Age Representation in High-Exposure Horror Games
Victoria Mummelthei · www.nodiscipline.de
Falmouth Horror & Gaming Conference 2026
The Inciting Question
Horror relies entirely on vulnerable bodies to sell fear—yet it keeps aggressively defaulting to a single, highly capable physical archetype.
A custom Virtual Census 2.0 framework built to code high-exposure characters and track who gets to exist on screen.
79 horror titles and 240 human-coded characters, weighted by player ownership metrics.
Gender splits tell a familiar story, but age reveals who is actively erased from the genre.
The Sample
180
Total titles
79
Fully coded
240
Characters coded
1M+
Owners each
Platform
Steam (PC) primary
Top dev countries
USA · Japan · Poland · UK
Current pass
≥1M owners tier · 101 titles (750k owners) pending
Horror in Context — Steam Ownership
Estimated Steam owner counts (SteamSpy data) — top horror titles vs. major non-horror releases from the same years.
Non-horror benchmarks
Horror titles in our sample
Dead by Daylight (~35M) sits in the same bracket as Elden Ring. Horror isn't a niche genre on Steam — these are blockbuster player counts. Source: SteamSpy estimates.
Gender — The Expected Result
Across 240 coded characters in the high-exposure tier (79 games):
All four categories share one denominator — 240 total characters — and sum to 100%. The ambiguous 7.9% is mostly masked, suited, or hazmat co-op avatars where gender genuinely cannot be coded. Zero characters were coded as explicitly nonbinary.
Age Distribution — RQ1
78.8%
of all characters are adults (18–64)
Children: 9.5% · Teens: 7.7% · Elderly: 1.2% · Unknown: 2.8%
Age Breakdown
UK benchmark uses ONS ageing categories: 0–15, 16–64, and 65+.
Visual share
The 1.2% Problem
"Decrepit = Dangerous"
"Expendable Exposition"
"Competence ≠ Monster"
Mainstream games: ~3% elderly representation | Horror: 1.2% (And mostly hostile)
RQ5 intersectional finding
Action-Horror
100%
adult leads. Combat-heavy play assumes peak physical fitness.
Psychological-Horror
~83%
adult leads — but children and teens appear more often where narrative carries fear.
Co-op / Multiplayer
~72%
adult — with lots of masked, suited, or age-erased avatars.
Systemic Sandbox
Most varied
Management and survival systems allow more unusual ages and roles.
The "Default Body" in Horror
Combat, stealth, and stamina systems are implicitly built for peak physical performance, not demography.
If only young adults survive on screen, players inevitably build a mental model of who belongs in a crisis.
Aging isn't treated as a neutral phase of life. When games reach for old age, they reach for the monster.
0
Playable Elderly
in M-rated titles
The Sole Exception
Wickerbottom (Out of 79 games)
1
Race & Ethnicity
Rating × Age — RQ4
ESRB M / PEGI 18
0
%
of characters adult in M-rated titles
0 playable elderly
ESRB T / PEGI 12–16
0
%
adult — teen and child leads appear here
FNAF · Little Nightmares · OMORI
E / E10+ / None
Mixed
Highest child-lead ratio + most ambiguous identities
Undertale · DREDGE · Hello Neighbor
Limitations
Non-human antagonists break demographic coding
1M+ ownership skews toward big IP formulas
Giant categories mask systemic visual cues
Real-world data isn't a perfect gaming standard
What this opens up
"18 to 64 is doing an irresponsible amount of heavy lifting."
Replacing blunt demographics with visual coding
How systems inherently code for the body
"Did the genre get more or less ageist, or was it always like this?"
Tracking the disappearance of older bodies over time
76 games left to code
Where we leave off
78.8%
Adult default
of all coded characters
1.2%
Elderly characters
1
Playable elderly
🗞 Industry Note
GamesIndustry.biz
"Nobody's making games for the retired people: The growing yet underserved market for grey gamers"
Thank you for listening to me counting fictional bodies.
Questions, critiques, and methodology tips welcome.