Directing the Spotlight on NPC Side Characters

The 2021 film Free Guy focuses on a non-playable character (NPC) named Guy in a popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) and his “awakening” from his assigned code. He figures out that as a bank teller, he was only a background character in an open-world game with real-life people as the main players. The…

The Rising Cost of Video Games

Sometime over the past few years, I stopped buying new games, and for a while, I found myself purchasing a lot of “old” games through the PlayStation store. Games like Beyond Two Souls (2013) and Heavy Rain (2010) were some of my new obsessions at the time. I bought these games in a bundle with…

Affirmations: for Gamers <3

“I suck at this game”. I don’t know how many times I have told myself this in the ~12 years I have been playing video games; and no matter how much or how little I mumble these words under my breathe, my performance at whatever game I happen to be playing never gets any better.…

Phobias and the Unintentional “Horror” Games.

Recently, there have been a lot of conversations about video games in relation to horror and terror. Particularly in the case of horror games where the effect is intended. However, I want to talk about a slightly different subject: when non-horror games unintentionally have “horror” or otherwise “scary” elements. First of all, it is important…

Terror in All Quiet on the Western Front

During class on Tuesday as we were discussing Stephen King’s differentiation between horror and terror, one of my peers brought up Edward Berger’s 2022 film adaptation of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front as an example of a truly terrifying piece of media.  As I’ve been haunted by the film ever since I…