The multiple lives of permadeath: An introduction

Abstract

In the introduction to this special issue, the editors argue that permadeath games respond to the increasing prevalence of the social, ecological, psychological, and economic conditions of precarity. Permanent death, or permadeath, has experienced a renaissance of sorts with the release of games such as DayZ, Don’t Starve, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, One Chance and Minecraft. Permadeath games emphasize the precariousness of play by making defeat, failure, and death irrevocable, countering mainstream design paradigms that embrace infinite retries and the devaluation of death. Drawing on Judith Butler’s deployment of the term ‘precarity,’ the editors contend that permadeath’s resurgence is evidence of a growing awareness of the tenuousness of human existence, not only in economic terms, but also in terms that are moral and ecological. In other words, the recent rise in experiments with the mechanics of death might relate directly to contemporary issues such as anthropogenic climate change, neo-liberal economics and even the so-called death of the monolithic ‘gamer’ identity. Permadeath games are uniquely situated to voice the inherent precarity of what it means to live and play in the early twenty-first century.