This article uses Bolter and Grusin's notion of remediation to explore analog media technologies-cinema, photography, cartography, television, and radio-in digital horror videogames. Such moments illustrate what Lister et al. term the "technological imaginary" of both old and new media technological imaginary of both old and new media. Old media technologies contribute a sense of the real perceived as lacking in digital media, yet central to a generically-significant impression of embodiment. Critical theorization of these forms within media studies illuminate their function within digital video game texts; such processes illustrating the cultural, institutional, and aesthetic meanings and mythologies of both analog and digital media, while continuing traditional use of media technologies within discourses of horror and the supernatural.

This article explores construction and representation of masculinity in the “survival horror” video-game series Silent Hill. Noting the dominance of traditional male characters and masculine themes within the video-game medium, the Silent Hill franchise is seen as deviating from this assured, aggressive, and unexamined machismo. The series' protagonists are instead nondescript, flawed, domesticated men—unstable, angst-ridden, and unreliable in a manner that interrogates the dominant mode of masculine gameplay. The problematic nature of video-game interactivity and identity, the extent to which gameplay can exist independent of playable protagonists, and the gendering of video-game goals and objectives are considered. Despite conforming to certain masculine activities—fighting, collecting weaponry, exploring and dominating space—Silent Hill complicates such aspects through the game avatars' unremarkable abilities, limiting supplies, frantic combat styles, frustrating spatial progress, experiences of entrapment, and a pervading sense of helplessness, exemplified by the games' often deterministic linear structures. Overall, this article argues that the games encourage critical distance from the male game characters, the rescue missions they attempt and often fail, the monstrous images of femininity they imagine, and the voyeuristic practices in which they engage.

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This article explores the construction of Silent Hill-Konami's survival horror video game series-as art. Adopting a discursive approach to the notion of ''art,'' the extent to which traditional formations of cultural value are mobilized is explored across three aspects of the series' first four installments. The Silent Hill game texts are examined as evoking formal devices of art cinema, including realism, ambiguity, psychological complexity, and self-reflexivity. Next the games' advertising is considered as emphasizing these qualities, privileging narrative over ludic gaming aspects. Finally the games' representation in the documentary ''The Making of Silent Hill 2'' is discussed as positioning the series within frameworks of artistry and authorship.

/ This paper explores Konami's horror videogame franchise Silent Hill according to recent discussions of immersion, alienation and critical simulation. Silent Hill constitutes an extremely selfreflexive series, frequently acknowledging its videogame status and interrogating the medium as experience and text. This, paradoxically, produces an experience of simultaneous critical distance and intensified engagement. Clumsy controls, grotesque imagery and deterministic gameplay disrupt player immersion. The digital emulation of analogue media and its distortion denies technological transparency. Silent Hill invites comparisons to Brechtian theatre and filmmaking through its estranged protagonists, multiple `alternative' spaces, and pervasive `unpleasure'. Yet while encouraging critical engagement with the videogame process, these aspects also contribute to the games' horror affect. Anti-immersive elements rely upon repellent audiovisuals. Analogue disintegration is employed to signify evil, corruption and contamination. Contradicting assumptions that emphasizing construction and enunciation disrupts identification, immersion and illusion, such aspects are fundamental to Silent Hill's operation as horror text.