University Calendar

Video Games and Mourning

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.

Location:	Main Hall 201 - Classroom
Price:	None
Sponsor:	Philosophy Department
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