Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Dennis Washburn

Second Advisor

Roopika Risam

Abstract

Through a critical analysis of interactive horror, this paper argues that video games can function as ethical diagnostic narratives that uniquely expose systemic failures surrounding women’s bodies and medical authority. Focusing on Silent Hill 3 (2003) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011), I examine how these games render harm legible through player participation. By requiring players to move characters through hostile environments and make decisions within systems that simultaneously grant and restrict control, these games foster identification and complicity by positioning players directly within the structures they critique.

While feminist horror scholarship—notably from Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed—has explored societal anxieties surrounding the female body, this project instead examines the fears of inhabiting that body. Building on this scholarship, alongside video game theory and Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, I trace how medical maltreatment against women persists within contemporary culture. By employing imagery of menstruation and a narrative of forced reproduction, Silent Hill 3 utilizes somatic horror to construct medicalized environments that position the female body as both spectacle and something requiring control. Alice: Madness Returns shifts focus from the body to the mind, foregrounding the psychiatric control of women through fractured environments that mirror the historical delegitimization of women’s trauma and the violence of institutional authority.

Ultimately, I argue that horror video games occupy a productive space within ethical discourse by making these stories navigable and allowing players to engage with them as embodied experiences rather than distant representations. Yet this potential is not without risk, as rendering women’s suffering playable can also reproduce harm through normalization or sexualization. Even so, by placing players within systems of control, these games become sites where the structural conditions of women’s lives are not only represented, but felt, enacted, and contested.

Download

Share

COinS