The Treatment of Death in Video Games

Death. It comes to all of us. It comes particularly often, however, to video gamers. The majority of games feature death in one form or another, so the question arises as to how the medium is portraying the concept.

Whilst films and books often give great emotional impact to a characters passing, video games often involve the repeated demise of the playable protagonist at the fault of the gamer, so the implications are inevitably going to differ. No-one screams at the telly out of pity and mourning when Gordon Freeman takes one too many bullets to the zero-suit; but they will instead scream for a different reason. Player death does not usually mark an emotional tragedy in video games, but it does mark a setback for player progression much to the frustration of the gamer. It is part of the trial and error process that defines many gameplay experiences and thus gamers learn from their death rather than lament it. Does this belittle the impact of death? Well it certainly presents it as a minor frustration rather than a permanent loss, but it also teaches players to learn from their mistakes. The whole point of many games is to avoid your demise as much as you can, which arguably goes some lengths in painting death in as negative a light as possible.          

Of course, rogue-like games, which appear to have proliferated lately, accentuates this notion. They amplify the negative consequences of death by making it a permanent status for your character, thus robbing the player of all the progress they made with said character. Of course, you can still play the game again with a completely new character, so death is still not the be all and end all in that regard. But the impact of the characters demise is certainly taken to new heights and thus more accurately, if still unevenly, reflects the fixed cost of death. And then, of course, there’s games like Dark Souls, which make a huge deal about death by implementing it as a defining factor of the gameplay experience. It presents death as an inevitable and frequent phenomenon, which accentuates the sense of danger that the player is in. The words “YOU ARE DEAD” which arise following every passing portrays death as the ultimate failure, which certainly may reflect some real-world views.

So player death is presented in a multiplicity of ways, but what about the death of others in video games. How about the people that the player themselves kill? Online multiplayer games like Call of Duty make a popular sport out of the slaying of others, in which the number of kills you have made is simply a statistic to be proud of. This kind of portrayal of death by video games is often a hot button issue in the political landscape, where many voices proclaim it as the cause of real world gunman killings. The way they glorify violence and motivate players to kill, these voices say, can have an unhealthy effect on people’s attitudes towards all violence and killing in general. To counter this, one might say that every human has a destructive side, and games like Call of Duty help them to release this inner rage out on a virtual world rather than the real one. Regardless, as you are hopefully well aware, these kinds of games are in the minority in their approach to the death of others.

Many games emphasise the wrongness of murder, often by implementing a morality or choice mechanic into their gameplay. Games like Mass Effect or Infamous often give you the choice to kill someone who has betrayed you or antagonised you in some way, but make it very clear that you are on a path to evil if you decide to pull the trigger. Even Grand Theft Auto highlights the illegality of murder by immediately bringing out the police or even the army to pursue you if you decide to dish out death upon innocents. There are also plenty of video game characters whose deaths have certainly been emotionally weighted and portrayed in a tragic and dramatic light. Lee Everett in The Walking Dead, Dom in Gears of War 3, Sarah in The Last of Us; these are just a few recent examples of character deaths which have dealt a real emotional punch in emphasising the tragic significance of the loss of a loved one.

The portrayal of death in video games then, as shown, is as varied as it is extensive. However, whether it’s concerning the death of the player, the killing of others by the player, or the death of game characters, some form of meaning is always imposed upon the phenomenon even if the nature of this meaning is sometimes considered unhealthy.