Death and death rituals in digital games (2025)

In‐game and out‐of‐game mourning: on the complexity of grief in virtual worlds. In Mediating and Re- Mediating Death and Dying

Wiring death: dying, grieving and remembering on the internet

New mourners, old mourners: Online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning

How does online mourning differ from offline mourning? Demographic, social and technological changes alter mourners’ social relationships with both the living and the dead, and hence their experiences of grief. Online technologies comprise the latest chapter in this story; earlier chapters include family/community mourning (pre-industrial), private mourning (twentieth century), and public mourning (turn of the millennium). Pervasive social media in which users generate their own content have significantly shifted mourners’ social interactions and the norms that govern them, partly in new directions (such as enfranchising previously stigmatised griefs; more potential for conflict between mourners and others) but partly returning to something more like the relationships of the pre-industrial village (such as everyday awareness of mortality, greater use of religious imagery, more potential for conflict among mourners). Online, mourners can experience both greater freedom to be themselves and increased social pressure to conform to group norms as to who should be mourned and how.

Coping With Loss: Mapping Digital Rituals for the Expression of Grief

Death in digital spaces: social practices and narratives

International Conference on Cultural Informatics, Communication & Media Studies, 2020

Purpose: In post-modern society, Internet and social media mediate between daily life processes such as death, establishing new forms of social interaction among social actors and creating new norms. The creation of digital cemeteries and the usage of the services they offer by Internet users, the conversion of a deceased person’s Facebook profile into a profile “Remembering” or the replacement of a user's profile photo by a black background in cases of grieving, demonstrate emphatically the new dimensions that the event of death takes on Internet and social media, leading to the building of a public experience, despite the fact that in Western societies death is considered to be a private affair.Methods: This paper based on an in-depth review of the literature deals with death as an event mediated by new technologies, since Internet and social media have given the opportunity for new narratives about the experience of death and have contributed to the emergence of new social pr...

Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn? Overview and Analysis

OMEGA--Journal of Death and Dying, 2012

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society. In particular, social network sites can bring dying and grieving out of both the private and public realms and into the everyday life of social networks beyond the immediate family, and provide an audience for once private communications with the dead.

Living in the digital ether: The evolution of bereavement and abolishment of death in a technological society.

Death seems to be a permanent and unchanging event, when one's life draws to an end the lives of others are forever changed. When one thinks of the funeral they think of black hats, coffins, and of old rituals. It would seem foreign and inappropriate somehow to involve computers and technology in the death industry. Throughout this essay, one will see a brief introduction to social media, a look at historical rituals of the Judeo-Christian funeral rites and lastly the benefits of social media to mourners. This essay hopes to not only explore the evolution of death and bereavement, but to provide supporting evidence and proof that social media websites aid in the brief and process. Using Durkheim's social solidarity and Goffman's impression management, hopefully these will become clearer to the reader as they progress. Keywords: death, rituals, funeral, social media, facebook, evolution, impressions.

Virtual afterlives: grieving the dead in the twenty-first century

Mortality, 2015

Playing together and ritualisation in online games

Online computer games are increasingly seen by game studies and industry as `more than games', i.e., places where players form and maintain relationships by playing together. However, currently, these practices of playing together and their roles for gameplay and the relationships of the players are not presented and explained in an integrated manner. In this context, my research focused on exploring social aspects within and around two online games, World of Warcraft and Star Kingdoms. Specifically, I investigated the emerging practices of playing together with fellow players, friends, family and romantic partners and their functions in an integrated fashion. To achieve this aim, an ethnographic study was conducted (using participant observation and semi-structured interviews) and the data were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively through a ritualisation framework inspired by a multidisciplinary perspective on secular ritual (coming from anthropology, communication and media studies and social psychology). Within this framework, ritual and ritualized play (but also ritualization as a process) were defined as referring to practices through which the game is enriched with new meanings that go beyond the game being `just a game'. These new meanings include those centered on relationships/social interactions and identity. Thus, many gamers play computer games not only for their gameplay, but also for the relationships/interactions established and/or maintained through them. In addition to their value for anthropology, social psychology and communication studies, these findings are particularly useful for game developers and UX designers, who have to find ways to accommodate and support these relationships/interactions via game design, alternative media or marketing strategies.

Responsibility Beyond the Grave: Technological Mediation of Collective Moral Agency in Online Commemorative Environments

Design Issues, 2018

Online platforms of donations in memoriam are technologies of commemoration that mediate a responsible mode of being in the world. They construct death as empowering for the deceased, and they open up new opportunities for collaborative action to emerge. By relying on existing conceptualizations of post-mortem personhood and technologically mediated agency, this article considers the socio-technical construction of the commemorative platform, MuchLoved, an online tribute charity; it focuses on its interaction design for online donations in memoriam. Through specific design options, MuchLoved stirs a distinctive form of distributed agency with a collective and moral character. This accomplishment of collective moral agency through technological mediations might redefine the space of symbolic immortality and change the human condition in relation with death.