A Mortician's Tale
Game
Documents about A Mortician's Tale
Whitepaper3 pages
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.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
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.
DiGRAJun 2025
Whitepaper21 pages
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.
DiGRAJun 2025