The Terrible Victims: "Female Ghosts" as a Cultural Symbol in Chinese Indie Video Games

This paper examines the symbolic function of female ghosts in the horror puzzle genre of Chinese indie video games, arguing that these spectral figures give expression to anxieties about gender, memory, and justice that are difficult to voice openly. Grounded in Gothic theory, folklore studies, and feminist media criticism, the analysis compares representative titles from mainland China and Taiwan to show how divergent socio-political conditions produce distinct portrayals of ghostly femininity. The study situates these works against structural constraints on the independent sector, including limited funding, censorship, and algorithm-driven distribution, which have pushed developers toward low-cost genres with strong narrative potential.

The analysis focuses on four titles: Detention (2017), Blind Village (2022), Laughing to Die (2024), and Firework (2021). Through qualitative textual and visual analysis, the paper identifies two principal archetypes, the wrathful avenger and the empathetic helper, and finds that each is regionally inflected. In Detention, the ghost is an ethical agent and witness to Taiwan's White Terror, prompting civic reflection on guilt and remembrance. Blind Village, by contrast, presents a vengeful spirit drawn from folk tradition and feminist allegory, reflecting anger over gender injustice and institutional failure in mainland settings. Laughing to Die and Firework offer a gentler model in which ghostly grandmothers or teachers guide protagonists through grief and suppressed truth.

The author terms the ethical framework underlying these gentler figures "underworld justice," an imagined system in which care and reparation persist where human institutions fail, and contrasts it with the subsumption of women's agency under state feminism in China. The paper also notes the influence of Taiwanese titles, such as Detention and Devotion, on subsequent mainland horror games, despite the latter's banning in mainland China. Overall, the study concludes that female ghosts function as "terrible victims" who reclaim narrative space and ethical agency, contributing to scholarship on cultural memory, feminist aesthetics, and game design under political constraint.