Resident Evil

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 4

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Episode 4 is up! And, I have to say, at this point the first three feel like an elaborate throat-clearing exercise. This is where the deep dive really begins. Script below the jump.

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Let’s Study Horror Games

Ian Bryce JonesLeave a comment

I’ve begun a new series of “Let’s Study” videos on horror games, just in time for Halloween. This first episode explores the historical roots of the survival horror genre, which means that it’s a new manifestation of this lesson plan.

Over the summer, I was working on a peer-reviewed video essay that’s quite thematically dense. As a result, this video feels a little bit shaggy to me: loose, casual, searching for a central raison d’être. I constantly had to remind myself that this is for general audiences, and not every audiovisual argument needs to be an airtight assemblage of well-researched examples.

The unqualified good news? This video is a massive improvement on the previous blog post version of this lesson plan. The future videos in this series will be a mix of original material and “enhanced remakes” of previous lesson plans.

Transcript below the fold, as usual.

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Lesson Plan: The Visual Language of Survival Horror

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two_opening_doors

Ian here—

What follows is a two-part post, combining lesson plans from two separate days of my course “Comparative Media Poetics: Cinema and Videogames.” The learning objectives for the course centered around three main analytical questions, which animated the course and which students were expected to respond to in their written assignments. When looking at a given text, the course asked: 1) How is this particular film or particular game put together? 2) What effects and functions are engendered by its specific construction? 3) How has the historical development of the medium shaped this construction?

All three of these questions come together in a particularly potent way during this week, where we took a close look at game developers who developed a visual style out of technological necessity, but then paired that style with a genre that worked well with its specific effects. On the agenda: 1990s-era survival horror games.

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