Making Friends with Death: Posthuman Post-Life Play

This paper, by Poppy Wilde of Birmingham City University, examines how videogames centred on death, dying, and grief can be used to reconceptualise mortality through a critical posthumanist lens. Drawing on autoethnographic play experiences with Spiritfarer and Gris, alongside other titles such as A Mortician's Tale and Last Day of June, the author argues that these games can move players away from humanist, capitalist framings of death as the interruption of progress and toward a view of death as one phase in a generative, interconnected process. The argument draws on feminist, new materialist, and rhizomatic theory, particularly the work of Rosi Braidotti, and situates itself within existing scholarship on games and death, grief, and the afterlife.

The central claims are that Spiritfarer embraces a notion of final destination through its ferrying of spirits to the afterlife, while Gris uses its score, restored colour, and backward-moving mechanics to convey grief as both overwhelming affect and a process of discovery. The author reads both games as demonstrating postdualistic relations with death, in which the ego and its anxieties dissolve into ongoing processes of becoming. The analysis is qualified by a counterpoint: Gris can be seen to simplify grief through a rigid "five stages" framework, and Spiritfarer's focus on spirits may reinscribe the Cartesian dualisms that critical posthumanism seeks to reject.

The study is primarily theoretical and interpretive rather than empirical, relying on close reading of gameplay and engagement with the existing literature rather than survey data or sampled player responses. Its scope is limited to a small selection of narrative and affective games. It is positioned as a contribution to scholars working at the intersection of posthumanism and game studies, as well as to those interested in the affective affordances of games dealing with loss and bereavement.