SAVED GAMES AND RESPAWN TIMERS: THE DILEMMA OF REPRESENTING DEATH IN VIDEO GAMES
SAVED GAMES AND RESPAWN TIMERS: THE DILEMMA OF REPRESENTING DEATH IN VIDEO GAMES

Summary/Abstract: Beginning with the late 20th century, video games have been studied as cultural artefacts that are both influenced by and influential towards the societies that produce and receive them. Like other cultural productions, video games are partly concerned with representation. Even though it might seem that the often fantastic worlds they generate have little to do with what would be referred to as“the real world,” many of the great questions of human literature and arts are nevertheless present. Death is no exception, but unlike other themes, its depiction has always presented video game producers with a certain dilemma. How might one properly render the sense of loss associated with death, for example, when one must also offer the player the possibility to turn back in time and resume their game playas if the event had never taken place? Indeed, when the only consequence of death consists in a temporary removal from the game world, followed by an almost immediate reintegration, how meaningful might the event be? Furthermore,considering that a number of scholars define video games as series of rules and obstacles to be overcome, death being nothing more than one such obstacle, canmortality be at all represented in this novel media? The aim of the present paper is to explore the conflicting relation between the representation of death in video games and basic game mechanics, as well as to examine some notable titles and their attempts to render death more faithfully. Ultimately, we question what remains of death and its “traditional” connotations when placed in the relatively new media of video games.

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