Movies may be a passive experience, where viewers only have to keep their eyes open to participate, but video games won’t tolerate inaction. Scorn, for example, “blurs the lines between the body's tools and the environment that the player is exploring with these sort of horrific biomechanical machines,” he adds. When you use a tool like a hammer, for example, it may start to feel like a natural extension of yourself. “Our thoughts and presumptions depend crucially on the body and the visceral reactions that we have,” Leonardis says. The theory of embodied cognition links the mind with people’s physical experiences. How our brains connect with our bodies matters, even in video games. “There's really a sort of survival aspect of being disgusted,” he says. Humans have a natural aversion to that which can get us sick or give us infections (see also: all incarnations of The Last of Us). This often means “grotesque violations or transformations of the body,” like rot, mutilation, or contamination. “Body horror specifically posits the body as the central source of anxiety and worry for these particular stories that unfold,” Leonardis says. It leans heavily into the sound of horror creaking and popping is offset only by a lot of wet squishing. Scorn’s world is alien, full of flesh and metal, with ample scenes of cracking apart bones and bloody muscle. His history of examining horror includes 2022’s Scorn, Ebb Software’s first-person survival horror game inspired by the works of H. Eric Leonardis, a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute with a focus in neuroscience, researches human and animal behavior. There’s a reason our brains react so strongly to things like body horror, even when it’s depicted through a video game.
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