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 videogames, it also gave us the opportunity to come to terms with our own mortalities.
Death serves multiple mechanical roles in videogames— 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 videogames, we generally give it much less thought and treat it with much less seriousness than actual death, especially when it comes to the player.
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