Much has been written about violence and video games, but what about death? And more specifically: What about dying? Players do a lot of killing in games, but the truth — and it’s a truth that’s underrecognized — is that they do at least as much dying. From Space War’s exploding rocket ships to the dramatic agonies of the fragged Halo shooter, the story of video games can be understood as a 50-year saga of players dying over and over without end. This talk will put that history of game death in the spotlight, considering both its cultural and personal meanings and its implications for the past and future of game design.

About Julian Dibbell

Julian Dibbell is an internationally-recognized author, speaker, and technology journalist who specializes in information technology. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde (Paris), Folha de Sao Paulo (Brazil), TIME, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Details, The Independent (London), The Daily Telegraph (London), The Nation, and in many other publications. It has been anthologized in venues such as Best American Science Writing (2002) and The Best of Technology Writing (2007, 2008, 2009). His 1993 article for the Village Voice, "A Rape in Cyberspace" is the most-cited, reprinted, and assigned essay ever written on identity and the Internet. He is the author of the books My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (1999), and Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot (2006). He has published books, essays, and articles on virtual worlds, social media, online communities, hackers, bloggers, music pirates, computer viruses, encryption technologies, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. He is a contributing editor for Wired magazine and a non-resident fellow of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. In 2004 he co-founded the game research collective Terra Nova.