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DTSTAMP:20250521T213000Z
UID:AAAOxXAAVAADhT1AAq@thor.lawrence.edu
CATEGORIES:Other
DTSTART:20250521T213000Z
DTEND:20250521T233000Z
SUMMARY:Video Games and Mourning
ORGANIZER;CN="Philosophy Department":
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DESCRIPTION:
 A young man encountered his father's "ghost" in 
 an old video game when he loaded an old controller 
 and found a recorded session of his father's last 
 high-scoring race from a game they had played 
 together, years after his father passed away (Bowman, 
 2014) A grieving mother encountered her deceased 
 child in virtual reality (VR), using the occasion 
 to share a simulated birthday meal and tell her 
 daughter goodbye (Kim, 2020). What are we to make 
 of the presence of the dead in video games? On 
 the one hand, video games seem like places of 
 pretense and play, hardly apt material for something 
 as weighty as death and grieving. On the other 
 hand, the roles these games can play in bringing 
 us together and providing us with structured support 
 for social bonding suggests that we ought not 
 overlook their potential significance for the 
 bereaved. I argue that they they provide us with 
 structured opportunities to remember the dead, 
 and reprise our roles with them.Furthermore, this 
 may mirror historical traditions that highlight 
 the importance of longing and simulation, what 
 Michael Puett (Puett, 2015) calls the "as-if" 
 spaces of ritual. This approach is inspired by 
 Confucian defenses of mourning practices as artificial 
 but valuable ways to distill and frame our messy 
 and conflicted natural responses (Olberding, 2015) 
 and let us explore ways of being in the world 
 that reflect our social connections, which can 
 be uniquely aided by differences from rather than 
 adherence to "real life". Video games may offer 
 a way to implement some of the goods promoted 
 by classical ritual spaces, in a way that aligns 
 with Confucian arguments in defense of ritual 
 mourning.\n\n
 Price: None\n

LOCATION:Main Hall 201 - Classroom
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