Our project name finally came to us! We fell in love with A Pretty Terrifying Project, so we thought, why not just keep it? So our official project name is now…*drumroll* A Pretty Terrifying Project: Examining Feminist Theme Co-occurrences Across Horror Video Games. Ultimately, this was easy to come up with once we narrowed the scope of our project.

Everything seems to be on track, and we have a clear plan heading into spring break. The team has some smaller housekeeping things to take care of before spring break. Truly will be annotating some of the code in our current repo so I can navigate the existing code when working on it, and Michael will be updating some of the visualizations. In the next phase, we are focusing on website development, some close reading, and writing. I’m looking forward to working on the website during the break. I enjoy web development, so this is sort of a fun thing to do during my very uneventful spring break.

The team and I have each picked a game that falls into one of our key co-occurrences to do a close read during the spring break. Everyone’s pretty excited to work on these since we all chose areas and games we’re particularly interested in. Michael will be looking into Doki Doki Literature Club (girlhood + captivity), a cute, yet psychologically horrific game, while Truly will be working on Bloodborne (motherhood + violence), a dark, gothic, Lovecraftian-esque game. I, on the other hand, haven’t picked a game yet, but will focus on one that explores the co-occurrence of embodiment and violence. I’m interested to see how this collaborative writing experience pans out for us.

We’re trying to keep it light and enjoy the break, but we also took some time last night to plan ahead for after spring break and the final stretch! We’ve decided that ‘finished’ for us is a well-developed website that displays our visuals that holds important contextual analysis, such as related theoretical frameworks and close readings. We feel that this part may be the bulk of the work going forward, and we want to spend time ensuring we do thorough research and writing at this stage.

I think that the pretty terrifying team has a solid sense of what needs to be done to hit our upcoming milestones. Enjoy the spring break, everyone! Don’t work too hard!