Paranoid Simulations for the Eternally Precarious: Approaches to the Logic of Capitalism from Videogame Fiction

Abstract

This essay examines how The Stanley Parable (2011), Hypnospace Outlaw (2019), The Exit 8 (2023), and Pools (2024) construct atmospheres of horror and control through the creation of empty, decontextualized environments. Far from conventional horror, these spaces mobilize a diffuse regime of power that unsettles perception, destabilizes reality, and restricts the player’s agency. They reflect the experience of the precarious subject, embedded in systemic structures that erode their connection to place and neutralize any impulse toward autonomy. Violence manifests not as an explicit threat but as a structural dynamic: it appears in the absence of purpose, in repetition, and in the impossibility of escape. These scenarios, designed to induce exhaustion, operate as allegories of systems that neglect human needs and generate forms of alienation, where absence becomes a device of subjugation and dispossession.