I had a very profound conversation with a colleague this evening about the difference between our relationship with our fellow humans and our relationship with artificial beings.
If I spend a lot of time nurturing a character in a computer game, and that character “dies”, is my feeling of loss fundamentally different from my feeling of loss if a person in my life dies?
To me the answer is obviously yes. To my colleague the question — and its resolution — was more nuanced, which surprised me.
I’m still thinking this over, and I will probably have more to stay on the subject tomorrow.
I have taught 2 NYU courses concerning DEATH & DYING IN VIDEO GAMES. Since 2013, there are numerous scholarly articles and books about this subject — from a psychological viewpoint of dealing with “loss.” Here are just a few sources to consider when thinking about this topic (with number of pages for each by the source):
1. Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age, edited by Christopher M. Moreman and A. David Lewis (230 pages)
https://books.google.com/books?id=qgyqBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA252&lpg=PA252&dq=death+in+interactive+media&source=bl&ots=h9T42rY1Ux&sig=vo2tQnEer9lOGE7_ZGjZmqhi4bI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gQkVe2wH8ejgwSRhYLgCA&ved=0CEUQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false
2. From IE ’13: The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death’s “Motivation during Videogame Play” by Wilawan Inchamnan and Peta Wyeth (9 pages)
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513010&CFID=497723466&CFTOKEN=16662454
3. From IE ’13: The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death’s When Game Over Means Game Over: using permanent death to craft living stories from permanent death in Minecraft” by Brendan Keogh (6 pages)
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513572&CFID=497723466&CFTOKEN=16662454
4. From IE ’13: The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death’s Collapsing Action; or, Games of Life and Death by Robbie Fordyce (8 pages)
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513017&CFID=497723466&CFTOKEN=16662454
5. From IE ’13: The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death’s Death and Dying in DayZ by Marcus Carter, Martin Gibbs and Greg Wadley (5 pages)
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513013&CFID=497723466&CFTOKEN=16662454
6. Death is Dead: How Modern Video Game Designers Killed Danger by Adi Robertson (3 pages)
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/28/4157502/death-is-dead-how-modern-video-game-designers-killed-danger
7. Gamasutra on Player Death (Cheating Death: Accommodating player failure and recovery) (7 pages)
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/240418/Cheating_Death_Accommodating_player_failure_and_recovery.php
8. I’m Afraid to Die in Games by Gita Jackson (3 pages)
http://boingboing.net/2015/04/20/im-afraid-to-die-in-games.html