Isolation Effect
The first time I played Alien: Isolation was at a press event months before the game’s release. I was in a room with a number of other players, but it was dark, and I was seated in such a way that I couldn’t see anyone else, just the huge television in front of me, and with the headphones they had me wearing, I couldn’t hear anything but the game.
Multiple times, I tried to accomplish the goal I was faced with, and multiple times, I failed. Each time, my failure was swift and terrifying. I was spotted, pursued, and slaughtered by the xenomorph. Each time, I screamed.

Eventually, in response to one of these screams, a woman working the event came over to check up on me. “Are you alright?” she asked.
*****
I’m no stranger to playing horror games alone, often with the lights off in the middle of the night. But games like Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space give you guns and other tools with which you can obliterate your enemies. You can shoot their heads off or slice their limbs off. You are powerful. You don’t just face and overcome your fears. You massacre them.
After getting killed by the xenomorph multiple times in Alien: Isolation, I start to feel like nothing would be more satisfying than going all space marine, taking an assault rifle to the bastard and seeing it get torn to shreds. But of course you can’t. Alien: Isolation isn’t that type of game. All you can do against that unstoppable creature is sneak and run and hide and pray. This is Isolation’s most maddening quality and its greatest. Even last year’s Outlast, in which you face threats you cannot defeat, feels quaint to me in comparison to Isolation. In Outlast, survival usually felt like a simple matter of understanding what I needed to do, which was pretty clear, and executing it properly. Part of what makes Isolation so unsettling to me is that I never know of a surefire path to survival and success. Everything always feels uncertain and dangerous. I never feel safe.

And so things have started getting personal between me and the xenomorph. I believe that the best horror helps us confront the fears lurking inside of us, and as it catches me again and again, the xenomorph becomes a terrifying representation of all my own slippery, unpredictable fears, all the fears that coalesce to make me just a little afraid of facing the world each day.
Fears associated with being unemployed, the increasing anxiety that there may be no place anymore in writing about games professionally for this particular woman who happens to be transgender and who takes games seriously enough and believes in them enough that she wove critiques of issues of representation into a tiny fraction of her work.
Fears associated with being out in the world as a visibly trans person, which lead to me always being a little vigilant, a little on edge, wondering if this is going to be one of the times that someone laughs at me, or says something to me, or maybe does something to me.

Most of all, of course, the game plays on my own fears about solitude and loneliness. Piercing reminders of my own loneliness can pounce on me from anywhere. They happen in the real world and they happen on social media. I can try to hide from them but I cannot always escape them. And I probably shouldn’t try.
Sometimes I start to feel like every defeat by the alien is itself a kind of victory. At least I said fuck you after I got caught again. At least I said I have no idea how to get past you, no idea how to win this game we’re playing, but I’m not going to let that stop me from trying again. You can’t keep me down, motherfucker. I am terrified but I am also angry. Angry that things are this way and not another way. That I don’t have a job. That I live in a world that is hostile to trans people. That I feel so alone sometimes.
As I play the game, as I get caught again and again, my nerves get more and more frayed, and I wonder if it’s cathartic, if I should press on, face and overcome my fears, or if it’s too much for me to handle, if it’s not good for me, doing all this alone, if it cuts too deep.

I hide in a locker. The xenomorph senses I am inside. It yanks the door open. I scream.
I come out of a vent right when the xenomorph is prowling past. My pulse starts racing. I know it’s hopeless. There is no getting away. I scream.
I decide to just make a run for it. Don’t look back. I hustle desperately toward my destination. I hear the xenomorph chasing me, and then my body shudders. I scream.
And as this happens again and again, the thing that really unnerves me isn’t that the game is so terrifying that it keeps making me scream. It’s that right now, in my apartment, in my life, no one can hear me scream. It’s not that it makes my pulse race, but that it cracks my heart open, turning my own loneliness and my own fears about always being alone into a monster, making me desperately wish that I had a partner with whom to face the terrors in the game, and the terrors in my life.
But what are our choices, the game seems to ask. You can cower in fear and pain here forever, accepting the way things are right now and not doing a damn thing about it, or you can give it another shot, face your fucking fears, get out there and try to live something resembling a life.
I press the button and go again.
Notes
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