In Fred Botting's study of the gothic, horror and technology, he touches briefly on video games, noting that video games have much in common with the early gothic novel: both are the centre of moral panics and controversy; both are known for their somewhat formulaic and mechanical structure; both emphasize intense emotion and violent shock (Botting 2008: 79). But though he cites gothic-oriented games such as DOOM (1993) and Silent Hill (1999), Botting's focus is not on the narrative of video games themselves, as he mainly wishes to use them to illustrate how their play reinforces the notion of the gothic as counterfeit, as an empty circulation that ‘haunts and affirms the boundaries of cultural formations’ (83); to that end, he concludes that there ‘is little difference … between figures on the screen and figures twitching in front of it’ (137). The connection Botting draws between video games and the gothic is worth further study, however; indeed, video games as a medium can be usefully thought of as inherently gothic in the way they are predicated on doubling and repetition. Even when the games’ narratives don't rely on gothic mechanics, this doubling is still inherent in the game play itself. While the act of a player controlling an avatar would seem to follow an Enlightenment model of rational self-fashioning, in which the player gains in knowledge, skill, and self-assuredness with each iteration of the experiment, still the gothic doubling inherent in the game play calls into question notions of the stable Enlightenment self. The simulacrum of the game, with its complex engines of choice and consequence, serves as a paradoxically unstable but grounded real, one that highlights control only to suggest that the world ‘outside’ is more chaotic, less governed by reason, and more gothic in its own right. However, as I argue below, players are so used to this doubling, that this apparent potential for gothic destabilization of self is left somewhat unrealized. Through the encoding of gothic elements into the narrative, and importantly into the very act of choice that governs video games, these games both rein force and simultaneously call attention to the lie of rational choice that undergirds the very neo-liberal economic market that saw games rise to media dominance.