ACADEMIA Letters Death and Dying in Games: A Catholic theological engagement of Bosman’s typology of narratological embeddings of player’s death Matthew Pulis 1. Introduction Videogame-related scholarly work rarely focuses on the death of the player’s avatar. Death in this refection is not considered as “morally problematic or dangerous to audiences, but as an unnecessary narrative disruption due to the typical game structure of trial-and-error, die-and-retry.”[i] Videogames may be the only narrative medium where the player’s death is “entirely routine” and often leads to frustration[ii] even though they have the capacity to trigger existential refection.[iii] The aim of this essay is to theologically engage Frank Bosman’s three-categories of how videogames deal with death, while juxtaposing the apparent fear of death exhibited in games with embracing “sister death.”[iv] 2. Narratological Embeddings Bosman asserts that death or its absence communicates to the player their “(in)ability to achieve” targets embedded in the game.[v] In examining videogames Bosman outlines three categories of narratological embeddings (NE), each with further sub-types as per Figure 1. The Actual death embedding takes death seriously because the avatar dies. The continuity of play is narratologically safeguarded through cloning (1A); and by bringing in a replacement: Academia Letters, July 2021 Corresponding Author: Matthew Pulis, matthew.pulis.02@um.edu.mt Citation: Pulis, M. (2021). Death and Dying in Games: A Catholic theological engagement of Bosman’s typology of narratological embeddings of player’s death. Academia Letters, Article 1558. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1558. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0