Bernard Perron is Full Professor of Cinema and Video Game at the University of Montreal, Canada. He has written Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (2012) in the Landmark Video Games book series he is co-editing. He has edited Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play (2009). Among others, he has also co-edited The Video Game Theory Reader I (2003), The Routledge Companion to Video Games Studies (2014), and Video Games and the Mind: Essays on Cognition, Affect and Emotions (2016).
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