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You might recall that about a year ago, I had the pleasure of attending and participating in the Thinking After Dark conference (my notes: one, two, and three). Now, several of the papers presented at that conference (including, I'm honored to report, my own) are available in the latest issue.
Half of the issue is in French, but for those of you who (like me) don't speak that beautiful language, there's still a lot of quality to digest here. I particularly enjoyed William Huber's Catch and Release: Ludological Dynamics in Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, and Clara Fernāndez-Vara's Dracula Defanged: Empowering the Player in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which, as she clearly points out, is not a horror game).
My own paper is about Japanese culture as viewed through the lens of horror games. I've gone ahead and posted the slides (2.4mb pdf) from the talk (though they might make more sense if you read the paper first). My idea is that Japanese horror games, even when trying to appear western, are throughly rooted in their home culture, and by studying Japanese horror game tropes we can actually find clues to the way that Japan works as a whole. I'm also really interested in the idea that culture shock--this unbalanced feeling that we get by seeing works that were developed with motives we do not understand--is a huge affordance to horror because it is so unbalancing. As I've written here before, I'm sure a big part of the draw of Asian horror movies is that they do not follow American cliches, and without the bedrock of comfortable patterns to assist us, we feel out of control and, consequently very scared.
Anyway, check out the issue! It's pretty awesome to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal, especially alongside such other interesting research.
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