Playing with Religion in Digital Games

4. Silent Hill and Fatal Frame: Finding Transcendent Horror in and beyond the Haunted Magic Circle

88 On a rainy afternoon in a sleepy, middle-class American town, seventeen-year-old Heather Mason visits an aging shopping mall onanerrandforherfather.Walkingthroughthemainentrance,Heather is transported to the horrifying town of Silent Hill, where the mall has become a monster-infested and blood-soaked nightmare. Descending through the strange worlds of Silent Hill, Heather crosses through several haunted circles, including a derelict hospital with a filthy, mirrored storeroom where she sees herself invaded by bloody tendrils and consumed by decomposing walls. Her consciousness raw from terror, she finally reaches Silent Hill’s rotten core where she must master the perverse rituals of a religious cult called “the Order” and use them in battle against their unholy and half-formed god. Thousands of miles away, a young woman named Miku Hinasaki searches for her brother in the fabled Himuro mansion high in the hills above Tokyo. Stepping across itsdecrepitthreshold,sheentersahauntedsphere,afoggyrealmruledby the angry dead, ancient curses, and long-forgotten Shinto rituals for the binding and loosening of hell. As a horrified Miku performs each arcane rite, she descends to Himuro’s most sacred circle, that of the Strangling Ritual. There, she not only witnesses the dismembering of the Shrine Maiden, but also faces the maiden’s vengeful ghost in a battle for her sanity and her brother’s freedom. In this chapter, I will explore supernatural horror in the ritualistic game worlds of Silent Hill and Fatal Frame and argue that by entering these horrific magic circles, both Western and Japanese players experience terror, abjection, and ultimately, religious transcendence. Silent Hill and Fatal Frame Finding Transcendent Horror in and beyond the Haunted Magic Circle four Brenda S. Gardenour Walter Silent Hill and Fatal Frame 89 Theformalizedreligionsandritualsconstructedwithinthesurvival horror game worlds of Konami’s Silent Hill and Tecmo’s Fatal Frame are quite distinct from each other. The religion of Silent Hill is a mélange of purposely distorted elements, or simulacra, drawn from Western and “non-Japanese” religions embedded in a strict pseudo-Christian hierarchicalmodel .1In Silent Hill, therulesandritualsof theOrder,thegame’s primary cult, are vital for the deciphering of the plot and the survival of the main character and therefore the player. Even with a good ending, however, the Order is never defeated; instead, it persists as a primary structure that haunts, in ever more elaborate detail, each subsequent installment of the game. In contrast to Silent Hill, the formal religion of Fatal Frame is constructed from signifiers drawn primarily from Japanese Shintoism and Buddhism. In Fatal Frame, the player journeys to sacred sites, such as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, and uses ritual objects, such as sacred mirrors, masks, and plaited ropes, in the performance of conflated and scrambled Shinto and Buddhist rituals. The religious hardscape of Fatal Frame is for the most part composed of signifiers that accurately reflect religious structures and objects in the material world of Shinto and Buddhism; the religious rituals embedded inthegame,however,aresecondarysimulacra,distortionsof traditional practices that exist somewhere between the physical and digital worlds and reflect abstract truths in both. While the religious structures within the digital game worlds of Silent Hill and Fatal Frame are dissimilar, both use transcendent horror in and beyond what I call the “haunted magic circle.” In Rules of Play, Salen and Zimmerman suggest that the ritual sphere of play might be imagined as Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle,” which he describes in his classic Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture as a “playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course,” a temporary “world within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”2 Salen and Zimmerman’s use of the open and closed magic circle to describe the realm of digital gameplay has sparked controversy, particularly among those scholars and gamers concerned with the inflexibility of an imaginary bounded circle that divides the virtual and the real into a false binary.3 While I admit that Salen and Zimmerman’s model has limitations, as any model 90 Brenda S. Gardenour Walter must,itismybelief thatthesimplicityof Huizinga’smagiccircleremains a particularly useful tool for the examination of religion and ritual in (and of) digital gaming. As magic circles, digital game worlds are ritual spaces, “forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain .”4 According to Juul, play within gaming spaces is governed by “a rule-based system with a variable...