December 18, 2016

Wrap-up of 2016 games: Being-towards-death in a Videogame

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  • Student Work

During the 2015-2016 academic year, IDG student Francesca Borg Taylor-East developed a video game titled "Being-towards-death in a Videogame" for the purposes of the Prototyping for Game Designers course. The game shows a satirical view of dying in certain videogames, where a character respawns with no impacting consequences. In "Being-towards-death in a videogame", the player is asked to explore various ways of dying. Dying in this game has no real impact, the character is simply respawned and asked to die again. The title "Being-towards-death in a videogame" is a pun on Heidegger's philosophy of Being, wherein death is seen as the finitude of one's life. Simply put, "Being-towards-death" allows the person to live authentically in light of this drastic finitude.