The Fractured Imbunche: A Study of Chilean Horror Games

This extended abstract, presented as a work in progress at DiGRA 2025, examines Chilean horror videogames through the lens of transculturation, a concept describing cultural contact that generates new identities, forms, and motifs through heterogeneous authorship and active audience participation. The study aims to determine whether these games enact transculturation and whether recurring motifs can be identified as distinctly Chilean. The Chilean videogame industry is small, and its horror subset smaller still, yet titles such as Tormented Souls (2021), The Signifier (2020), and the upcoming Curilemu, which draws on Chilote mythology, indicate considerable potential.

The argument draws on several theoretical frameworks. The author situates the videogame as a particularly suitable medium for transculturation because it serves as a space of cultural creation and requires participation from both developers and players. Prior work on Latin American games by Ramirez-Moreno and Navarrete-Cardero identifies two approaches, regionalism, which foregrounds local folklore and pre-European cosmovisions, and cosmopolitanism, which universalizes regional myths while preserving local color. The author also proposes applying Pruett's analysis of Japanese horror games, which argues that some titles deliberately obscure their cultural symbols while still retaining recognizable national elements, to the Latin American context, which is characterized by cultural hybridization.

Because Chilean horror games have received little scholarly attention, the study turns to Chilean horror literature for expected motifs, drawing on Diamantino Valdés's reading of the imbunche, a figure from Chilean folklore, as a metaphor for national identity marked by fractured memory and political repression. The paper proposes to test whether games like The Signifier embody these motifs and to identify any others that emerge, an analysis framed as a work in progress rather than a set of established findings.