Games That Haunt Us

Stephanie Farnsworth is a PhD candidate at the University of Sunderland, UK. She is founder and Director of Events for MultiPlay, an international community of games scholars and researchers that hosts 4-5 online conferences each year. On the editorial board for MultiPlay, Stephanie is currently working on the Liberate Me Plenty anthology (2023) on queer game studies as well as a special edition journal on The Last of Us. Her research focuses upon ‘mutant theory’, expanding upon monster theory and examining the relationship audiences have to biotechnology. She writes about body horror, bodily transformations and biofuturism.

Games That Haunt Us is a vital and unsettling collection that reveals just how powerfully the Gothic animates videogame worlds. From haunted environments to monstrous bodies, its chapters illuminate why Gothic games speak so urgently to our cultural moment. This is essential reading for anyone interested in games, the Gothic, or the uncanny intersections between the two.

• List of Contributors Foreword Ewan Kirkland IntroductionStephanie Farnsworth (University of Sunderland, UK)Part 1: Defining Gothic Videogames1. Gothic Epistemology and Space in Metroidvania Games: Navigating Hollow KnightJack Orchard (University of Oxford, UK)2. Scheme-Mother: Exploring Narrative Tension Through Southern and European Gothic Influences in Destiny 2’s The Witch QueenKira Jones (Emory University, USA)3. A Matter Not Yours: Gothic Metalepses and Determinist Horror in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Hearts of StoneAndrin Albrecht (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany)4. Breeding Unease and Distrust through Disruptive Design in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs Peter Howell (University of Portsmouth, UK)Part 2: Gothic Environments and Walking with the Undead 5. The Mourning Tree: Ghosts, Hauntings and Learning to Grieve through Everybody’s Gone to the RaptureKris Darby (Liverpool Hope, UK)6. Haunted, Hunted & Harrowed: Resident Evil 2’s Police Department Maze of TensionEoin Murray (Falmouth University, UK)7. “It always ends like this”: Temporality and the Refrain in NieR: AutomataSian Tomkinson (University of Western Australia)8. Animals, the Authentic and Gothic Fantasy : the Implicit Moral Mechanics of Killing in The Witcher 3: Wild HuntMichael Rübsamen (Lund University, Sweden) and Magnus Johansson (Lund University, Sweden) 9. EcoCosmicism: Re-Reading Lovecraft in the Wake of the Climate CrisisJemma Morgan (Independent Scholar, UK)Part 3: Reanimating the Gothic Body through Videogames10. "I Want A Girl": Outlast: Whistleblower, the Feminised Male Protagonist and Intergender Body HorrorThea Bamber (Roehampton University, UK)11. “God Doesn’t Love You. Not Like I Do”: Exploring Queer Design, Posthumanism and the Chthulucene in Outlast IIZarin Rafiuddin (University of Leeds, UK)12. From Ikkyu to Undertale: A Transnational Development of the Animated Skeleton in VideogamesJames T. McCrea (National University, UK)13. Upgraded models: The demise of the clone in Star Wars: Jedi Fallen OrderStephanie Farnsworth (University of Sunderland, UK)14. Uncanny Identities and the Existential Posthuman Gothic in SOMA and The SwapperKevin Veale (Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand)Index