Glitch Horror: BEN Drowned and the Fallibility of Technology in Game Fan Fiction

"Glitch Horror: BEN Drowned and the Fallibility of Technology in Game Fan Fiction" examines a emerging subgenre of horror rooted in anxieties about technological malfunction, using the 2010 4chan creepypasta BEN Drowned, a story about a haunted Majora's Mask cartridge, as its central case study. The work argues that the story's unsettling force does not come from supernatural invention alone but from its grounding in real, familiar frustrations: corrupted saves, broken rules, and the sense of a game behaving in ways its designers never intended. Drawing on Freudian and Mori-derived theories of the uncanny, the analysis contends that these recognizable malfunctions provoke a deep, involuntary unease in players who identify closely with their avatars.

The analysis situates BEN Drowned within meta fan fiction and transmedia practice, emphasizing its collectively shared, open-sourced character as a key driver of its cultural resonance. Its methodology draws on Cox's taxonomy of metafiction, Huizinga's concept of play, and comparisons with the notorious Superman 64 and with net art works by JODI and the Mattes that locate unease in glitched graphics. The central conclusion is that the story's dread mirrors broader cultural fears about gaming's vulnerability to malfunction, addiction, and loss of control.

The work also considers the reception of creepypastas, noting cases in which such stories have been mistaken for fact, including a 2015 incident in which girls attacked someone after reading Slender Man narratives, and an online commenter who oscillates between belief and mockery regarding the BEN story. These examples underscore a tension between audiences' appetite for being frightened and their willingness to credit frightening tales as true.

Ultimately, the work argues that BEN Drowned and related texts constitute an emerging "glitch horror" genre reflecting technological anxieties, and it calls for further scholarly research into this genre and the psychological dynamics that sustain it.