Marc C. Santos and Sarah E. White, "Playing With Ourselves: A Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Fear/desire are the same
- We engage our psychology in confronting horror in survival horror games
- Psychological repression of horror (the death drive, the Lacanian Real) allows us to enter into subjectivity
- Player as defender/preserver of subjectivity, re-asserting stability and the Symbolic Order
- The player as champion of the symbolic order partakes in two kinds of activity/pleasure: Proaretic pleasure in resolving action/threats; hermeneutic pleasure in ordered narration, solving mysteries, linearity and coherence (Barthes)
- Silent Hill, the law of the Father
- Repressed desire for nihilistic assimilation (with the pre-subjective maternal) in the form of zombie/monstrous consumption of the self
- Eradication and repressing of this desire by killing monsters
- Loss of language as key to the (impossible) return to the Real and transformation/assimilation into abject monstrosity
- Monstrous mother-Others as final bosses (maternal phallus: umbilical cord)
- In addition to the proaretic pleasure in destroying the abject Real, players must attempt to provide the ontological meaning/structure and create coherence (hermeneutic pleasure)
- Narration as symbolic killing of multiplicity, ambiguity in lieu of One true self, illusory objectivity
- Gameplay as therapy for the disturbed avatar (player as detached analyst)
- Silent Hill 3 calls into question this distance by suggesting that we have shared our avatar's psychosis and delusions in our attempts to restore the Symbolic order
- Digital games as a safe space to engage with a simulated Lacanian Real and then turn it off and return to an unquestioned (but no less illusory) Symbolic order and social reality