Playing Dead: Death, Games and Popular Culture

The COVID19 Pandemic has emphasized for many of us the presence of death in everyday lives and the ways in which it is reflected, refracted, mediated and represented by our social institutions and cultural products. Games, game design, game studies have something to offer in this context, whether this be an interrogation of the often casual way death might be treated in popular video games, or an understanding of how games and forms of play might treat death more ethically. We can also explore how game design might work to start conversations around death, grief and memorialisation.

Scholars with the Interdisciplinary Death & Culture Network, hosted by the University of York, have long-been exploring such ideas in their wide-ranging work on cultural responses to mortality. Back in 2018, I attended their Playing Dead symposium, organised by Matt Coward-Gibbs, which offered scholars in various disciplines to discuss the intersection of play and death. There were a number of papers and conversations pertinent to Game Studies, but the event also afforded insight into the connections between the study of games, broadly construed, and other sites of death in culture, such as stage plays and popular music.

Arising from that symposium is a volume of essays, Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead, edited by Matt Coward-Gibbs. Some of the authors whose work features in the book reunited for this special Manchester Game Studies Network roundtable.

The participants involved were...

Matt Coward-Gibbs, an Associate Lecturer and PhD student in Sociology at the University of York and editor of the forthcoming volume Death, Culture and Leisure: Playing Dead (Emerald, 2020). His work focuses around death and dying; culture and community; pleasure and leisure; and deviance and transgression. Matt is a steering group member of DaCNet (www.york.ac.uk/dacnet) and is currently working as part of an interdisciplinary team to develop a national hub for research sensitivities. @MattCowardGibbs.

Ewan Kirkland, the Course Leader for the Animation and Games Art & Design degree programmes at the University of Brighton. Focussing primarily on horror videogames and the Silent Hill series, Kirkland has published numerous papers and chapters which have appeared in Games and Culture, Convergence, Gothic Studies and Camera Obscura. Currently Ewan is working on a study of videogames’ relationship with Gothic literature for Routledge’s Advances in Game Studies book series, containing chapters on Bioshock, Gone Home and Night in the Woods. In addition to his work on games culture, Ewan has also published on romantic comedy films, racial whiteness in popular culture, Dexter, The Lego Movie and The Powerpuff Girls. He is also author of Children’s Media and Modernity: Film, Television and Digital Games, which examines media for children across modern history, and contains case studies of Hook, Teletubbies, Little Big Planet and the Children’s Film Foundation. As well as publishing, Ewan has organised academic events on the My Little Pony franchise, David Bowie, Battlestar Galactica and zombies in popular culture, and was co-organiser of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association annual conference in January 2020.

Beth Michael-Fox, who has recently completed her PhD at the University of Winchester. She examines the idea of ‘death studies’ as a field of research and the ways in which death and the dead have been given an especially hospitable welcome in a range of media in recent years, looking especially at television series where the dead come back and at autobiographical writing focused on death and the dead. She runs an online monthly support group for any postgraduates researching death from any perspective for the Association for the Study of Death and Society, with her colleague Dr Renske Visser running a similar group for early career researchers. If you’re interested in joining, please feel welcome to get in touch. You can find information about the postgraduate group pinned to Beth’s Twitter profile here or email bethmichaelfox@gmail.com for more information about either group. Beth and Renske are also co-editing a special issue of the journal Revenant on Death and the Screen, so if you are interested in submitting an abstract or finding out more then please look here. For more about Beth and her work in general, look here.

Chloé Germaine Buckley, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and member of the MGSN. Chloé’s research on games includes an examination of the intersection between gothic and games, specifically the interplay between ludic forms and the Weird. Her essay for the forthcoming volume assesses the influence of ludification on zombie fiction and gamebook tie-ins, identifying conflicting functions for dead bodies in playful texts. Beyond this, she is working on advocating for a material Game Studies, with Dr Paul Wake, which involves studying analog games, including table-top and live-action roleplaying games. As a game designer, she has written for table-top supplements and for LARP. @gothlit_chloe

Vivian Asimos, one of the founders of alt-ac.uk, and an independent scholar interested in the intersections of religion and popular culture. She received her PhD from Durham University, where she studied the anthropology of religion, with a thesis on online mythology.

Paolo Ruffino, a lecturer in communication and media at the University of Liverpool. Paolo is the author of 'Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture' (MIT/Goldsmiths Press, 2018), and editor of 'Rethinking Gamification' (Meson Press, 2013) and 'Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Technics and Politics' (Routledge, 2020). He is currently investigating contemporary practices of independent game development, and the boundaries of human, nonhuman, and posthuman forms of game play.

We hope you enjoy watching our roundtable! You can find out more about the volume here.