Pushing Buttons: Games let us live to the limits of our mortality – and beyond

In this week's newsletter: It's an act of subversion to design a game that tries to get you to think about death, but titles that embrace it can be wonderfully freeing

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There's a line in Gabrielle Zevin's brilliant novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a multilayered love story about game designers, that shows remarkable understanding of video games and what they do for us. What, after all, is a video game's subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?"

It's a connection that Zevin draws several times in her fabulous book, the contrast between the endlessly replayable, replaceable lives of video games and our own real, distressingly fragile mortal lives.