If there’s one thing I learned in the Gothic literature course I took last term, it’s that Gothic is almost impossible to define as a genre (if it’s even a genre at all). In that course, we studied everything from “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe to “The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter to “Lacrimosa” by Silvio-Moreno Garcia. All these writers are from different backgrounds, countries, and centuries; they write about diverse subjects in distinct styles. Yet all of them wound up in the same Gothic literature course. So, what is Gothic? Well, my classmates and I decided it was a loose collection of tropes and themes: haunting, repression, excess, the loss of the self, sexual deviancy, all that good stuff. But I noticed something else that all the stories we studied had in common: a powerless protagonist. Gothic texts are meant to unsettle, to question humanist ideas of “man” as the arbiter of his own destiny, to cast doubt on notions of natural and benevolent progress, and to show off some fucking awesome monsters. It’s difficult to accomplish any of that with a musclebound hero capable of slaying any evil and changing world history. Yet gaming narratives are defined by the player’s active participation, usually in the form of just such a musclebound hero. This begs the question: can a video game be Gothic?

I’ll admit my question is a little stupid; it’s obvious some video games can be Gothic. After all, just because the player is active doesn’t necessarily mean they’re powerful. In fact, most horror games are frightening because they strip the player of power and force you to hide in the shadows. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a classically Gothic horror game with a physically weak protagonist. According to one of its designers, Thomas Grip, the idea in The Dark Descent was “that the darkness itself should be an enemy.” You cannot kill the darkness. You can’t escape it either, not for long anyways. Take this all-encompassing terror and add a dark castle, repressed memories, plus a few forbidden magics, and voila! You’ve got a Gothic video game. But here’s the thing: I’ve never played The Dark Descent. I’ve barely played any horror games at all, for two reasons. One, I scare easily. Two, I like pretending I’m a big man with a big sword who can kill anyone who annoys me. Are those things related? Maybe, but it doesn’t change the fact that when I ask if a video game can be Gothic, I’m most interested in my favourite type of game. Y’know, the one full of big men with big swords? I’m talking about action RPGs, and in the next couple of posts, I’ll look at a few of these games to see if any can truly be called “Gothic.”

The title image for this post, “edgar allen poe-tato flakes” by Rakka, is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.