Marina Cone: Techno-hauntings, Ruins, & Designing Horror Game Spaces - GDoW Aug!

Techno-hauntings, Ruins, and Designing Horror Game Spaces

In our increasingly digitally-mediated world, the stories we tell about our past incorporate technology that subsequently becomes haunted. By remediating old technology to use in games as hauntings, game developers can not only expand their repertoire of scares, but tell more complex stories about the way that we relate to technology. I argue that we can use two frameworks I have developed — a genre of games that are "techno-haunted", and a form of exploration of ruin known as "ludo-archaeology" — to narrativize hauntings in video games. From this, we can prompt a player to reflect on their surroundings in new and more complex ways, subverting old formats and ways of perceiving the world by connecting them to the contemporary mechanics and design methodologies of modern video games.

Marina (she / they) is a recent graduate of a Master of Arts at the University of Otago, having just finished their research into ruins in video games.

Join us for a special Saturday GDoW speaker session! We will be in Studio 30, on the ground floor of Toi Pōneke. Doors open at 4pm and Marina's talk will kick off at 4.15!