To the Moon

Time to Reminisce and Die: Representing Old Age in Art Games

"Time to Reminisce and Die: Representing Old Age in Art Games" argues that the medium's depictions of aging are narrow, and that older characters are rarely developed as complete, agentic figures.

• Depictions of older characters in art games are narrow: aging is most often framed through impairment, failure, cognitive decline, and death rather than as a full life stage.
• Elderly characters typically serve as rhetorical devices for meditating on mortality rather than as protagonists with their own goals, interiority, or capacity for growth.
• Aging is commonly modeled procedurally as degradation, expressed through slowness, diminished ability, or eventual failure.