Delivered by Intellect to: Alexander J. Zawacki (33344257) IP: 84.141.79.118 On: Fri, 27 Sept 2024 09:24:33 HOST 15 (1) pp. 83–98 Intellect Limited 2024 Horror Studies Volume 15 Number 1 www.intellectbooks.com 83 © 2024 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. https://doi.org/10.1386/host_00082_1 Received 20 December 2021; Accepted 31 October 2023; Published Online April 2024 ALEXANDER J. ZAWACKI University of Göttingen Glitches and ghosts: The digital uncanny in video games and creepypasta ABSTRACT This article seeks to address the phenomenon of glitches and ‘creepypasta’, or short anonymous stories (usually in prose but sometimes presented in other media), that focus on video games and related ludic media. The inherent uncanniness of the glitch – as an affront to player agency and an assertion of mysterious operations performed ‘under the hood’, as though possessed of an agency of their own – is assessed, as well as the ways in which such eerie interruptions are put to use in fictional narratives about haunted video games. It is argued that the glitch, as an instance of a video gamer asserting its own agency which is alien and often actively opposed to that of the player, is fertile ground for narratives about games which exert their own occulted willpower. Stories about such games often feature the player being overpowered by the media they engage with, inverting the normal ontological hierarchy between the player and the played. INTRODUCTION Creepypasta irrupted into the scholarly and national discourses at the same time: in 2014, when two preteen girls in Wisconsin brutally stabbed a class- mate nineteen times in an attempt to sacrifice her to the digitally born monster known as the Slender Man. Belatedly, a growing number of academ- ics have turned to this massive corpus of online horror storytelling, although KEYWORDS Legend of Zelda Pokémon Slender Man horror internet horror virtual gothic