Heather Maycock

Death is alienated in Global-North societies ruled by informational-capitalist abstraction that is digital, financial, and operational. This project analyses death procedures in single-player role-playing videogames through game analysis and game making. This is in order to understand the relationship between grammarised ludic procedures and the necropolitical horizon. Role Playing Game videogames make fertile terrain to assess the potential of re-familiarising death through calibrated death moves. These games use an established repertoire of player-involving mechanics through grammarised death procedures –videogame design aspects that invoke death through formalised game structures, mechanics, and moves. This research aims to understand two different aspects of ‘death games’: necropolitical tendencies embedded in ludic structures reflective of the current cultural condition, and possibilities to re-familiarise death arising from game mechanics and move sequences. The research investigates the potential of game design processes to re-familiarise death (as an event) and dying (as a process) beyond abstract alienation. It urges cognizance of and resistance to informational-capitalist necropolitics through the gameworlds, game design, and interactional mechanisms that RPG videogames offer. 

Names of Supervisors: 

• Natasha Lushetich
• Dominic Smith
• William Huber (external at Falmouth University)