Ghastly Graphics: Tool Fandom, Bad Cinema, and the Haunted PS1 Game Development Community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Throughout the late 2010s, a community of independent game developers has come together under the moniker “Haunted PS1” to produce an annual anthology of game demos and an accompanying livestreamed event showcasing these works celebrating a mode of game-making often referred to as “low-poly horror.” This emerging genre nostalgically celebrates the aesthetics of older generations of computer and console games, especially those made for the original PlayStation (PS1) during the mid-to-late 1990s. Over time, this has resulted in an increasingly large group of new indie games that have all been deliberately made to recreate the awkward control schemes, disorienting texturing warping, and jittery polygons inherent to PS1-era game development. To achieve these outdated effects using contemporary game engines, the Haunted PS1 community has produced and openly shared its own custom tools and plugins. This article uses one such tool called “The Haunted PSX Render Pipeline” as a prompt to investigate the relationship between independent game development and other nostalgic and DIY modes of creative practice, namely zine-making and underground horror film. Furthermore, we work to reveal why games and tools released within the Haunted PS1 community are so often distributed for free and how this is partially related to the distinctly obsolete, ugly, and non-commercial aspects of the PS1 aesthetic within contemporary videogame capitalism and fandoms for so-called “bad” media.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".