The following piece contains spoilers for Silent Hill 2.

Everyone analyzes Silent Hill 2. Including me. It’s not hard to see why, either.


It is both a seminal title in video game history, especially for more mature storytelling endeavours, not just in the realm of horror, but it was a popular one. It was a defining title for the PlayStation 2 era when it was released in 2001, and remains a defining title to this day. There are so many crucial scenes that can be broken down and indeed analyzed, just off the top of your head. The game is loaded with symbolism and strives to tell an adult story about tortured people in a medium that mainly revolved around shooting people in the face. Where other games had told stories about grizzled white guys who rode into town and acted the hero (even Silent Hill (1999) did this), Silent Hill 2 was smart enough, and daring enough, to dare to subvert that expectation. The regular looking guy was no hero. In fact, some even consider him a villain.

So, more than twenty years on from the game’s original release, people can’t stop talking about it! And this, really, is only a good thing. Despite this, I am acutely aware of the fact that people can’t stop talking about it. As a cultural touchstone for horror, it acts as a lightning rod too for those who fancy themselves analysts – like I myself aspire to be. It is doubly good that the specific “Silent Hill 2 research” field is so mined, because new essayists or commentators or what have you can explore previously published material. Yet.

When there is such an inundation of similar content, it becomes harder and harder to stand out. I adore the Silent Hill series, Silent Hill 2 especially, but it becomes painfully difficult to bring a fresh perspective to the analysis. Believe me, I have tried. Retrospectives are a dime a dozen. Histories of the game have been painstakingly charted and catalogued. Extensive psychoanalysis has been performed not just on James Sunderland, but on the other characters in the game as well.

The question is, then, what is there left to say? Video games are such a complex medium, and there’s no shortage of them. Yet it seems everyone is bringing their plate, stacked with new perspective, to the buffet offered by Silent Hill 2. I consume as much analysis as the next person, but I’ve come to see some of the newer analysis as bringing nothing new to the table, at least nothing significant. I imagine simply it’s that people are working in a vacuum, and this is an attitude I can fully understand. It can be demoralizing to work on something, only while you are doing research to discover that someone has already done it.

It is a source of internal conflict for me – I welcome any and all new discussion on the game, keeping it alive for a new audience, but I also wonder whether there is anything useful left on the game’s bones that has not already fallen away from many hours in the broiler. In the end, perhaps this line of thought stems from my own knowledge that what I have written has already been written by others.

And here we come to the real point of this article, I suppose – not that I am concerned that other people are making so many videos on Silent Hill 2 (because no matter how rote, I love that stuff), but that my own work is below par – not just that, but it is hard to compete with so much stuff. Even if my work was stellar, I still have to fight my way through the recommendations of thousands of other similar analysis videos. To stand out on increasingly packed social medias, where everyone (wonderfully) is making their own content, is extraordinarily difficult.

I’m most of the way through a longform analysis of Silent Hill 3, for instance, when I did a search on YouTube. The futility of making something quickly became evident. So I have worked to include as much academic research as possible, bringing the perspective of books from a variety of different fields, as well as weaving my own thoughts into the video’s script. Yet. Again, a niggling feeling.

Existing as a content creator can be exhausting, if you let it. My mind reels at even the name. “Content creator”? In the eyes of many on the internet, that is all that certain channels are – in the eyes of the corporations that run those big websites, that is indeed, all we are. We are pinpricks of data in the machine that make them the extra few cents that push their profit margins up a little bit. So it stings a little to come to terms with that fact – but it also becomes a little demoralizing.

Creating good content for people to watch is something I have always prided myself on. I take constructive criticism seriously, and I have generally been disappointed with non-constructive criticism. I appreciate that sometimes I may get the facts wrong, or that opinions may be disagreed with – but to not argue in good faith is to not argue at all, but merely to aggravate. I don’t want this to read as a whining post – “how could you criticize me?” – but as a question of self-worth on the internet – “how can I create better?”

I love making the content that I make. Even if some of my scripts never see the light of day, I have enjoyed the time I’ve spent working on them. The question at the end, is: do such things deserve to see the light of day? Is work that I consider slightly derivative, walking over patches of well-trod ground even while I try to bring some new perspective to it – is that worth releasing for others to consume? Such things are hard to answer easily.

Time, then, is the value I am questioning. Is it worth spending five hours watching a elaborate breakdowns on the internet of a game that is over twenty years old? Is it worth spending double that time writing one of your own? Is it right to ask that someone else spend hours watching a long video? I am increasingly trying to monitor my time spent on the internet, to know when is time to step away from the screen and to just go outside for a walk, or to read a book, or something similar. Because, as everyone knows, the internet can be exhausting. A relentless barrage of information, that, while often extraordinary or important, can be overwhelming.

Questions of worth on the internet all stem from time for me. For that, then, I appreciate every single one of you out there who spends time on any of my videos, or on stream with me. Because that is time you have taken out of your day, one way or another – and for that, I am deeply grateful. I hope that I will continue to see people on my still-quite-new Twitch channel, and I thank you for your patience as I work hard on a variety of video scripts. One day, they will see the light. Maybe they won’t be as I quite hoped them to be – but I hope, always, for the best. Stay safe, all.