Scary web-comics, emotional video-games: I find digital literature quite stressful, but worth it all the same

“I will not let technology cause me stress.”

It’s a good motto but hard to live up to. I’ve always found computers, the internet and digital literature to be difficult to use, even scary sometimes. These kinds of technology seem so much less intuitive than a good old fashioned book or painting. Even after years of getting used to them, they still hold surprises.

I guess web-comics are a kind of digital literature we haven’t mentioned much in class. When I first found some I expected to be simply reading ordinary comics on the internet. But of course, being on the web allows for sound and flash animations to be added. So about five or six years ago I was reading about scary stories in some internet forum – probably a question on Askreddit – and I followed a link to a web-comic that suddenly used a flash animation with sound to create a ‘jump-scare’. It worked: I jumped. I was reading in the evening and went to bed with nightmares. Having found the comic again all these years later, it wasn’t so scary but still made me jump a little, even when I knew what was coming.

An image of that comic should be above. It’s called the ‘Bong-Chon Dong ghost’. If you don’t know it here you go: http://comic.naver.com/webtoon/detail.nhn?titleId=350217&no=31. Not for the faint of heart!

Digital literature has tools at its disposal that paper literature lacks. It has ways to prompt sudden reactions. It can really just be more powerful, with more impact on the reader – or player. That’s a good thing, especially in an age when it seems less and less people even read anymore, despite us being more literate than ever. But digital literature and its toolkit can also make me nervous.

I’m more comfortable with video-games, which I’ve played since childhood. Until recently they weren’t connected to the big scary internet, where anything can happen. I tended to avoid horror games in favour of shooters and other action adventures. But I never really thought of video-games as ‘literature’ – that was an exclusive, slightly snobbish domain reserved for classic novels and Shakespeare, plus one or two other playwrights who struggled to challenge the Bard’s monopoly on the stage. Final Fantasy X was the first game I played that really was story-focused, an adventure that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantasy novel. Could it hold a candle to Tolkien? Why not? Tolkien’s books were entertaining and thought-provoking, but they never made me shed a tear.

Despite seeming newer and less natural, digital literature – web-comics, video-games, all the other varieties – actually make me feel more in touch with my emotions. They’re more personal, they offer more to care about. Not only do I imagine characters and worlds, I get to see and hear them, even play with them. I’m still scared of being burnt when bad things happen, but digital literature offers escapism and immersion in ways a novel can’t.