gamevironments: Video Gaming and Death (2018)

Jordan Brady Loewen's paper, published in a 2018 special issue on video gaming and death, argues that conventional video games treat death as a mechanical reset with little existential weight, whereas virtual reality may alter how players think about mortality. Loewen contends that VR's capacity to produce embodiment and out-of-body experiences can intensify what Henri Bergson called "fabulation," the mind's tendency to attribute life and soul to images and other beings, a tendency he links to religious thought. The argument rests on the paper's central framing: that VR does not merely depict death but implicitly reshapes beliefs about consciousness and mortality.

The principal empirical anchor is a 2017 University of Barcelona experiment by Bourdin and colleagues, in which VR-induced out-of-body experiences were associated with a reported 50 percent reduction in participants' fear of death relative to controls. Loewen treats this finding as evidence that immersive embodiment can influence deep existential attitudes, though the claim remains a single study whose effects are reported in relation to a specific experimental condition rather than to games as such.

The paper's game analysis is correspondingly selective. Arizona Sunshine is judged not to exploit VR's fabulative potential, while Deep Sea, a death-simulation game whose designer Robin Arnott sought to "turn off the brain," illustrates how the same power could be turned toward negative affective ends. Loewen's conclusions extend to possible military, hospice, and social-control applications, but these remain speculative. The paper reports no pre- or post-experience survey data showing actual belief change among players, so its claims about VR games' effects on beliefs are largely theoretical, with the Barcelona study serving as the primary, and only, empirical support.