When Maxis’ simulation game The Sims launched in 2000, my friends and I (aged 10) quickly became obsessed with it, spending hours in the game customizing Sim-versions of ourselves, building elaborate homes for them, and watching their lives play out. But although the game featured many innovative gameplay mechanics for its time, my friends and I were specifically interested in one particular feature: your Sims could die.

At first it was a tragic and heart-breaking discovery, but very soon afterwards we were excitedly creating horrible and tragic deaths for said Sims.

While our parents were disturbed by our morbid fascinations with killing off each others’ Sim lookalikes, my friends and I were excited about the game’s death mechanics. The Sims dealt with death in a much different way from most other games we were playing at the time — even though those games also included death and dying — and it not only encouraged us to think about death in video games, it also gave us the opportunity to come to terms with our own mortalities.

In video games, death can serve multiple mechanical roles — it is most commonly used as a thing you want to avoid, a goal you need to accomplish, or as a narrative device. While death is prominent in many video games, we generally give it much less thought and treat it with much less seriousness than actual death, especially when it comes to player death.

The Sims (Maxis, 2000)

This could be from a lack of permanence in most video games. Mechanics like life systems (a certain amount of retries designated to a player after they’ve died) and respawning (when a player reappears at a fixed point in the game, after they die) have been a staple in many video games, but subsequently remove the seriousness and finality of death — acting more as an interruption or annoyance rather than the actual consequences of death.

I think this is why myself (and millions of others) were fascinated with killing off our Sims — their deaths were permanent, they meant something, and that directly affected the gameplay of The Sims.

Their deaths were permanent, they meant something,

and that directly affected the gameplay…

There’s a relatively new movement that’s slowly gaining popularity called death positivity (or “death acceptance”) that is encouraging people to face their own mortalities and to be open to talking about death, addressing it, and demystifying it. The movement was started by a group of young morticians and funeral directors whose goal is to lift the veil on death, and encourage us to explore our thoughts, feelings, and fears about mortality.

As a person who has been quite accepting of death and her own mortality since she was a young child, I am super on board with this whole death positivity movement — but I’m particularly interested in how it applies to video games. The interactivity of video games makes it a great medium for getting the player to directly deal with things like death, yet a lot of the time it seems developers aren’t really considering it mechanically when designing their games.

However, there are a bunch of games that do use death in mechanically or narratively interesting ways, and it’s exciting to see developers really thinking about death when designing their games. In a sea of video games using traditional death mechanics, it’s interesting to look at what games are using death differently and how that is allowing players to really think about and come to terms with their own mortalities.