A Mortician's Tale
Game
6 documents in the library are about A Mortician's Tale, from writers such as DiGRA, Game Developers Conference and Gamecity Hamburg. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside A Mortician's Tale, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about A Mortician's Tale
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.
- Heather Maycock's paper examines death-themed video games, which encourage players to reflect on death, dying, and grief rather than treating death only as punishment or a mechanical feedback loop.
- The paper argues that death-themed games, though often presented as humane and empathetic, can encode particular cultural values, particularly the dominant twenty-first-century Anglosphere model of the "good death" originating in palliative care.
- That dominant model emphasises individualism and the dying person's control over timing, place, symptoms, and activities.
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.
- The paper argues that games about death, dying, and grief, such as Spiritfarer, Gris, A Mortician's Tale, and Last Day of June, can reframe mortality away from humanist, capitalist views of death as an interruption of progress toward a view of death as one phase in a generative, interconnected process.
- Drawing on critical posthumanism, feminist, new materialist, and rhizomatic theory (notably Rosi Braidotti), the author reads both Spiritfarer and Gris as enacting postdualistic relations with death, in which the ego and its anxieties dissolve into ongoing processes of becoming.
- Spiritfarer is interpreted as embracing a notion of final destination through its ferrying of spirits to the afterlife, while Gris conveys grief as both overwhelming affect and a process of discovery through its score, restored colour, and backward-moving mechanics.
Unraveling Grief: Design Space Analysis of Death-Themed Games
"Unraveling Grief" is a Design Space Analysis, drawing on the QOC (Questions, Options, Criteria) framework, of death-themed games.
- The study is a Design Space Analysis using the QOC (Questions, Options, Criteria) framework, produced by Aalto University researchers, that organizes death-themed game design into a Design Space Map across four domains: death design, fictional design, visuals, and mechanics.
- Across eight examined games, including That Dragon, Cancer, Spiritfarer, and A Mortician's Tale, individual portrayals of a single intimate loss produced the strongest emotional impact, while group portrayals encouraged broader, more objective reflection on mortality.
- Most games convey death primarily through narrative rather than explicit imagery, and recurring motifs such as spiritual gravestones act as visual shorthand for multiple losses.
Storytelling with Verbs: Integrating Gameplay and Narrative
Narrative design functions most effectively when treated as a core component of game design, where gameplay mechanics—or "verbs"—serve as the primary building blocks for storytelling.
- Gameplay mechanics, or 'verbs,' should serve as the primary building blocks for storytelling to ensure that the player's physical actions and the narrative arc remain cohesive.
- Integrating narrative design as a core component of game design from the start of pre-production prevents ludonarrative dissonance and streamlines the development process.
- Designers should define characterization and world stakes by analyzing the implications of player actions, such as how 'defend' implies survival while 'attack' implies aggression.
A Mortician's Tale: A Different View on How Games Treat Death
This analysis examines the integration of death as a narrative and mechanical element in video games, specifically through the lens of the independent title A Mortician’s Tale.
- Games can achieve deeper emotional resonance by replacing traditional punitive death mechanics and superficial narrative tropes with nuanced, empathetic representations of mortality.
- Removing fail states and urgency from gameplay encourages players to slow their pace, fostering a reflective environment that allows for deeper engagement with the stories of the deceased.
- Direct, ritualistic interaction with the deceased and the integration of meaningful character relationships are the most effective methods for eliciting profound player responses.
Queer Games Bundle 2022: Our Top 5
The Queer Games Bundle 2022 serves as a promotional highlight for a significant digital collection of independent titles developed by LGBTQ+ creators.
- The 2022 Queer Games Bundle hosted on itch.io featured 588 independent titles created by LGBTQ+ developers.
- The initiative utilized a dual-pricing model consisting of a $60 fixed-price option and a pay-what-you-can edition, with all proceeds distributed equally among the participating creators.
- Launched in June 2022 to coincide with Pride Month, the bundle serves as a promotional vehicle to increase the visibility of marginalized voices within the gaming industry.