Horror, Interaction and Animation

The plan for Society for Animation Studies 2008. A perfectly horrid panel featuring myself, David Surman and Christian McCrea. We are obviously the cool kids... 

Panel Abstract: Horror, Interaction and Animation

Out of a fired ship, which by no way

But drowning could be rescued from the flame,

Some men leap’d forth, and ever as they came

Near the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay ;

So all were lost, which in the ship were found,

They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship

drowned.

(Donne, 1896  [1633])

In John Donne’s epigraph of 1633 ‘A Burnt Ship’ the rhyming poetic style represents a scene of violent finality with a sense of gruesome balance and elemental vindication. The quality of the form interacts directly with the content, in such a way that the reader is left with a paradoxical sense of a ‘perfect massacre’. The topsy-turvy image of contrasting deaths by fire and water retrieve a sense of orderly beauty from within the carnage, a transitory moment at the epicentre of an otherwise chaotic collision. 

The spirit of Donne’s orderly carnage echoes around the charnel house of the contemporary horror videogame, where the connection between the animated and interactive best summarise a rich juncture of ideological and material practices. Our predisposition to dealing with the codes and conventions of horror are challenged by the essential faculties of interaction, which seem at first sight mutually opposed to the creation of suspense and heightened tension so crucial to the evocation of horror. 

A paradoxical horror, drawn from the senses of gratification and reward bound up in play, directs us to a ‘way of seeing’ the horror scenario for its macabre compositional beauty. The writerly affordances of play bring an art of arrangement to the gameworld that recall the photographs of notorious murder scenes of serial killer Jeffery Dahmer, and the subsequent aestheticisation of death through artists Jake and Dino Chapman, and filmmakers David Fincher and Alejandro Jodorowsky. From the strategic ‘movement’ of corpses of in Splinter Cell and Tenchu, to the dynamics of fragging in Quake, understanding horror in games is significant insofar as it transcends its own generic boundaries to further game-form itself.

The animation of death, written into the code of the enemy, explodes into a dynamic visualization upon activation (your bullet hits their body). The encoding and decoding we are familiar with in the negotiations taking place within any representation are doubled by the literal encoding and decoding/ folding and unfolding of the interactive/animated body, which takes its place in the composite artistic ambitions of the game designer, the level designer, the animator, the programmer, the texture artist and the player, each of whom write into the signified space of bodily horror the orderliness of ‘good’ interaction, with its own particular quality, structure and call for legitimacy.  

The papers in this panel will each in turn explore the ways in which animation and interaction collide in the bodies seen on screen in contemporary and historic videogames.

xoxo Final Girl