Death and Macabre Aesthetics in Games Conference

On 13 May, Institute of Digital Games (IDG) lecturer Dr Daniel Vella delivered a keynote presentation at the Death and Macabre Aesthetics in Games Conference, held at the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow, Russia. Dr Vella's presentation, "The Wanderer in the Virtual Ruin: Digital Games and the Ruin-Situation," examined the imagery of ruins in digital games, reading this as an extension and reworking of long traditions of ruin imagery in literature, painting and cinema.

At the same conference, IDG Ph.D. student Renata Ntelia also presented a paper entitled "The Ostracization of Death," which read the lack of representations of natural death in digital games as symptomatic of a wider cultural taboo surrounding natural death.