[Commlist] Call for Chapters – Scary Levels: Designing Fear in Games and Interactive Media

Call for Book Chapters – Scary Levels: Designing Fear in Games and 
Interactive Media

Editor: Zlatko Bukač (Assistant Professor, Department of English 
Studies, University of Zadar, Croatia)

Space and place continuously serve as sources of inspiration in video 
games and various other interactive media, within which they have a 
specific way of representing and operationalizing fear and dread. 
Interactive works can turn fear into a set of narrative and game design 
sequences that are problems and solutions for the experience of playing 
and reading. For example, how to structure attention, limit knowledge, 
choreograph movement, regulate pace, and distribute safety and danger. 
In doing so, they transform levels, localities, and arenas, big or 
small, into affective machines: corridors become arguments about 
vulnerability, checkpoints become politics of relief, maps become 
instruments of control and disorientation, and environmental cues become 
a language of dread. This focus invites contributors to treat “levels” 
not only as discrete segments of gameplay, but as cultural forms where 
historical imaginaries, cultural memories, destroyed or reimagined urban 
landscapes, and social narratives are translated into navigable worlds. 
Urban and architectural imaginaries are especially relevant here: 
streets, housing blocks, subway areas, transit corridors, basements, 
ports, underpasses, stairwells, ruins, and liminal zones recur across 
games as design resources for unease. Such spaces are never purely 
physical; they are also symbolic (loaded with cultural meanings) and 
imagined (produced by rumor, folklore, news, cinema, and online 
circulation).

A central thread of the collection is the relationship between fear, 
space, and cultural memory. It starts from a simple but far-reaching 
premise: interactive media do not merely represent fear, they 
operationalize it.

We invite chapter proposals for Scary Levels: Designing Fear in Games 
and Interactive Media, an edited volume that examines how fear is 
designed, staged, and negotiated through interactive systems. Moving 
beyond approaches that treat horror primarily as narrative content, this 
collection foregrounds fear as an experiential, spatial, and cultural 
phenomenon - one that is produced through playable architectures 
(levels, routes, thresholds), procedural constraints (scarcity, pursuit, 
uncertainty), perceptual regimes (visibility, sound, interface), and the 
interpretive labor of players navigating environments saturated with 
implication, memory, and threat.

Particular attention is given to environmental storytelling and 
indexical storytelling: the ways games communicate fear through traces 
rather than exposition. Documents, recordings, photographs, residual 
sounds, stains, broken objects, worn paths, abandoned rooms, and 
environmental micro-details function as evidence of unseen events and 
absent bodies. These elements invite players to reconstruct a world 
through inference, turning interpretation into a form of vulnerability. 
We welcome contributions that theorize indexical storytelling as a 
narrative design technique of fear and connect it to environmental 
storytelling, spatial history, and affective play.

Methodologically, the volume encourages interdisciplinary work that 
links game studies with approaches from human geography, cultural 
studies, urban analysis, architecture, memory studies, and the digital 
humanities. Chapters proposing or demonstrating innovative ways of 
analyzing fear in interactive media are encouraged - through spatial 
annotation, route analysis, critical cartography, archival 
reconstruction, interface analysis, sound studies, production studies, 
player reception, or practice-based research. The goal is not only to 
interpret horror, but to clarify how fear is built across design layers 
and how interactive spaces can be read as cultural and historical 
formations.

As fear and anxiety come in different forms, may be subjective, and are 
highly interpretative, this collection is interested in various 
unconventional genres and narrative forms in which these issues appear 
-from RPGs and romance visual novels to stealth games, walking 
simulators, VR experiences, action-adventures, and multiplayer games. 
Thus, while chapters may focus on horror titles, we also welcome work on 
non-horror games and interactive media where fear, unease, anxiety, 
threat, or insecurity are central to the experience.

Essays may explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:
• Representation and perception of fear in digital literature, 
interactive media, or video games
• Perspective and camera as fear machines
• Vulnerability and safe spaces
• Designing fear through space and movement
• Save points as politics of relief
• Maps as instruments of control and disorientation
• Narratological structures of fear
• Structures of feeling and structures of fearing
• Heterotopia in video games
• Hermeneutics of suspicion in digital narratives
• Fear/anxiety in stealth games
• Fear in multiplayer games
• Ruinophilia and ruinophobia
• Level design in affective play
• Indexical storytelling in fantasy video games
• Indexical storytelling and architecture in video games

Interested authors are invited to submit their proposal (400–500 words) 
and a short bio (max. 200 words, including the author’s academic 
affiliation) by July 1, 2026, to (scarylevelsbook /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(scarylevelsbook /at/ gmail.com)>.

Authors will be notified of acceptance by August 1, 2026. The deadline 
for full essay submissions is December 1, 2026.

Full essays should be 7,000–8,000 words (including references, notes, 
and citations) and follow the Chicago Manual of Style. The collection 
will be published with an established academic press, with Routledge 
expressing preliminary interest.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely. The commlist has no responsibility for any damage caused by its postings. Subscription to the list automatically implies agreement with this rule.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------