Uncanny Homecoming: The Temporality of Dwelling and Return in Digital Games

This paper, written by Justyna Janik and Daniel Vella for DiGRA 2025, examines how temporality shapes the player experience of home places in digital games. Building on existing scholarship on dwelling, habituation, and coziness in titles such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, the authors argue that moments of returning to in-game places that no longer afford the feelings of home can be understood through the concept of the uncanny. Drawing on Royle's account of the "unhomely at the heart of hearth and home" and a hauntological framework inspired by Derrida, they describe such moments as collisions of time layers that trap the player in a present still bound to the past.

The central contribution is a taxonomy of five kinds of uncanny homecoming. Narrative homecoming involves scripted returns to homes outside the player's own history, governed by fictive time. Progression homecoming occurs when a player revisits a previously inhabited place, such as Candlekeep in Baldur's Gate or Kokiri Forest in Ocarina of Time, and finds it changed, a disjuncture grounded in the player's alterbiography. Negated homecoming arises when player effort is undone, leaving the gameworld reverted while real-world time advances. Abandoned game homes, whether left by the player, by other players in dead MMO worlds, or altered by patches, produce a similar sense of estrangement. Finally, nostalgic homecoming describes returning years later to a fondly remembered game that has stayed the same while the player has changed.

The paper is a conceptual and theoretical work rather than an empirical study, so it presents no survey data, sample sizes, or statistical findings. Its scope is drawn from a range of commercial games across several decades and platforms, from 1990s titles to recent releases, and its methodology relies on phenomenological and temporal theory applied to these examples. Its aim is to illuminate the affective and temporal dimensions of dwelling in digital worlds.