dark, responsible for inventing the genre of Survival Horror, a genre characterized by, as Laurie N. Taylor writes, "Learning to run, or unlearning to always fight" (Perron, 46). Survival horror expects your character to be weak, surrounds you with utterly horrifying environments, and teaches you to conserve and manage scarce resources. Some monsters in are unkillable; success means running and hiding. As Carl Therrien notes, "horror-themed games have emerged in a great variety of ludic genres," including side-scrolling action, shooters of all varieties, point and click adventures, fighting games, text-adventures, RPGs, MMORPGs, racing, and strategy (Perron, 32). I'd add rogue-likes and walking sims as well. This is fascinating, and something I'd really like to come back to. All games, it seems, might have horror elements. Killing things in a FPS game is horrible. Trying not to get killed by a monster in a text adventure or dungeon crawler is horrible. Video games in general: kinda horrible. Why?! I need to analyze whether I think this is a fundamental feature of video games.

The walking sim example is of course especially interesting to me. When you have no way to defend yourself, every game functions somewhat like a walking sim (compare Amnesia and Gone Home). Are walking sims just the latest evolution of survivor horror games? RE7 looks and works a lot like Gone Home (a comparison pointed out by my friend Doug Eacho), although eventually in RE7 you do acquire weaponry and the gumption to fight back effectively. Much of the experience, though, is the same: wandering through a foreign space, exploring new objects and rooms, feeling scared about the unknown.

In RE7, the unknown turns out to be demons, cannibals, monstrous insects, your possessed wife, etc., and this makes me think the distinction between walking sims and survival horror is *really* the fact that fear in RE7 is justified for the masculine player. It's ok to be scared, if what you're scared of is that utterly gruesome. It's not ok to be scared if all along it turned out you were just learning to know your sister better.

And the gender tensions are rampant here! The monstrous feminine emerges early and often. The father figure can't die and chases you around with chainsaws, true. But the mother figure transforms into something spider-like and births demon insects from a pouchy, insect-nest of a womb that has abruptly developed around her genitals."You're not afraid of a girl, are you?" she shrieks at one point. But her voice drops and doubles when her monstrosity emerges. In another scene, a sign says "prove you're a real man and stick your hand down this pig's throat." A real man does horrifying acts, even if he's scared, and the game makes that ok (because who wouldn't be goddamn scared of that).

PS, I just got my copy of Queer Game Studies edited by Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw, and I'm really looking forward to reading the game through that lens. Also think about this in the context of Dark Souls, which Natalie Deam, Doug Eacho, and Paul Wallace explicated through a queer lens really fascinatingly last year at a session of Stanford's Critical Gaming Workshop.

#queer #women #WalkingSim #struggle #masculinity #academic