“The Dark Descent”:

Amnesia’s Debt to Victorian Physiological Psychology

Abstract

Amnesia (2010) is arguably one of the most successful horror games to date, particularly if its success is measured by the level of fear it has instigated in its players. Developed by Frictional Games, Amnesia is set in 1839 and follows an English protagonist named Daniel as he traverses a mysterious and merciless Gothic castle. This paper seeks to situate Amnesia in the context of both nineteenth-century psychological theory and the ways that those theories have been inflected in neo-Victorian literature and criticism. While critical discussions of neo-Victorian literature have drawn attention to questions of sense perception and the body, this essay draws on video game studies to show how Amnesia is designed to elicit reactions from players, based in fear, that mirror Victorian concepts of physiological psychology and the works of Alexander Bain, while adapting their presentation to a contemporary and interactive medium. Focusing on the nineteenth-century theoretical antecedents in a contemporary video game will demonstrate the value of placing video games with particular historical settings alongside the cultural resources of those settings. This project allows both neo-Victorian and video game studies to continue developing an interdisciplinary vocabulary in order to encourage further study of the ways in which games (re)present the Victorian past.