Stones in Our Pockets: Mental Health Dimensions of Grief in Contemporary Video Games

This article combines the expertise of games studies scholars, medical ethicists, and clinical psychologists to analyse representations of grief in contemporary video games. Grief is a universal human experience, but navigating its psychological, social, and embodied effects can be a challenging task. Constructionist approaches to grief therapy emphasise the importance of metaphors for understanding the experience of loss (Nadeau 2006; Young 2008; Neimeyer 2010; Southall 2013). Paying attention to the metaphorical language used by a client can provide a therapist with key information about the client’s personal and cultural perspectives and world view. Equally, a therapist can work with clients to devise metaphors that shift their perspectives and aid the process of meaning-making. Video games provide players with new metaphors to express and explore grief. Since video games communicate across audio, visual, verbal, haptic, mechanical, and performative modes, they can offer a complete gestalt that touches on the physical, emotional, practical, and systemic impact of loss. In this article, we survey the multimodal metaphors for grief that appear in 14 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) video games and identify recurring tropes and themes. We consider 1) what is illuminated by these metaphors? 2) what is obscured by these metaphors? and 3) what are the therapeutic implications of these metaphors? We conclude with a set of recommendations for game developers who want to design ‘serious games’ that explore emotionally fraught topics, and a set of recommendations for grief and bereavement therapists seeking to integrate video games into their practice.