Playing with Death: When “Game Over” Beckons “Try Again”
This article is about the staging of death in certain video games and the way it is experienced by regular gamers. In these games, it's all about killing characters and simulating the death of your avatar. A certain parallel can be drawn between the end (of the game) and death (as the end of life). A psychoanalytic framework sheds light on these issues. Video games are described structurally, to account for their complexity (and their success) as a “total game,” synthesizing several forms of mediation. A corpus of video games is then analyzed to understand how death is staged.