“I Hope There Are Beasties in the Next One”: Positivity Through Interaction in Death-Themed Digital Games

Death is prevalent if not near-ubiquitous in digital games. It is the most common failure state for player characters, often serves as a metaphor for growth and change, and functions as a core gameplay mechanic in numerous critically acclaimed games from Hades (2019) to Elden Ring (2022). Death in digital games is rarely permanent. Games in which the player is expected to die often, like Celeste (2018) and Cuphead (2017), often include in-game counters that track how many times they player has died, sometimes with notes of encouragement; in many others, from recent games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023) and God of War: Ragnarok (2022) to early games like Metroid (1986) and Castlevania (1987), the player character’s death isn’t considered part of the game’s canon narrative, and each death simply reverts the game to a previous save state. As digital games are by definition interactive, challenging, and meant to be replayed multiple times, it is perhaps unsurprising that death is a common but unserious occurrence for the majority of gameplay experiences. F the few games that genuinely explore concepts of death, dying, and the grieving process, one might expect them to present weightier, more solemn experiences than their counterparts above. Interestingly, many games that are thematically centered on death, such as Spiritfarer (2020), I Am Dead (2020), and Outer Wilds (2019), are on the whole strikingly positive and uplifting, especially those in which the game’s central characters are either close to death or already dead at the game’s beginning. Digital games that consider a person’s entire life after it has ended can focus gameplay and content on a celebration and appreciation of that life, rather than the unknown aspects of a life intended to continue after the game’s completion. This is particularly true with games that encourage or require players to interact with aspects of deceased characters’ lives, as with the challenge events, often based on a character’s greatest fear, and cooking/hugging interactions in Spiritfarer; or the excavation of memories about a deceased person from multiple people that remember them in I Am Dead. This paper uses a humanities-based critical methodology to explore how death-themed digital games use game mechanics, user interface design, and interaction design to create positive, uplifting, and celebratory experiences around grief, death, and dying, and how these interactive experiences can help players more fully consider death as a fundamental part of human existence.