Death and Video Games

Dying is a part of almost every video game, you either die, or kill, hundreds of times in the average game. Even in games that try to focus less on the minute-to-minute gameplay and instead try to emphasis their world and/or story you will most likely have killed hundreds of people and died at least a dozen times by the time you reach the credits. The Last of Us is a fantastic example of this. Death even creeps into the cozy genre of gaming. Just look at Stardew Valley that opens with the death of your character’s grandfather. Then we have games aimed at younger players, like Pokémon, that attempt to downplay any connection to death and dying. Defeated pokémon don’t die, they faint, only to be revived at the nearest pokécentre. But then we see Marowak haunting the Pokémon Tower, or Ogerpon’s former master being killed in the Gen 9 DLC. Death is still a vital part of these more family friendly games. Now that we understand the many ways that we see death, and even deal it out to others, I’d like to start to understand the relationship between it and gaming. So, let’s ask and then try to answer a simple question.
What relationship does gaming have with death?

I’d say it’s a rather superficial one, as death in a game is always a temporary thing. The swathes of bandits, monsters, or other variety of enemies will simply be replaced with identical versions of themselves with the same voice lines, appearances, and behaviours. Even if you’re playing a game with only unique combatants, they will still regain their lives whenever you, or anyone else, decides to start a new playthrough. When you, the player, die then it’s little more bother than a quick reload and you’re restored to a previous position with very little other than time lost. Some games attempt to take death more seriously with Ironman or Hardcore modes deleting save data upon death. Even with these, however, death is no more than a set back to a determined player, it’s never an eternal end like it is in real life.

Nor should it be. No one would enjoy a game that permanently denied you a chance to replay it after your character died. Being able to reload, respawn, and restart games is a natural part of what makes them fantastic. This is true with all forms of storytelling. You can rewatch, reread, and indeed, replay, almost any story weather it’s a novel, a film, a game, or anything else. It’s just the nature of fiction.

What video games offer in relation to death is control. Those that stand in between us and our objective die because we decide that they die, our characters die because of a mistake we made while playing, and even when we lose that control and characters canonically die, we have the power to restart the game or play an earlier entry in the series and bring them back to life. This is of course true with any means of telling a story. We can simply stop reading The Lord of the Rings after the first book and Boromir will never die. As long as you never watch Alien 3 then Newt and Hicks will avoid their fates. What makes this sense of control somewhat more prevalent within video games more so than with other mediums is the fact that you directly play games. Whereas you watch Ellen Ripley survive her many trails within the original 1979 Alien film, you survive the Sevastopol station as Amanda Ripley in Alien Isolation. This means that if Amanda gets caught and impaled on the tail of an XX121 Xenomorph, that’s directly because of an action that you took as the player. Likewise, when you reload your save file and Amanda comes back to life, it’s you that loaded the game, that pulled her from the temporary setback that was death in a video game. Games are about control, about putting you as the player within a situation, a game, a story, a world and letting you explore it. This control applies as much to death as it does any other aspect of them. Death may be a part of video games, but unlike in reality, we have control over it, and that feels good.

What this nature creates is a world where death can’t ever carry the same weight as it does in real life. Even when characters have a canonical death within a long-running series, you can simply replay the earlier games to spend more time with them. This isn’t a choice we have when death takes away our loved ones. I can’t spend time with my aunt, grandparents, or friend by just loading up a memory of them. They are gone, in a way that is more permanent than gameplay, or even fictional narratives of any medium, can allow for. Boromir, like Albert Wesker, may have canonical deaths, but whenever you start the story again, they are still waiting for you, alive and well.

But there is a part of gaming where I feel the uncomfortable permanence of death. That cold uneasy shadow that we are all familiar with. That horrible knowledge that you, and everyone you know and love, will one day, END.

Games preservation is something I’ve been invested in since I was a teenager. Yet this is a task that’s doomed to fail. Despite my love, care, and protection of my retro games, the discs will someday begin to rot, the data slowly becoming unreadable to the consoles designed to play them. The consoles themselves will become rarer as each one lost to neglect, simple were-and-tear, or just the destructive nature of time itself will not be replaced. While fans like me will do what we can, eventually the parts for repairs will stop being produced, and the consoles will simply stop working. The best-case scenario here is that the parts continue to be produced, but even then, eventually the people repairing these consoles will die and they will end up being thrown away, donated somewhere, or left to decay in a storage box somewhere. Collectors like me will try to preserve the games, consoles, and media that we love, yet we are doomed to fail. These games will be lost to time. This is why I feel the uncomfortable shadow of death within my beloved collection. Because my goal of preservation is as temporary as life itself, and once my games and consoles decay, their deaths are permanent.

How many games have already been lost to time?
Just visit any abandonware website and spend a few minutes shifting through the hundreds of games and realise that these are the few games that were lucky enough to be preserved on sites like this. Even games from beloved franchises with millions of fans have games that have been lost to time. Try playing the iOS Resident Evil Degeneration tie-in game now. I didn’t have an iPhone when this game hit the app store, so I missed it. I’m obsessed with Resident Evil in a way only possible with a combination of ADHD and Autism. I have played every Resident Evil game besides this one. I’ve played the unfinished Gameboy Color port of Resident Evil 1, I’ve played the java port of the 2002 Resident Evil remake, I’ve played Resident Evil 4 android and iOS versions. These are games that most people don’t even know ever existed. Yet the closest I can get to playing Resident Evil Degeneration is an internet archive capture of an old games’ preservation website with a link that no longer works. It breaks my heart to say this, but the iOS Resident Evil Degeneration game is dead. This is a game from a series with at least ten-million fans based on the sales of the last game. If this death can happen to a game from the Resident Evil franchise, then there must be millions of games long forgotten. Games coded in the bedrooms of nerds for the Commodore 64 or the Amiga 500 computers. All now dead and forgotten. Like all the games you love now will be. From Elden Ring, to Skyrim, from Paralives to The Sims 4, from Tomb Raider to Uncharted, all will be forgotten.

Games preservation and collecting is a reminder to me, that I, like everyone and everything I love, will one day, END.

So why bother?

This has all been very depressing so far. It brings me to that old question; one I’ve asked myself a lot over my life. If life is so temporary, if everything I do, no matter how great, how grand, will one day be forgotten, completely lost to the cruel nature of time and decay, why bother doing anything?
The answer is deceptively simple really; because I enjoy it.

Don’t let the simple nature of this reason distract from how powerful it is. I don’t believe in a God or Gods, I don’t think there’s an afterlife, there is no real, definitive reason that we are here from what I can make of it. Yet there is a purpose to our lives, it’s not one given to us by a creator, nor by the universe itself, it’s one given to us by ourselves. I don’t know what your reasons for living are, dear reader, but I can tell you what mine are. My wife is one of my reasons for living, just getting to cuddle up to her each night is something I’m so grateful for that I could never express it even if I had the rest of time itself. I love her so much its honestly unbearable at times. Then I have my family, they are amazing, and I will live for them, because when I think about all we’ve been through together it makes my chest feel all warm and happy. But they’re not the only reasons I have for living. My games collection as well as the collection of merch and other related material is another one. Sure, these games may one day be dust, long forgotten by anyone currently alive, but right now, I love them. I love playing them, I love writing about them, I love talking about them, and I love looking at them on my shelves. They bring me joy. Then I have my writing. I love stories. I want to bring my own fictional world to life, and I want to share it with others.

Life is hard, it’s random, chaotic, and very often, not in our control. There is no purpose to life, no one thing that will bring you joy. To steal a term from gaming, life is the ultimate sandbox, you must find your own reasons to live, but when you do there is so much power and joy in it. There is no wrong reason to live. Life can have purpose because you like collecting coins, or just that feeling of relaxation when you get into a nice hot bath at the end of a hard day’s work. Hell, wanting to see how the next MCU film pans out is a mighty good reason to live. I’m looking forward to Avengers Doomsday myself.

Go out there and live your life, collect those coins, enjoy that booty call, rewatch that film, book that trip to Spain, or whatever else it is that gives your life purpose! I’m going to continue collecting my games, writing my stories, and loving my wife and family, because those are my reasons to live. My life’s purpose isn’t grand; it’s not going to see me exploring the world or changing the course of history and I very much doubt that I’ll be remembered past those I personally interact with after my death. Despite that, I know that I’m happy now in a way that I’ve never been before. I still have bad days, life can still be hard, and it often feels unfair, but I have a home filled with love, a family to support me, and passions to chase. My life has purpose and that makes it very much worth living, despite the shadow of death, the knowledge that one day I will end. I hope that you’re able to reflect on your own life and feel the same way, and if you can’t, I hope that you manage to go out there and find your own life’s purpose, whatever it may be.