Horror in Video Games: There's Seeing -- and Then There's Realizing What You're Seeing

If you have followed a number of my recent posts, I've had an issue on my mind about the way that we see as spectators and the way that we see as players in video games (in fact, for what it's worth, the article below used to be titled "Seeing as a Spectator, Seeing as a Player in Video Games"). Largely this interest has something to do with the fact that my long suffering wife often sits with me as I play games, and I am frequently interested in the sorts of things that she sees and that I don't and vice versa while playing.

Much of this started to come to a head when she was thoroughly disgusted by my playthroughs of Dead Space and Dead Space 2, so much so that she abandoned me to my play. Given that I had failed to see much of the repugnant images in a horror game, I started thinking about how play sometimes interferes with seeing and what consequences that has to appreciating the full extent of a game's presentation.

This is the result:

Horror in Video Games: There's Seeing -- and Then There's Realizing What You're Seeing