The Simulated Weird: Video Games, Weird Fiction, and Gothic Horror

We live in weird times—a moment in history where climate disasters, literary movements, and hyperpop artists are equally described as weird, associations that connect the term to the alien, the catastrophic, and the uncategorisable. Concurrent with these cultural developments has been a flourishing of scholarship on weird fiction, a form of speculative fiction that uses estrangement to depict the breakdown of human rationality and agency. Once a pulp curiosity of 20^th century literature, weird fiction has become a site of critical 21^st century nihilist, posthumanist, and new materialist thought. Much scholarly attention has been given to short stories, novels, films, and television serials. Video games, however, have remained peripheral to weird fiction scholarship, despite their capacity to disrupt the player’s sense of agency through systems-driven interactions. This thesis attempts an intervention. I utilise the methodologies of comparative media studies, game studies, unnatural narratology, critical theory, and critical posthumanism, and draw on three sets of concepts: simulation, narrative architecture, and procedural rhetoric; abjection, monstrosity, the unnatural, the nonhuman, and the unhuman; and exploitation, commodification, and rationalisation. In Chapter I, I map out the changing mode and themes of the literary weird, from its origins in European folklore, Gothic fiction, and Decadent fiction, to its self-reflexive articulation in weird fiction, New Wave science fiction, and New Weird fiction. Specifically, I compare the shifting articulation of the nonhuman, from the late 19^th and early 20^th century cosmic horrors of Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, William H. Hodgson, and H. P. Lovecraft, who posit the nonhuman as radically Other and outside of human history, to the later 20^th and 21^st century weird science fictions of P. K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Thomas Disch, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Miéville, who connect the emergence of the nonhuman to class exploitation, rationalisation, militarism, pollution, and ecosystem collapse. In Chapters II and III, I turn my focus to the simulated weird. I analyse the video games Doom, Silent Hill 2, Inside, and Pathologic 2 through an action-based framework that understands the weird as the outcome of player-machine interactions. Furthermore, I connect the politicised weirds of Inside and Pathologic 2 to New Wave science fiction and New Weird fiction. I argue that 21^st century New Weird fiction and video games converge in their radical reorientation of the weird through systems-driven frameworks, like ecology and new materialism, that transform the weird into an encounter of possibility and awe, rather than paralysis and terror. I contend that though suffering and incomprehension remain key to the weirds of Inside and Pathologic 2, these new weirds go beyond the tragic fatalism of their literary predecessors, to contest and articulate alternatives to our current crises of fascism, capitalism, and climate change.