Video Gaming and Death

The document examines video gaming as an especially fertile medium for the uncanny, using the 2010 creepypasta "Ben Drowned" as its central case study. Drawing on Freud's theory of the uncanny alongside media theorists such as Kittler, Sconce, Royle, Hayles, Galloway, and Botting, it argues that games are among the most uncanny of media because they blend data with embodiment, familiar worlds with mechanical strangeness, and personal memory with networked circulation. The author contends that the uncanny strangeness of play is ordinarily concealed by familiarity, and that narratives about haunted cartridges expose it.

Central to the analysis is the physical Nintendo 64 cartridge, which stores save data and thereby becomes a site of nostalgia, memory, and haunting. The author reads Ben, the entity of "Ben Drowned," as both a viral phenomenon and a ghostly informational simulacrum that exploits the boundary between organic and digital, living and dead. Glitches and corrupted game worlds are interpreted as revealing the fragility of the systems that govern both games and contemporary society, while anxieties about mutation and loss of control are linked to broader concerns within digital culture.

The scope of the work spans creepypasta and haunted-cartridge narratives, including "Sonic.exe" and Pokémon creepypastas, with a particular focus on The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, whose recurring death theme and fan interpretations of its zones as the five stages of grief receive attention. The analysis is primarily theoretical and textual rather than empirical; the closing bibliography draws on gaming industry data, but the document presents no quantitative findings of its own. Its conclusion anticipates that digital uncanny dread will intensify as gaming, remakes, and nostalgia-driven culture continue to expand.