ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focusses on ‘death narratives’. Ludologically speaking, the death of the player’s avatar, known as ‘player’s death’, is a simple but efficient feedback system of the game indicating that the player has not met the required input sequence to pass a particular instance in the game. While older games may give players a small set of retries before forcing them to start the game all over again, most modern games allow for the manual or even automatic saving of the game, resulting in a situation in which the player is forced to retry only a very small amount of the game for an infinite number of times. Some games, however, do try to incorporate this ludological feedback mechanism into their larger narratological framework, making the retries ‘sensible’ and ‘believable’ within the given game lore. The author presents a typology of such death narratives differentiating between narratives that ultimately avoid the avatar’s death, and those that circumvent it. The author ends with theological reflections on the death narratives, in particular regarding the notion of original sin, and the connection between sin and death.
