The representation of death in video games

Abstract

From its beginnings, videogames deployed an esthetic spectrum that made new forms of representing death possible. It could be thought that differences between videogame and other media, such as cinema, arise from the clash between two great cultural forms: storytelling and gaming. But current context shows a scenario that is full of mixtures and connections between them. In this work, characteristic features of death representation in videogames –such as recurrence, insertion in a playful regime, distance from typical semantizations of narrative genres, and tendency to disrupt the story– are pointed out. In addition, this work describes two great representative strategies that the medium elaborated in different moments of its history. At present, both of them coexist and to a great extent dominate the video-ludic landscape. One strategy consists in invisibilizing the act of dying; in the other one, death is spectacularized through an audiovisual maximization. These two forms do not present themselves in a pure state nor do they exclude other possible representative paths, but they allow us to observe tendencies that enjoyed (and enjoy) a great stability. Finally, four cases are analyzed. Such cases produce a deviation from the implementation of the act of dying as a penalty and as a regression of ludic nature, and propose alternative solutions to the question about the representation of death.