The World of Scary Video Games

Bernard Perron is Full Professor of Cinema at the University of Montreal, Canada. He has coedited The Video Game Theory Reader 1 (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), The Routledge Companion to Video Games Studies (2014), as well as Figures de violence (2012), The Archives: Post-Cinema and Video Game Between Memory and the Image of the Present (2014) and Z pour Zombies (2015). He has edited Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (2009). He has also written Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (2012) in The Landmark Video Games book series he is co-editing. His research and writings concentrate on video games, interactive cinema, the horror genre, and on narration, cognition, and the ludic dimension of narrative cinema. More information can be found at his research team website: (soon to be changed to LUDOV, Laboratoire universitaire de documentation et d'observation vidéoludiques/Video Vames Observation and Documentation University Lab).

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: The Genre

Chapter One
The Horror: Falling into the Arena of Video Game Genres
Crossing Paths with a “Monstrous” Concept
The Need to Use a New Combo
Finding Some Directions

Chapter Two
“You have once again entered the world of survival horror. Good luck!”
Loading Screen…
A Species of Their Own
A Cross-Media Genre
The (Survival) Horror Genre

Chapter Three
Something to Fear: From the Fictional to the Videoludic
Gut Reactions
The Answer Is Fear
Fear-Motivated Actions

Chapter Four
Building the Pyramid of Scary Video Games: Toward the Scare Tactics of the Videoludic Horror Genre
The Gaming Apparatus: Technical and Formal Aspects
The Videoludic Treatment of Horror
Figures of Interactivity, Actional Modalities and Scare Tactics
The Pyramid of Scary Video Games

Part II: The History

Chapter Five
Thinking about the History of the Videoludic Horror Genre, Part I: From Teleology to the Initial Cluster
Teleology, This Monster (Before 1981)
The Scattered Generic Cluster (1981-1991)

Chapter Six
Thinking about the History of the Videoludic Horror Genre, Part II: Crystallization and Bipolarity
The Crystallization of the Survival Horror (1992-2005)
The Antipodal Clusters: Fight or Flight (2006-2016)
Scary Virtual Reality (2017 and the future…)

Part III: The Scare Tactics

Chapter Seven
The Frightening Regimes of Vision
The Experience of Gamership
Third-Person Frightening Regime of Vision
First-Person Frightening Regime of Vision
Seeing Is Not Everything

Chapter Eight
The Frightening Regimes of Audition
Third-Person and First-Person Frightening Regimes of Audition
Synch to the Rendering of the Gruesomeness
(In) A Fearful Mood
Dreadful Listening and Terrifying Forewarnings

Chapter Nine
Scary Playgrounds
Setting the Mood
Caught up in the Maze
Unsettling Progression

Chapter Ten
Monsters Meet Scared Player(-Characters)
Some Kind of Monster
Figures Under Threat
Seek and Destroy
Surviving Horror

Afterword

References
Ludography

Index