Project 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. The project now aims to refine and examine the dataset to visualze the co-occuring patterns of feminist themes across the horror video game genre. Through data visualization and close readings, we seek to uncover and interpret the complex relationships between these themes, ultimately contributing to broader discussions.
Our findings reveal co-occurences across themes, raising questions about how feminist frameworks can help us reads the genre's patterns of representation. What do these cluster's reveal about how horror encodes and sometimes subverts gender and power dynamics? We invite you to explore the heatmap below to begin understanding some of these key questions
Feminist Theme Prevalence in Horror Video Games
Number of games in the dataset
of Games
Explore the Heat Map
This heatmap visualizes the co-occurrence frequency of each feminist theme pairing, with each cell showing the exact number of games in which both themes appear together. Darker cells indicate stronger co-occurrence; lighter cells indicate weaker overlap.
The chart offers a clearer picture of which theme pairings are most common across the dataset — and how that differs from how frequently any single theme appears on its own. Notably, Violence and Embodiment emerge as one of the strongest pairings, with a co-occurrence of 40 games. This suggests that the female body under physical threat is a dominant narrative within the genre.
Cells outlined in orange mark pairings selected for closer analysis. Click any highlighted cell to explore a deeper reading of that co-occurrence.
Theme Co-occurrence Network
As you may have noticed in the heatmap, themes rarely occur in isolation. The close reads of the data reveal that themes frequently co-occur beyond the specific pairings selected for analysis as seen in the heat map above. Digging further into the dataset reveals additional layers worth examining.
The following visualization maps the interconnections between feminist themes based on how frequently they co-occur within individual games. Each node represents a distinct theme; edges connect nodes according to the strength of their co-occurrences, with thicker lines indicating stronger relationships. The layout is force-directed, meaning themes that frequently appear together gravitate toward one another, while less associated themes settle toward the periphery. Nodes are draggable. Clicking a node opens a sidebar listing every game in the dataset that contains the connected theme.
Explore the Network
Click a node to see which games share that theme · drag · scroll to zoom
Explore the Dataset
Drag pieces from the tray onto the two board slots to filter and cross-reference the dataset. Combine a genre, theme, or archetype in each slot to see which games sit at that intersection, along with a breakdown of co-occurring attributes.