8-bit nostalgia and the uncanny: Horror as critique in Twine games

Abstract

As the video game medium has matured, nostalgia for earlier games and systems has grown, including through commodification of nostalgia by video game companies. Nostalgia contrasts a constructed ideal past in tension with an inadequate present. This doubled structure echoes how the uncanny distorts familiar spaces with unfamiliar dread. I explore how three indie Twine games create horror through their rhetorical and mechanical appeal to nostalgia. Tom McHenry’s Horse Master (2013) problematizes players’ empathy in resource sims; Michael Lutz’s the uncle who works for nintendo (2014a) examines the dangers of over-immersion in video games; and Christine Love’s Even Cowgirls Bleed (2013) critiques violent gameplay mechanics by taking them to their horrific extreme. These games’ aesthetic, mechanical, and thematic appeal to players’ nostalgia leads to a defamiliarization and ironization of the familiar, resulting in an uncanny horror. As a result, these games use the horror genre to critique unproblematized and commodified nostalgia in the video game community.