Video Games, Art-Making, and Digital Commemorative Narratives

Abstract

Digital sites have become increasingly popular places where bereaved individuals choose to enact grief and memorialise the deceased. Various online sites, including social media and video gaming sites, are frequently revisited by bereaved individuals, not only as an act of remembrance but also as a way of storytelling, given that certain representations of the deceased continue to live on in these digital/virtual realms. Considering this active turning and returning to virtual environments to enact mourning and to digitally perform multilayered narratives of loss—specifically in video games—I ask what the implications are for art- and image-making. Pilgrimage is an important and popularly used metaphor or trope in video game narratives, especially in role-playing games. In this article I surmise that the experience of immersion into video game narratives as a ritual of mourning allows individuals to experience greater agency by undergoing a video game pilgrimage. Moreover, I argue that related engagements and interactions with works of art informed by such imaginary worlds may shed more light on the “art” of mourning in general.