Bursts of static, wayward pixels, frames dropping at random from a dimly lit video—in most video games, these effects are mistakes. They interrupt the immersion and so degrade the quality of the work. Sometimes they render an otherwise respectable game unplayable. Why, then, do they produce the opposite effect in horror games? How can they intrigue and electrify a player when they frustrate in every other circumstance?

Sigmund Freud describes the “uncanny” as a crossing of boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar. It just so happens that horror is a genre primarily concerned with the crossing of boundaries, primarily those holding our reality together. I’ve heard that the appeal of horror games is that they allow people to experience fear in a safe, controllable environment, but a good horror game seeks to undermine our reality. It reaches out to us from beyond the screen.

The Flat, for example, is a game that features a first person point-of-view filtered through a VHS-like distortion. It shakes and scrolls in strange directions as you attempt to navigate the titular flat. Whenever you move between areas, the screen flashes with static. The audio is somewhat garbled, as if it’s being played underwater. Though these effects give the impression of glitches, they’re clearly intentional. They’re so out of place, so inherently wrong. You know without being told that something terrible happened in this flat. And if the medium keeping it inside your computer is fraying, what’s to stop it from happening to you?

While “playing” The Flat, I realised that it reminded me of the video game Gone Home. However, one is a piece of digital poetry and the other one is an adventure video game; two things that would normally be considered very different from each other. Still, the lines are quite blurred when it comes to the nature of The Flat. It is not an actual video game and for that matter, Gone Home can not be considered digital poetry either. The dulness, mystery, spookiness and darkness of both works creates this characteristically video game ‘vibe’ that we see in The Flat.

In our posts we’ve all used the word “play” to describe the action we are doing when navigating this piece of work. In reality we are never actually “playing” anything, we are rather just clicking to specific areas that have already been indicated to us and are the only option for moving forward. Moving on, what we read are not clues that will help you figure out the game or come to a solution but words of poetry. Yet the combination of the three different ‘layers’ of The Flat; the music and sounds, the imagery and the text, create the whole story behind the meaning of this particular work. The theme of horror the keeps popping up in all of these works of interactive fiction we have seen is, also usually associated with adventure and thriller video games. Those three layers are also the ones found in video games. So could we say that videos games are in a way digital fiction or vice versa?

The eerie and the uncanny are two similar descriptions of situations which invoke a sense of uneasiness. In fact, the two are so interrelated that definitions of uncanny often include a feeling of eeriness (which doesn’t help when trying to differentiate between the two). In class, we described the eerie as something present when there’s supposed to be nothing, or nothing present when there’s supposed to be something. This description is not far off from the one presented in “The Uncanny” which states “everything is uncanny that out to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light”(4). Both involve something being present when it typically isn’t. They also both rely on some degree of unknown. Once that uncertainty disappears and you know exactly what has been presented to you, any suspicions go out the window and take the eerie and the uncanny with it.

However, there are small subtleties that distinguish the two which I better understood after exploring The Flat by Andy Campbell. The Flat is undoubtedly an uncanny piece of work. The fact that you are placed in this unknown environment with no sense of what is going on captures the uncanny feeling of something being oddly familiar. To further push the point, the last line of text states “what you didn’t see was what happened when you weren’t here”. While the setting of an apartment is a familiar scene to most, the fact that you don’t know what’s going on, and the odd placement of certain objects throughout the flat create suspicion. Furthermore, the lone figure outside of the end of the work provides an example of how questioning if “an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,”(5) contributes to the uncanny.

With the eerie, things show up when they aren’t expected and more so contribute to a feeling of fear than the uncanny. With our example from class, you know people are supposed to be roaming our campus, so if one day everyone mysteriously disappeared, that would be eerie. With the uncanny, everyone didn’t disappear, but you notice they seem a bit off. People might be acting differently than usual, or there’s a weird vibe in the air. In the Flat, the eerie could correlate to returning and expecting people to be over but they aren’t. When going through The Flat, I assumed I was alone and not expecting anyone so I wasn’t surprised by the lack of people. However, even without knowing much about the apartment, I had a feeling that something felt off. That is what is core to the uncanny.

In the scope of the class so far, this piece utilizes interactivity as a tool for storytelling like we’ve seen in most of the works we’ve examined. This interactivity gives the reader agency in the sense that they are able to decide which areas they want to explore. Even though there is no explicit end goal, this work encourages multiple plays as the reader tries to understand the story.