Death-Themed Games and Playing the "Good Death"

Heather Maycock's paper examines death-themed video games, a category of games that encourage players to reflect on death, dying, and grief rather than treating death merely as punishment or a mechanical feedback loop. Building on existing scholarship in game studies and death studies, the paper argues that these games, while often presented as humane and empathetic, can encode particular cultural values. Its central concern is how death-themed games intersect with the "good death," a discourse formulated largely in palliative care that has spread through wider culture, and in its dominant twenty-first-century Anglosphere form emphasises individualism and the dying person's control over timing, place, symptoms, and activities.

The analysis draws on a curated case study selection, including Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus 2020), I Am Dead (Hollow Ponds 2020), and The Graveyard (Tale of Tales 2008), interpreted through a lens combining game studies and death studies literature. Preliminary findings suggest that the systems of many death-themed games give a particular mode of dying an intrinsic goodness, sometimes presenting it as necessary for completing the dying process. These representations frequently align closely with the dominant individualistic model of the good death. By contrast, games that incorporate slowness, boredom, or loss of control appear to resist this normative framing and decline to treat a good death as something that must be achieved.

The paper is presented as part of a broader PhD thesis, with individual aspects intended for development into further games analysis research. Its stated contribution is to add a critical perspective to existing scholarship on death-themed games and to identify a further point of intersection between video games, death studies, and the health humanities. The study is qualitative and interpretive, relying on close analysis of selected titles rather than survey data or a broad sample, and it is situated within an Anglophone, primarily British-influenced framework of death discourse.