I wanted to write a blog post this week, and I wanted it to be about Anatomy. The problem was that I didn’t know what about Anatomy was keeping me thinking about it. In truth, there wasn’t any one thing. The limited vision, layout of the house, intriguing voice clips, and especially the imagery of the house “swallowing” the player all stuck with me. Unifying these elements was a glitchy aesthetic. Anatomy acts as though it’s broken, and the formal elements which make it feel broken are, in large part, what make it horrific.
Video games are expected to work. When they don’t work as intended or expected, players experience the moment of dysfunction as a “glitch”. The first run through Anatomy is largely glitchless. our exploration of the house is spooky, but the spookiness is provided through typical horror game tropes: dark hallways, spooky recordings, creaking doors. It’s scary in the way that Gone Home is scary – through atmosphere. The only hints of what’s to come are the VHS home video-style scanlines that cross the screen periodically.
As the game loops, it becomes increasingly broken. Strange polygons appear in even stranger places. Doors are phased on top of each other and into the ground. The audio recordings, previously obscured only by typical cassette fuzz, become increasingly distorted and loop in strange ways. Even the screen which introduces the game changes – transforming from a blue screen featuring a date and time, a classic of VHS recordings, to a red screen stating that “you never came back”. At one point, the house’s teeth slowly clip through the floor and around you, chewing the player from beyond the game space. Even the repetition itself can feel like a glitch. Games are supposed to be just as you left them on repeat visits. Anatomy is not.
Through intentional glitch-like behavior, Anatomy transforms from a game which presents a horror scenario into a game which is itself a horror scenario. Video games and their trappings, even those of horror games, are a source of comfort for many. Anatomy not only subverts the home by making it unhomey, it also subverts the game by making it ungamey, unsafe.
As I was thinking about this concept, I wondered if there might be a term for it. My first instinct was to call it “glitch horror”, and as it happens I found a paper from the Digra Conference 2017 which also talks about this concept with that term. However, writer Emily E. Crawford puts “glitch horror” not in the context of the video games themselves. Instead, the author connects it to fanfiction. She discusses the popular “creepypasta” BEN Drowned, a story about a malfunctioning copy of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask which haunts its players. She compares this experience of the familiar game becoming strange to the Freudian uncanny (Crawford 8). Indeed, this concept is popular, with Sonic.exe being another example of a horrific malfunctioning game within fanfiction. Anatomy brings this concept to life. Although its malfunctioning is intentional, it acts as though it is not, replicating many unintentional glitches found in other games. It would be easy to imagine a horror fanfiction describing a game like Gone Home behaving, instead, like Anatomy.
Anatomy recalls some other games, such as Eternal Darkness or Metal Gear Solid, which try to scare players through pretending to erase or reading memory card data. Doki Doki Literature Club, too, makes explicit references to its medium. Anatomy takes these meta concepts and applies them in horrific scenarios. The game exemplifies how games are uniquely positioned to use their formal elements and tropes to subvert audience expectations. Unlike film or literature, even the most well-intentioned games break. Game creators know that their audiences know this, and they can use this audience knowledge to have players asking “is the game glitching on purpose?”
You can read Emily E. Crawford’s paper here (and I highly recommend that you do!):
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/150_DIGRA2017_FP_Crawford_Glitch_Horror.pdf
The use of these glitches was definitely interesting in this game. I have experienced very similar glitches in other games (often because my laptop was struggling to run the game). But in games like The Sims, these unintentional glitches become comical and maybe at times frustrating. But the way these glitches are intentionally placed just makes the game even more unsettling.
Anatomy’s brand of horror definitely centers on how it subverts the player’s expectations, and glitches are a huge part of that. I think your analysis of this “glitch horror” is very cool, and it got me thinking about other situations in which glitches, instead of being thought of as problems to be fixed, end up defining a game or playstyle. The comical Goat Simulator games are a great example, in which the developers confess to have purposefully left in all glitches except those that crash the game for humorous effect. Another example is the speedrunning community. Speedrunners frequently exploit glitches to move through games quickly in the hopes of getting a top speed. I’ve always found it notable that in many games with large speedrunning communities, certain glitches are very well known and documented, and yet the game developers never patch them out – perhaps in recognition of their importance to the speedrunning community.
This post was extremely thought-provoking. My first blogge post was focused around sonic.EXE and its relation to the fourth wall, and the idea of glitch horror is an additional element that I had not considered. I think it may also be useful to think about this concept in relation to other forms of media, namely movies. The trope of evil malfunctioning technology has been a common trope in horror movies for decades, and is clearly one that translates extremely well to the medium of video games. I’m curious about the social implications of why this specific fear is so commonly used in the horror genre, and why it remains so effective. As you discussed, this fear is crucially linked to the notion of safety. What does that say about how the idea of safety is constructed? I’m also curious if this fear is universal and would be similarly terrifying for people of anyone or nationality.