This doctoral dissertation is the first long-term, long-form research project on representations of suicide in videogames. In it, I research how videogames depict, simulate, and represent suicide, since videogames offer crucial insights into suicide, particularly into how it has been understood and how it should be understood. Videogames do this through a mix of depiction and simulation, representing suicide through its language and imagery as well as through interactive, reactive models that the player can affect or is affected by. This project is guided by a broad research question: "how do videogames represent suicide?" In order to answer this question, I will write four articles partly answering it from various perspectives, like the meaning of suicide in virtual worlds, the social contexts outside videogames and their representations within them, and the player's agency to make player and non-player characters die (or not die) by suicide. I will analyse various videogames as case studies for every article. I have chosen videogames that are exemplary in their representations of suicide, either by virtue of their semiotic complexity or of their explicit representation of their real-life contexts. My analysis is done through close readings of videogames, guided by New Formalism as described by Caroline Levine and by New Historicism as described by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. I close read videogames by analysing the social forms—units, hierarchies, social networks, rhythms—represented in videogames, then putting those forms in conversations with cultural and political discourses from the videogame's context of production to track how those discourses are represented within the videogames. The results of this research project will serve as a detailed framework for understanding suicide in and through videogames.

2025