Let’s Study Horror Games: Belated Memorial Day Weekend Catch-up

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So, this is embarrassing. I actually did conclude the initial 10-episode run of Let’s Study Horror Games by the end of April. But I forgot to cross-post the video here once I uploaded it to YouTube. And then I made an 11th episode, and realized I still hadn’t announced the 10th one. And then weeks went by, and I fretted about, wondering how I should announce both videos on the blog. All of this is much more worry than it’s worth, so I finally just decided to announce them both in this post.

Episode 10 is an extension of some themes I delved into in this old blog post. (I had originally wanted to include Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem in that post, but it takes a lot of persistence to get the “save game deletion” sanity effect in that game, and there’s no way to reliably capture it unless you’ve committed yourself to capturing the entire game.) It marks the end of my formal plan for this series: any subsequent videos I release in it will take a more odds-n-ends approach, with no more multi-episode argumentative arcs.

Episode 11 inaugurates the more odds-n-ends phase. It focuses on sound, including musical scores, and includes within it a video version of this short lesson plan segment.

No transcript this time around, as it would be too unwieldy.

Let’s Study Horror Games, ep 9

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Moving right along! This episode adapts some material from this post, but also includes plenty of new material, as well. Script below the jump.

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Let’s Study Horror Games, ep 8

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I have returned, bearing new content. This episode isn’t based on any prior material—I had been meaning to write on Until Dawn here for ages, and just ended up making a video for this series instead of writing a blog post on it.

Work and other publications slowed down my progress on this series (remember back when I though I’d wrap it up in February—and that was my pessimistic assessment?). But I worked on ep 9 concurrently with this one, so it should be up in just a few days. I’m hoping to conclude the initial 10-episode run of this series by the end of April.

Script below the jump!

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Interesting Games of 2018: A Belated Wrap-Up

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I fell behind on 2018 games thanks to my “Let’s Study Horror Games” series. Things kind of worked out in the end, though, because 2018 ended up being not quite as supersaturated with games as 2017. To be sure, it was a year of big releases, both on the mainstream AAA front and on the indie front. But it didn’t have the sheer firehose volume of 2017.

Since my mid-year post handled January through June, I was originally intending this post to mostly cover games that came out from July 1st onward. It turned out there were plenty of stragglers I missed in the previous post, so that organizational scheme ended up going out the window. A jumble of things below the jump.

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Let’s Study Horror Games, ep 7

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The saga continues. This one’s dedicated to the Siren franchise, which means it’s a more in-depth version of some ideas I first poked around in in the tail end of this lesson plan.

I wanted to finish up this ep because it caps off a four-episode sequence that begain with ep 4. But my hiatus from this series is beginning now. Next up: catching up on interesting games from 2018.

Script below the jump.

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Published: “Teaching (Like) Hannah Frank (1984–2017): A Tribute”

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The Moving Image vol. 18 no. 1 is designated the “Spring 2018” issue, but I didn’t receive my hard copy until this week. And, looking online, lo and behold, it’s up on JSTOR and Project Muse. So I guess it officially exists now, and it’s high time to announce it.

There was a flurry of activity I was involved with when Hannah Frank passed away in August 2017. Much of that culminated in the SCMS special event that I co-organized. But most of the contributors to that event also contributed to a special tribute in The Moving Image. Due to the general sluggishness of academic publishing, that’s just coming out now. The tribute contains short appreciations written by Mihaela Mihailova, Jen Bircher, Robert Bird, Mariana Johnson, Ryan Pierson, Alla Gadassik, Tim Palmer, and myself.

Let’s Study Horror Games, pt 6

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I did it! I fulfilled my self-imposed goal of uploading four of these in December. (I also accidentally fulfilled my prediction that I’d post one of these on Christmas, which is when I actually uploaded the video.)

One consequence of sticking to this video-making schedule is that I’m now behind on playing games, and won’t be able to post any further run-downs of interesting games of 2018 until January. Following that, I’m going to be diving back into some peer-reviewed work. Not sure when I’ll return to this series, but rest assured: more is planned.

(This one serves as an “enhanced edition” of the lesson plan I originally posted here. Very happy to have a chance to tweak this material further, as it remains one of the favorite in-class discussions I’ve ever had with students.) And even though I don’t credit him in the video, I must give a shout-out to Adam Hart, whose writings on slasher films have been a frequent inspiration.

Script below the jump.

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