Call for Participants:

Games Against Death: Games, Mortality, and the Politics of Dying
A Workshop at DiGRA 2026, the 17th annual conference of the Digital Games Research Association
June 14, 2026, 10am-1pm
Maynooth, Ireland and online
Workshop: https://bcmcr.org/research/cfp-games-against-death-workshop/
DiGRA 2026: https://www.digraconference2026.com/

Deadline for submission of abstracts and expressions of interest: April 27, 2026

This workshop, taking place at the DiGRA 2026 conference, proposes “Games Against Death” as a conceptual and organising motif. Drawing on Douglas Davies’ notion of “words against death” (2017) – cultural practices through which societies negotiate, resist, ritualise, and give meaning to mortality – we argue that games function as powerful interactive words against death. Games do not merely depict death; they allow players to rehearse dying, manage loss, ritualise remembrance, deny mortality, exploit death as a resource, or confront the ethical distribution of grievable lives (Butler 2009). In this sense, games offer unique affordances for thinking with death: procedurally, affectively, ethically, and politically. Games offer a rich site for analysing how death is culturally framed in the present moment (see Wilde, 2025). Based on the presentations shared in the proposed workshop, we expect to publish an edited collection.

Death in games has already been approached from a range of scholarly perspectives, demonstrating both the breadth of existing work and the potential for further expansion. Research has examined games as sites for dealing with death, mourning, and memorialisation (Coward-Gibbs, 2020; Kagan 2022; Gibbs et al., 2025), as a designed system or mechanic (Cuerdo and Melcer, 2020; Klastrup, 2011), grief as an affective and experiential process in games (Harrer, 2018; Sidhu and Carter, 2021), and representations of the afterlife and post-mortem existence in contemporary video games (Recher, 2015) and the archeological record (Hall, 2017). Beyond representational concerns, scholars have highlighted how games can function as connective and commemorative spaces, allowing players to maintain relationships with the dead through shared play practices and the preservation of avatars as digital traces of the deceased (Arnold et al., 2017).  Death-themed games (Luo, Hämäläinen, and Rautalahti, 2025) explicitly centre death and dying as their subject matter, for example Dear Esther, Spiritfarer, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, and That Dragon, Cancer. A Mortician’s Tale foregrounds death more didactically, using gameplay to familiarise players with death care practices and to challenge death denial through procedural engagement (Zibaite, 2020; Kannen and Langille, 2020). Taken together, this body of work suggests that death in games extends well beyond failure states or spectacle, opening up more progressive, reflective, and potentially transformative ways of understanding mortality through play.

This workshop will bring together Game Studies, Death Studies, and Media Studies to explore how games engage with death across mechanics, narratives, aesthetics, and player practices. We aim to foreground death not as an endpoint, but as a process, a system, a ritual, a resource, and a site of political struggle.

The workshop will create a focused space to identify shared questions, tensions, and future research agendas. Participants may wish to discuss:

• intersectional and unequal deaths, including those whose lives are rendered grievable in games
• necropolitics and biopolitics in game systems and narratives
• death as a game mechanic (e.g. lives systems, checkpoints, permadeath, resources)
• the death of the avatar and questions of identity, attachment, and loss
• grief, mourning, and memorialisation in digital play
• death rituals, ritualisation, and repetition in gameplay
• mass death, apocalypse, pandemics, and ecological collapse
• games and war, gamified military combat, the militarization of combat games
• games featuring death denial, taboo, and humour, including comedic and trivialised deaths
• death positivity, care, sustainability, and eco-conscious practices in games
• the process of dying, death care, and post-death practices as represented in games

The workshop further invites participants to consider questions including:

• How does death function mechanically, narratively, and affectively in games?
• In what ways do games act as “words against death,” enabling resistance, denial, ritualisation, or acceptance?
• How are death, dying, and care represented across different cultural contexts and genres?
• What political, ethical, and ecological frameworks shape how death is distributed, managed, or made meaningful in games?
• How do games allow players to negotiate grief, loss, memorialisation, and the afterlives of characters, avatars, and worlds?

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The workshop will be offered in a hybrid format, facilitated by Dr Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University, UK) and Professor Martin Gibbs (University of Melbourne, Australia).

The three hour workshop will be structured in two parts:

• Part 1 will feature short presentations presenting emerging ideas, case studies, or provocations
• Part 2 will consist of a moderated roundtable discussion

The first part of the workshop will include the presentation of 6-8 accepted short papers, of around 5-8 minutes in length. A roundtable discussion in the second half of the workshop bringing together presenters and non-presenting participants to reflect on recurring themes, methodological challenges, and conceptual tensions surrounding death in games. Non-presenting participants are therefore very welcome.

Discussions will explicitly address possibilities for future collaboration, including a potential edited collection focused on Games Against Death.

EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

We invite those interested in the topic to engage either through a short presentation, or broader attendance and engagement online or in-person at Maynooth University, and join a lively discussion around death!

• Participants who wish to present should submit a 250-word abstract outlining their proposed short presentation, along with a short bio outlining your interest in the topic
• Non-presenters are encouraged to attend and contribute to the roundtable and discussions. To participate without presenting work please send a short expression of interest outlining your relevant interests or motivations

Please send abstracts/expressions of interest to poppy.wilde@bcu.ac.uk AND martin.gibbs@unimelb.edu.au with “Workshop – Games Against Death” in the subject line by Monday 27 April 2026.

The workshop will take place during the DiGRA conference, between 14-18 June 2026. We will confirm the date and time as soon as scheduling has been completed by the organising committee.

THE ORGANISERS’ BACKGROUNDS

Dr Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University, UK) is author of Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge, 2023). Her work explores death, posthuman subjectivity, zombies, and the ethical tensions of post-apocalyptic and survival play. She is co-editor of the special issue of Journal of Games Criticism on “Playing the posts: post-Anthropocene, posthuman, post-apocalypse” (2024).

Professor Martin Gibbs (University of Melbourne, Australia) is co-lead of the “Do-It-Yourself Commemoration of the Dead” project funded by the Australian Research Council. He has co-edited “Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured”, which explores the changing ways people mourn, commemorate and interact with the remains of the dead, including bodies, materials and digital artefacts, and is a co-author of the book “Death and Digital Media” (2017).

REFERENCES

Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Kohn, T., Meese, J., & Nansen, B. 2017. Death and digital media. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315688749

Butler, J. 2009. Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso.

Coward-Gibbs, M. (ed) 2020. Playing Dead: Death, Culture & Leisure. Emerald Publishing, Doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83909-037-020201001

Cuerdo, M.A.M. and Melcer, E.F. 2020. “I’ll Be Back”: A taxonomy of death and rebirth in platformer video games. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,  pp. 265–293, https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382863  

Davies, D. 2017. Death, Ritual and Belief: The Rhetoric of funerary rites (3rd edition). Oxford, Bloomsbury Academic, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474250986

Gibbs, M., Carter, M. and Allison, F. 2025. “Memorializing the Dead with Games” Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads. 30th June-4th July, Valletta, Malta. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/download/2517/2510 

Hall M.A. 2016. Board Games in Boat Burials: Play in the Performance of Migration and Viking Age Mortuary Practice. European Journal of Archaeology. 19(3): pp. 439-455, https://doi.org/10.1080/14619571.2016.1175774   

Harrer, S. 2018. Games and bereavement: How video games represent attachment, loss, and grief. Bielefeld, Germany, Transcript Verlag,

Kagen, M. 2022. Wandering Games. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13856.001.0001

Kannen, V. and Langille, A. 2020. “Playing with Identity: Exploring the Role of Gender, Death Positivity, and Queer Representation in A Mortician’s Tale”. In L. Zisman Newman (Ed.), Women and Popular Culture in Canada (pp. 209-221). Toronto: Women’s Press.

Klastrup, L. 2011. What makes World of Warcraft a world? A note on death and dying. In H. G. Corneliussen & J. W. Rettberg (Eds.), Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft Reader (pp. 143-166). The MIT Press.

Laundry Bear Games. 2017. A Mortician’s Tale. PC Game. Toronto, USA: Laundry Bear Games.

Luo, B., Hämäläinen, P., and Rautalahti, H. 2025. “Unraveling Grief: Design Space Analysis of Death-themed Games”. Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads. 30th June-4th July, Valletta, Malta. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). https://doi.org/10.26503/dl.v2025i2.2475

Numinous Games. 2016. That Dragon, Cancer. PC Game. Iowa, US: Numinous Games.

Recher, K. 2015. “Game Over… and Then? The Representation of Death and the Afterlife in Videogames.” Disputatio Philosophica. 17 (1). https://hrcak.srce.hr/151526

Sidhu, P., Carter, M. (2021). Pivotal Play: Rethinking Meaningful Play in Games Through Death in Dungeons & Dragons. Games and Culture, 16(8), pp. 1044-1064. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211005231

Starbreeze Studios AB. 2013. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Stockholm, Sweden: Starbreeze Studios AB.

The Chinese Room. 2012. Dear Esther. PC Game. Brighton, England: The Chinese Room

Thunder Lotus Games. 2020. Spiritfarer. PC game. Montreal, Canada: Thunder Lotus Games.

Wilde, P. 2025. “Making Friends with Death: Posthuman Post-Life Play”. Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads. 30th June-4th July, Valletta, Malta. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). https://doi.org/10.26503/dl.v2025i3.2540

Zibaite, S. 2020. “The Jovial Aesthetics of the Death-Positivity Movement: Notes on the Appeal of Playfulness in Activism.” In M. Coward-Gibbs (Ed.), Playing Dead: Death, Culture & Leisure. Emerald Publishing.