At the Horror and Gaming conference, 7–9 July 2026, centre member Matteo Polato, together with Jacopo Bortolussi, will present a paper about their artistic research project, Real Engine, which you can read more about here. Their abstract is below!
Real Engine: horror videogame development as psychogeographical practice for heritage research
Matteo Polato and Jacopo Bortolussi
This paper presents Real Engine, an artistic research project that employs horror videogame development as a practice-based methodology to engage with the peripheral heritage of ordinary places. Focusing on the interactive affordances of videogames, Real Engine explores how horror gameplay mechanics can be used as a psychogeographical method to defamiliarise normative narratives of local history, embracing instead affective, intuitive and synchronistic approaches. In this sense, this project can be situated within recent occultural practices concerned with the use of digital technologies as alternative modes of spatial exploration and historical research into local heritage, such as the media-driven paranormal investigation conducted in rural Kentucky in the documentary webseries Hellier (2019), and the viral psychogeographical mobile app Randonautica.
In particular, the paper analyses the development process and online reception of two lo-fi horror videogames developed by the authors based on fieldwork conducted in the Northeast Italian countryside: The Fair (2023) – set on a semi-abandoned town endangered by a local power plant – and How a Body Sounds (2025) – which explores the collective trauma and the material heritage of a natural disaster. Both projects demonstrate how an interplay between real-word exploration and horror videogame mechanics enables a personal attunement with collective hauntologies of place. Real Engine thus proposes a method for engaging with peripheral heritage through an ethics of discovery that resists the reifying tendencies of dark tourism and “ruin porn” (Lyons, 2018), engaging with the weird lore hidden beneath the everyday not as spectacle but as a network of human and non-human agencies to be approached with social, historical and ecological awareness.
Scene from The Fair (2023)