By Tamzin Maines ’29

Majors: Biology and Environmental Science

Contributor Biography: Tamzin is a freshman at Washington College, seeking a degree in environmental science and biology. She has a passion for understanding evolutionary processes and how adaptations influence the organism. She further explores the environment with her land-trust to maintain habitats and track populations of horseshoe crabs. 

Brief Description: We frequently see the sciences and the arts as two separate branches of academia. In practice, combining the two often yields a deeper understanding of the world. The biological processes of the amygdala that were built for survival now influence the way we interact with media. Horror games, such as Doki Doki Literature Club, Omori, and Slay the Princess, take strong advantage of this to influence the view and actions of the player. 

The following was written for FYS 101-48: Digital Narratives: Video Games as Literature 

Horror is a rich and diverse genre that captivates a wide variety of people and addresses issues of morality and society. A central part of the genre is invoking fear and then using that fear to direct the experience of the audience. This requires the exploitation of biological structures, particularly the amygdala and its related processes such as memory and forming associations. While the amygdala controls a wide variety of psychological phenomena, it mostly controls fear, nervousness, and the perception and reaction to danger (Cleaveland Clinic, 2022). The amygdala is in the center of the brain and is highly connected to many other parts of the brain that use instinctual responses, memories, and personal and cultural values to evaluate if there is a threat (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). It depicts current and past experiences as good or bad to properly direct attention and cognitive resources and interacts with other parts of the brain to guide decision making to maintain safety (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). Video games offer a unique horror experience since much of the player’s experience is connected to their actions instead of being a passive viewer. Horror has become an incredibly popular genre in video games including works like Doki Doki Literature Club, Omori, and Slay the Princess, which have a collective of 190,000 reviews on the popular gaming engine, Steam (Steam, 2025) (Steam, 2025) (Steam, 2025). Developers of horror games utilize the amygdala and its related processes to influence the actions of the player and make them analyze their decisions in a way that methodically improves their game by deepening the narrative. 

Doki Doki Literature Club by Team Salvato is an abnormal and gritty dating simulator. The game features a group of high schoolers that are part of a literature club, which consists of the player and a girl who controls the game and tries to get the player to date her, named Monika, as well as three other non-player club members that have no control over the game. Both the player and Monika adjust the game files to change the experiences of all other characters. Doki Doki Literature Club utilizes the release of adrenaline during stressful events and the amygdala’s ability to contextualize and learn from stressful experiences to give the player a deep, emotional narrative of balancing their curiosity and interest of the girls who have no control over the game. The ability to manipulate how well the amygdala connects to portions of the brain responsible for memory and recall builds emotional responses in the player that they have little to no control over, adding more depth to the story. The game starts off very comforting and uses bright pinks and cheerful music. Other than content warnings and very subtle hints such as fourth wall jokes, there is no sign that Doki Doki Literature Club is not a cliché and safe game, so the amygdala is left inactive. The player grows very close to one of the girls who does not have control over the game, named Sayori. To keep the player away from her, Monika gives Sayori severe symptoms of depression via the game files to make her less appealing, such as struggling to get out of bed, poor appetite, and low self-worth. A later scene depicts Sayori dead with very gruesome details after committing suicide. The game provides the player with very little sensory input, then flashes Sayori’s death on screen and uses a loud crash to introduce the scene. This provides high levels of stress to the player very quickly by providing disturbing imagery faster than the player can process, which releases adrenaline, often referred to as epinephrine (Cleaveland Clinic, 2022). Adrenaline is a neurotransmitter that causes a faster heart rate and breathing and increased alertness (Cleaveland Clinic, 2022). The adrenaline binds with receptors in a region of the amygdala, referred to as the basolateral amygdala, or the BLA (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024). The BLA is a central part of interpreting sensory input and is tightly connected to the hippocampus, which controls memory and recall (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024) (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). The adrenaline released when watching Sayori’s death makes the BLA more active in neural pathways between the BLA and the hippocampus in the player (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024). Doki Doki Literature Club then brings the player back to the main menu and has a nearly identical story, but Sayori’s file has been deleted and she is missing. The game also incorporates new, off-key music and sudden glitch affects that startle or unsettle the player. The BLA interprets jump scares and odd music as dangerous and sends information to the hippocampus (Dwek and Dixon, 2021) (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024). The hippocampus connects sensory inputs that lead up to moments of distress and uses cues given by the amygdala to contextualize that distress is something that requires large amounts of attention and cognitive resources to avoid in a process called fear memory (Dwek and Dixon, 2021) (Cleaveland Clinic, 2023) (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024). Due to the adrenaline the BLA received from viewing the death of Sayori, fear memory is built stronger and ends up having a greater effect over the player (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024). Therefore, when the player receives similar sensations that led up to the distress they received shortly after Sayori’s death, such as making the motions to click the mouse or hearing music stop, the hippocampus sends information to the amygdala and the amygdala then interprets those cues as danger. The amygdala then makes the player feel fear before they can properly make sense of what is happening in the game (Cleaveland Clinic, 2023) and this leads to all interactions with the girls being stressful, which conflicts with any curiosity or compassion the player has with the girls. Doki Doki Literature Club takes another shift after the death of another club member, Yuri. Monika then removes large amounts of stimulation that the player receives and puts them in a dimly lit room with just the player and Monika. The room Monika is in has two windows, which will occasionally get lighter and draw the attention of the player, encouraging them to glance at each window before refocusing on Monika’s face in the center. This works very similarly to bilateral stimulation. Bilateral stimulation encourages a person to rhythmically shift their attention to their left and right in a rhythmic way and can soothe the person out of anxiety and stress and lowers activity in the thalamus, which is responsible for bodily reactions during stress, such as a racing heart, fast breath, and flinching (Fisher, 2023) (Trauma Therapist Institute, 2025). The player enters a state of calm and the amygdala deactivates; however, it quickly under-stimulates them. To progress the story, the player must delete Monika from the game files, which leads to emotional conflict with the player. So far, the game has provided the player with many moments of distress that the amygdala has made efforts to avoid; however, curiosity drives the player forward to delete Monika and bring back previously deceased characters by going into the game files. Doki Doki Literature Club often triggers the amygdala and its related processes within the hippocampus to give the player less control over their emotions by having the amygdala act faster and stronger than other parts of the brain in a process called an emotional hijack or amygdala hijack (Cleaveland Clinic, 2023), which adds nuance to its characters. While the girls who weren’t in control over the video game were often sources of distress, they had aspects about them which made the player curious and forced the player to fight their own amygdala to push forward, creating a unique and deep narrative. 

The careful choice the developer makes of what does and doesn’t trigger the amygdala can also add more to the story, as seen in Omori. In Omori by Omocat, the player controls a young man named Sunny with mental health issues after the death of his sister. The player also explores Sunny’s mind while he is sleeping by controlling Omori. Omori often tries to protect Sunny by suppressing memories and discouraging action that confronts the trauma of Sunny losing his sister. Multiple endings may be achieved depending on how readily the player cooperates with Omori’s goals. Judging a variety of events as good or bad and deciding the most appropriate solution for Sunny’s challenges is a central part of Omori’s narrative, which the amygdala plays a key role in (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). The player must frequently come up with creative solutions to progress the story, including going into the game menu to stab Omori. The first time the player does this is when they are in a white room with a computer, a notebook, and a black cat named Mewo. There is nothing very stressful in the room. However, the player is quickly bored and wishes to progress. When the player opens the menu and sees the new option to stab Omori, they do it because they cannot find another way out. Omori takes out a knife and holds it out for a few seconds, then stabs himself in the stomach; this leads to Sunny waking up and the story progressing. Due to the delay between the motions of selecting “stab” in the main menu and the BLA receiving distressing visual stimuli of Omori being stabbed, the hippocampus does not form connections between the player’s actions in the main menu and distress (Dwek and Dixon, 2021) (Hajisoltani and Meftahi, 2024). The player is later placed in a black room with Mewo on an operating table and a butler that claims that “Mewo has been very, very bad.” The player has the option to cut Mewo, where Mewo will attempt to escape and try to scream. This triggers the amygdala and sends the goal of leaving the stressful environment to the part of the brain responsible for decision making, called the prefrontal cortex, or the PFC (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). The amygdala focuses attention and cognitive resources towards escaping the stressful situation by sending signals to parts of the PFC responsible for reward evaluation such as the orbitofrontal PFC and the anterior midcingulate cortex (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). These areas in turn send signals to the lateral PFC, which is responsible for executive decision making (Dwek and Dixon, 2021) and gets the player to make the decision to stab Omori. The hippocampus did not previously make the association between seeing Omori get stabbed and selecting the “stab” button, and so it does not make an effort to stop the player. The ability to escape the room deactivates the amygdala and provides a brief sense of relief to the player. The amygdala reactivates when the player watches Omori get stabbed and instills a feeling of regret and disturbance in the player (Cleaveland Clinic, 2023). This forces the player to re-evaluate and question their morality and actions, which sets up future choices of either working with friends and confronting traumatic moments or avoiding everything. The lack of confidence in the player’s goodwill adds to a different and more stressful experience than it would have if the player felt fully in control of their decisions and always did what they believed was right. The amygdala deepens the discussions Omori brings regarding mental health and trauma. 

Slay the Princess by Black Tabby Games manages to utilize cuteness and contrasts it with the responses given by the amygdala. In Slay the Princess, the player makes a series of decisions guided by a narrator and a variety of alter egos. The narrator frequently pushes the player to slay the princess trapped in the cabin within the game. Whenever the player dies, the story resets with the princess, player, and alter egos keeping their memories. The princess starts by facing away from the player and keeps a cold expression with narrow eyes during their first encounter. When the player makes the decision to slay the princess, as guided by the narrator, the princess’ face becomes rounder and her eyes become bigger for a cuter visual, which makes her seem more trustworthy and virtuous (Cui et al., 2023). This leads to a moment of panic when the player identifies the princess as good and understands that she is scared and about to get stabbed. This activates the amygdala, which provides a desire to avoid seeing the princess being stabbed; however, Black Tabby Games did not provide a way to avoid doing so once the player has gone that far. The amygdala then depicts the stabbing of the princess as bad and to be avoided (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). This association is the foundation for further interactions with the princess and the narrator. When the next cycle of the story starts, the princess is already drawn cutely and happily, encouraging the player to trust her (Cui et al., 2023). However, the princess holds a knife and stabs the player if they don’t look for danger or make the decision to protect themself. This builds two conflicting memories in the player, removing any feeling of having an easy and mindful decision. This heavily encourages the player to analyze all stimuli they receive and critically think about the decisions they make, giving Slay the Princess a unique feeling and making the player think deeply about trust and their own sense of morality, offering new ways to build narrative. 

The amygdala is a central part of our thinking patterns and is heavily interconnected to other sections of the brain (Dwek and Dixon, 2021). It also tremendously influences how we interact with literature and the world. Proper understanding of the brain can greatly improve the work of people who develop media in a way that forces the audience to feel and act in certain ways. Additionally, studying how the amygdala reacts in controlled environments such as horror video games can deepen our understanding of how the amygdala reacts to trauma and stress without needing to invade people’s privacy or run complex tests during chaotic situations. Incorporating biological and literary disciplines is vital to further understanding how the brain works and being able to produce high quality pieces such as the masterpieces of Doki Doki Literature Club, Omori, and Slay the Princess.  

Works Cited 

(2022) Adrenaline. Cleaveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/23038-adrenaline 

(2023) Amygdala. Cleaveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/24894-amygdala 

(2025) Doki Doki Literature Club. Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/698780/Doki_Doki_Literature_Club/ 

(2025) Omori. Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1150690/OMORI/ 

(2025) Slay the Princess. Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989270/Slay_the_Princess__The_Pristine_Cut/ 

(2025) The Science Behind Bilateral Stimulation. Trauma Therapist Institute. 

https://www.traumatherapistinstitute.com/blog/The-Science-Behind-Bilateral-Stimulation

Cui, A. et al. (2024) The Role of Cuteness on Consumer Attachment to Artificial Intelligence Agents. Emerald Insight. 

https://www.emerald.com/jrim/article-abstract/18/1/127/1212469/The-role-of-cuteness-on-consumer-attachment-to?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Dixon, M. and Dweck, C. (2021) The Amygdala and the Prefrontal Cortex: The Co-construction of Intelligent Decision-Making. American Psychological Association. https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2022-16688-001.pdf?auth_token=60ae83e04b8d6f9a95a513930934c41ba5f54657&returnUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fpsycnet.apa.org%2Frecord%2F2022-16688-001 

Fisher, R. (2023) Deep Brain Stimulation of Thalamus for Epilepsy. Science Direct. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969996123000591

Hajisoltani, R. and Meftahi, G. (2024) Epinephrine Injected into the Basolateral Amygdala Affects Anxiety-like Behavior and Memory Performance in Stressed Rats. Science Direct. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304394023005499