Looping the Real: Horror Games and the Metamodern Condition

This article argues that contemporary horror videogames operationalize fear, desire, and trauma as procedural regimes, producing a metamodern realism grounded in recurrence, delay, and endurance. Against postmodern accounts of surface and simulation, titles such as Silent Hill 2 , Fatal Frame II , Majora’s Mask , Shadow of the Colossus , and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice formalize the Lacanian Real not as representational excess but as a repeatable impasse internal to rule systems: a limit that must be traversed through failure, backtracking, and constrained agency. Drawing on psychoanalysis, affect/abjection, and game studies, I argue that horror games retool realism as procedural enactment: the player’s iterative negotiation of impasse, delay, and constraint. Horror games thus render dread, loss, and guilt playable by converting them into unit operations – discrete processes that distribute vulnerability and reproduce compulsion. This metamodern realism oscillates between sincerity and irony, mastery and helplessness, catharsis and anaesthesia. Methodologically, the essay mobilizes debates on simulation and procedural rhetoric (Frasca; Bogost) to specify how games “argue” through rules, and it situates this account against postmodern theories of simulacra and cultural logic (Baudrillard; Jameson).