Cameron, AllanCoombes, Max2024-08-252024-08-252023https://hdl.handle.net/2292/69757The aim of this thesis is to account for the uncanny nature of videogame embodiment. Valuable existing research positions videogames as embodied texts, which call on players to physically act and react to virtual sensory information, in a human/machinic feedback loop. In these accounts reflexive thought and memory are said to follow embodied experience; I argue these things follow, precede, and accompany embodied action. This thesis explores the role that reflexive thought and memory play in making videogame embodiment continuous, but also alerting the player to the strange temporal logic of the virtual system during play. In doing so it asks whether we can be both embodied in a text and reflexively aware of its operations, and how this affects our reading of videogame narratives and the play experience. This thesis draws on the phenomenological tradition and the Freudian unheimlich, to delineate an understanding of embodiment that accounts for reflexivity. Using this synthesis as a starting point, I provide a textual analysis of five videogames divided into five chapters, using notes taken during play. Each text raises an issue related to player embodiment in the text, and the tensions between the real-time processing of the computer and the preordained narrative elements present within the game system. My research finds that not only is the embodied player reflexively aware of these tensions, but that texts will often draw attention to issues of fate, memory, repetition, and cybernetics; issues that arise naturally from videogames’ computational logic. Attending to the uncanny textuality of videogames is critical for understanding them both as an embodied experience, and as narrative systems with their own temporal logic.Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htmhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/nz/Thesis2024-08-23Copyright: The author