ABSTRACT
Throughout this book so far, I have drawn on autoethnographic fieldnotes of playing World of Warcraft to explore acting, empathy, and subject formations. In this final analysis chapter, I turn from the “life” of the avatar, to its end. Exploring the ways in which death is explored in-game, I question how these moments are affective in ways that echo humanistic understandings of death as failure. As death suggests an ultimate ending, I explore how this feels like a threat to the rational, liberal, human subject. In posthumanising these experiences I question whether the care for the avatar’s death might be demonstrative of an ethically extended sense of which beings matter. However, death is not the “end” for an avatar that can respawn. I therefore turn my attention instead to a different “ending” – the ending of play. Considering how our continued entanglement with entities extends beyond our proximity to, or “use” of, them, I draw on new materialism to explore how the subjectivity experienced throughout this book does not end merely because gameplay does. In recovering my avatar, Etyme, after years of not playing, I demonstrate how entangled we are and will always be.
