In Sarah Beyvers’s seminar British Horror Games, students encountered Alien: Isolation (Creative Assembly, 2014), Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (The Chinese Room, 2013), Still Wakes the Deep (The Chinese Room, 2024), The Bunker (Splendy Games, 2016), and Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015) from a range of different perspectives. Over the course of the semester, they approached these games from angles like unreliable narration, Gothic horror, abject horror as well as trauma and memory. After these discussions, students prepared conference papers on a variety of games about and/or made in Britain, which they presented on a Friday and Saturday at the end of the semester. Each paper was followed by a Q&A session, which gave the other students an opportunity to share their insights and ask remaining questions.
Students worked together to lead class discussions about music and nationalism in literature. In such areas as the construction of national history in romantic ballads, 19th-century correlations of race and music, or parodies of national anthems in postcolonial fiction, presenters explained the importance of their topic, analyzed textual passages, and created questions to facilitate discussion. Exploring the resonance between orality and writing, students made audio recordings of their presentations and revised the written transcript of their recording. By developing their talk into written work, students gained direct experience with the integral role of dialogue and debate in scholarly research to hone ideas in tandem with writing.
