From Saviour to Colonial Perpetrator: Manipulating Player Empathy in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Origins

Survival horror is a subgenre of the action-adventure genre whose main game design features were established by Alone in the Dark (Infogrames, 1992) and Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996). Unlike more conventional games that aim to offer players a seamless gameplay experience, survival horror typically features a set of mechanics that enfeeble the playable character and work against the player’s attempt to achieve the game’s ludic goal. Although recent survival horror games feature a more heterogeneous game design and sometimes more powerful playable characters, early survival horror games rarely deviated from the Resident Evil formula. What is interesting about these early games, also referred to as classical survival horror, is that their propensity to defy the dominant game design norms is paralleled on an ideological level where, in keeping with the Gothic tradition, they challenge existing power structures. While on a more explicit level classical survival horror games usually contest patriarchal gender power relations, a deeper insight into the genre will reveal that some games provide a critique of the dominant culture that is more far-reaching. This article argues that the classical survival horror games Silent Hill 2 (Team Silent, 2001) and Silent Hill: Origins (Climax Studios, 2007) convey a postcolonial critique of the colonial assumptions of gameplay in action-adventure games. These games cue players to empathise with the playable characters whose agency in the game worlds they inhabit amounts to the perpetration of colonial violence against entities representing racial otherness. After several hours of gameplay, the games highlight the immorality of the playable character’s deeds and reveal the player’s complicity in colonial violence. This way, they raise awareness with respect to the colonial dimension of gameplay and question the uneasy relationship with perpetration that action games entertain in their subservience to the military-industrial-entertainment complex.