Fictional Videogames as Framing Devices: Suicide Communication in MMOs

In "Fictional Videogames as Framing Devices: Suicide Communication in MMOs," Gutiérrez Carrera argues that fictional massively multiplayer online games can function as framing devices that reveal online games as social spaces with their own communication norms, norms that can make direct talk about suicide easier to voice. Drawing on literary framing concepts and Gualeni and Fassone's work on fictional games, the author analyzes three scenes from the fictional MMO Agony of a Dying MMO, whose central framing device is the final hours of a game's service. The study situates these scenes against prior research, which has largely focused on player-driven suicidal behavior and on links between excessive online gaming and suicidality.

The analysis finds that the dying-server premise serves several communicative functions at once. It provides an alibi for jokes, an implicit channel for serious statements, and a kind of authenticity for players who speak openly. Chat logs, logging out, and the social structures of guilds, factions, and friend lists render serious remarks ambiguous or emotionally weighty. The same affordances that create safe spaces for marginalized players, such as a trans player's confession of a past suicide attempt, can also attract extremists once the game adds playable Nazis, a tension the author treats as central to the fictional world's social dynamics.

The conclusion characterizes the game's suicidal characters as a "suicidal other" that challenges the stigmatization of gaming disorder while expressing compassion for why players find solace in MMO communities. The author argues that virtual spaces offer distinctive opportunities for direct suicide communication, since the impending dissolution of a social network lessens the face-threatening nature of such statements. The study's scope is limited to a single fictional game and a small set of scenes, and the author notes that the representation's real-world validity requires empirical testing. Because the game's walking-simulator design leaves the player largely as an observer, the work also retains a meta-referential commentary on actual videogames, and it calls for future research using more fully playable fictional games.