Abstract
The horror video game genre, shaped by a male-dominated industry, has historically centralized masculine perspectives in both creation and representation. Women and the LGBTQ+ community are underrepresented both in production roles as developers and designers, and also in game content, where playable characters often portray characters through harmful tropes, such as sexualization and female monstrosity. While horror has been examined in film and literature studies, horror video games are underexplored as cultural artifacts. This project builds on an earlier phase of work on a constructed dataset horror_games_feminist_themes where keywords were web-scraped from Wikipedia’s Category: Horror video games tree to identify possible recurring feminist themes. This project now aims to refine and transform the dataset into a public-facing website that visualizes and interprets patterns that emerge from the dataset, making them visible and analyzable.

List of Participants
Naila – Project Manager
Lead project and meetings; organize and keep track of tasks and calendar; assist with other roles (visual design, development, etc); outreach on a social media platform

Michael – Visual Design
Identifying visual layout for data visualizations being created; assisting in the layout for UI of site; double-checking visual accessibility (wording, color contrast etc.)

Truly – Developer
Coding; documentation for the project; setting up website; assisting with research.

Enhance the Humanities
When we consider horror studies, scholars such as Barbara Creed argue that these genres encode themes of sexuality, reproduction, and maternity by framing the narrative of women as monstrous. Expanding further allows us to extend those ideas into tropes of fear and survival. While all of these scholarly frameworks provide crucial foundational research on femininity in horror stories and media, video games tend to be underexamined in the horror genre. The critical analysis of these feminist themes can provide meaningful engagement with how women are portrayed in these types of media. 

This project plans to extend how feminist horror theory can be considered through interactive media. It treats horror video games not only as mindless entertainment, but as an intervention of how industries induce fear through gameplay mechanics, female embodiment and player engagement. Unlike traditional film and books, where engagement is passively experienced, video games require participants to interact with its world, to embody a sense of vulnerability, survival, and curated limited autonomy. Fear is not only seen or heard, but in a small capacity, lived. By building an interactive dataset that highlights these themes present in horror video games, we gain new insights on how these narratives are presented in this unexamined media. 

Environmental Scan
Horror studies have historically been centered on film and literature; scholars such as Barbara Creed have analyzed the “monstrous-feminine” as a figure that is shaped by patriarchal fears about embodiment and reproduction. More recent scholarships extend these conversations into video games, interpreting monstrous female figures not simply as misogynistic constructs but as a resistance against the trope. Works such as Redefining the Monstrous-Feminine: Applying a Postfeminist (Eco)Gothic Reading to Horror Video Games by Jennifer Loring offer frameworks for interpreting witches, ghosts, and vampires as figures aligned with nature and with rebellion against patriarchal structures. Similar analyses of games like Doki Doki Literature Club! Examine how female antagonists disrupt player agency and destabilize typical male-driven themes and narratives in the horror genre (Graham 2025). While there is qualitative scholarship that critiques gendered tropes in horror, there are currently no existing datasets or data visualization projects on the subject. 

Final Product and Dissemination
Now let’s delve into what that deployment will look like. We believe that the process of creating a data visualization is itself scholarship – that in organizing content into a new form, we may reveal some novel insight into that content, or just take a new perspective by seeing the information through a different lens. For this reason, the final output of the project does not have to be a website that is solely available online. What makes this a digital humanities process is how digital tools serve to help us push and question our thinking throughout the process. So while one of the final outputs of this project will be a data visualisation hosted on a public website, another will be a lightweight static copy of the website that can be stored on drives or personal computers, and distributed that way. While this version of the project may lose some of the ease and interactivity of a fully online version, it will also be easier to preserve, as it will not be at the mercy of changing technological standards, and can be viewed with people without stable access to the internet. This way, a record of the scholarship remains, even if the online version itself is quickly left behind by technological development in a way that makes maintaining it untenable. The project is thus both more accessible in the present and accessible to future generations.

As for the online version, it could be hosted on a relatively simple website such CUNY Academic Commons, WordPress or Blogspot. Regardless of where it’s hosted, we would post it along with documentation and our justification for our project. If possible, it could be a good idea to post the static version of the site and a PDF version of the documentation for download there as well, to make the project more accessible in multiple forms.

Works Cited
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. MIT Press, 2020.

Drucker, Johanna. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011,

https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/5/1/000091/000091.html

Graham, Hannah. Metalepsis and Mental Castration: Doki Doki Literature Club! as the Cerebral Monstrous-Feminine. Georgia Southern University, Master’s thesis, 2023, https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/2976/

Loring, Jennifer. Redefining the Monstrous-Feminine: Applying a Postfeminist EcoGothic Reading to Horror Video Games. 2024. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/393901879_Redefining_the_Monstrous-Feminine_Applying_a_Postfeminist_EcoGothic_Reading_to_Horror_Video_Games