How Video Games Can Help with Grief

It is no secret that the world of video game academia is spearheaded by some wonderful people. I have cited hundreds of studies throughout my website showing how video games can help both physical and mental wellbeing, your education, and more. As delightful as these studies are to read, something I also find joy in is reading about these academic’s personal experiences with video games. Professor Pete Etchells gives a candid account in his book Lost in a Good Game about his hunt for the elusive Netherwing Drake mount in World of Warcraft, an item which randomly appears once every three weeks:

For me though, there was a simple reason that I was playing Warcraft that night, looking for that elusive dragon. I was playing to distract myself from the anniversary of my dad’s death.

Reading this book not only made me evaluate my own relationship with video games and grief, but it motivated me to take a deeper dive into the literature to learn about the experiences of others.

I will begin by discussing the theoretical reasons why people may turn to video games when they are grieving, followed by a branching of two paths: passive lessons people can learn about grief from video games, and more active lessons investigated through research and deliberate video game design. Finally, I will explore the phenomenon of video game memorials and why this ritual that was once ripe for trolling is now more commonplace and respected.

Spoilers will be minimised wherever possible, but clear spoiler tags will be provided for each section where necessary. As usual, there will be a summary at the bottom if you do not wish to read everything. Now, let’s begin!

The Mechanics of Gaming and Grief

Before I dive in to the specific psychology surrounding gaming and grief, I would like to share some universal psychological principles to explain why games can help with grief.

A psychological theory that can explain why people throw themselves into the world of video games when experiencing grief is known as Cognitive Load Theory. Cognitive Load Theory argues that we don’t have infinite brainpower: our capacity to think about and focus on tasks is limited by our cognitive load [1]. In our most intense moments of grief, it could be beneficial to distract our brains with something that demands a lot of our focus and attention such as video games. In fact, video games have been used in hospital to reduce harmful thoughts: victims of a car crash who played Tetris during recovery were less likely to develop PTSD due to fewer intrusive thoughts [2].

Another reason why people may escape to the world is gaming is for social support. Let’s say a young woman has recently lost her grandmother whom she was very close to. She might want to talk about what she is going through, but she’s worried about causing her mother further distress. Her offline support network of choice might be unavailable to her, so what does she do?

This is where research from Cole et al. [3] comes in. In this study, they found that over a third of participants would be more comfortable talking to their online gaming friends about their mental health than their offline friends. As someone who has experience with Massive Multiplayer Online games, I’ve seen myself just how social they can be and how people can just hang out and talk. While it may look like the young woman in the story is mindlessly staring at a glowing rectangle, she could actually be getting support from her online friends during a challenging time.

Before concluding this section, I’d like to address the elephant in the room. As someone who has written multiple articles on video game addiction, I understand the dangers of talking about the benefits of video games in a vulnerable population, especially when there is a relationship between video game addiction and poor wellbeing [4]. However, we also have to be mindful of the alternatives.

The best case scenario for someone experiencing poor wellbeing from grief is to seek grief counselling. However, people may be placed on waiting lists for grief counselling of around six months [5]. Doctors may be hesitant to leave a patient in need empty-handed, so they may be tempted to prescribe them something in the short-term such as anti-anxiety medication. However, doctors have been warned against this practice due to factors such as medication side effects and risks of long-term use [6]. Video games may be something that can help while navigating long waiting lists as they are not only social, but can help keep intrusive thoughts away before talking about them with a licensed professional.

Passive Lessons on Gaming and Grief

Moving Forward

In this section, I will be discussing Final Fantasy VII and the most famous video game spoiler of all time. Before anyone rolls their eyes at the warning, I actually know someone who miraculously has not been spoiled on this, so better to be safe than sorry! Please skip to the next section if you don’t want to read about Final Fantasy VII.

Perhaps the most well-known piece of grief psychology is Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief [7], arguing that when we lose a loved one we cycle through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before finally reaching acceptance. I think a great example of going through these stages is with the loss of Aerith in Final Fantasy VII.

We might be thrust into denial and anger due to something called secondary loss [8]. Secondary loss argues that we don’t just mourn the loss of a person, we mourn the little ways in which they improved our lives: the excellent tea your father brewed, the neat cable tidying your sister did when building PCs. No one heals quite like Aerith, so you are faced with restructuring your gameplay approach to account for her loss.

We also see denial, bargaining, and an extent of depression in the community response to Aerith’s loss. A glitch in the game exists called the Aerith ghost glitch where you can briefly see her in the Sector 5 church. While I do appreciate the novelty of glitch hunting, getting this brief glimpse of Aerith requires you to backtrack from the game and study how to trigger this glitch – all for a brief, uninteractable moment. In a similar vein, modders over the years have attempted to bring Aerith and her playstyle back into the game following her death, only for the game to crash [9]. All of this is time that could be spent progressing the plot, moving forward and strategising how to fill the healer gap in your party, but Aerith has proven hard to let go of over the years.

Finally, I mentioned in the introduction that I will be dedicating a section to games that have been designed specifically around grief and have been the subject of psychological research. However, I also think I’m being a bit unfair to Squaresoft, the developers of Final Fantasy VII. Sabine Harrer in her book Games and Bereavement [9] diligently dug up an interview with the game’s director published in EDGE Magazine in 2003 [10] that took my breath away:

When you lose someone you loved very much you feel this big empty space and think, “If I had known this was coming I would have done things differently”. These are feelings I wanted to arouse in the players with Aeris’s death relatively early in the game.

— Yoshinori Kitase, (2003)

It is tempting to think that more psychologically-conscious games are a modern invention facilitated by the luxury of Slack groups and emailing psychologists that live in a different continent. But the team at Squaresoft, behind their 800×600 resolution monitors, wanted to elicit thoughts of mortality from the loss of the beloved and valuable White Mage. It makes you wonder, can the loss of a valuable party member encourage someone to ‘do things differently’ in real life? Reach out to a loved one perhaps? If this sounds interesting to you, stay tuned for the section on Spiritfarer.

Always With You

This section contains spoilers for the ending of the indie title Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Please skip to the next section if you wish to avoid spoilers.

I touched upon the Five Stages of Grief in the earlier section and how the end goal is to reach the acceptance stage. This acceptance stage can include things such as being present in the moment and resisting the urge to become emotional [11]. Grief is challenging and complex, and some may even find comfort from the idea of not getting upset for an entire day. But I would like to talk about how the acceptance stage can be a more beautiful thing than simply not crying for a day.

In Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, you control Big Brother and Little Brother who each have one half of the controller. Little Brother hates water and can’t traverse it without Big Brother, with the other half of your controller coming to the rescue. We unfortunately lose Big Brother and take control of Little Brother on his own. But what happens when you need to traverse water? It turns out that it isn’t enough simply for you to use your Little Brother controls, you also need to use your Big Brother controls. When you do this, his voice whispers to you.

This is a wonderful gameplay translation of a concept known as continuing bonds [12]. Continuing bonds argues that when you lose someone important, you don’t just simply seal them away forever: they live inside you and in your capacity to think “What would x do?”. Your bond with someone does not end the day you lose them, you continue to think about them during key moments and benefit from their wisdom and knowledge to keep you moving forward in life. To keep moving in his path and to overcome obstacles, Little Brother thought of what Big Brother would do – and he kept going.

Active Lessons on Gaming and Grief

As briefly mentioned in the introduction, this section will touch upon both active explorations of the psychology behind gaming and grief, and how researchers have designed video games around the theme of grief.

Spiritfarer: How to Say Goodbye

This section references pet loss and contains vague spoilers for the game Spiritfarer, please move to the next section if you would like to avoid this topic.

Spiritfarer is a key reason why I wanted to write about this topic. I rarely get personal in these articles, but last year I had to say goodbye to my childhood dog. Like any normal person experiencing a painful loss, I decided to play a game around the topic of loss and saying goodbye. Spiritfarer is an adorable game where you play as Stella. You are responsible for running a ship, taking care of its passengers and learning their history, and eventually ferrying their souls through the Everdoor when it is time.

[Name redacted for spoilers] was my favourite passenger. I easily hugged them the most, was the most invested in keeping them happy and giving them delicious food, and would spam my friends with screenshots of how adorable they were. I decided that when it was their time to pass through the Everdoor, I would spoil them with amazing food and give them an abundance of cuddles.

Except that never got to happen. As of my playthrough in April 2021, [redacted] is the only passenger that you do not take through the Everdoor. Seemingly at random, they leave and say goodbye to you via a note on their door. There’s no feast, no cuddles, no closure, they just leave you forever, and that devastated me.

It devastated me because that’s exactly what happened to me in real life. I grew up with viral videos on the final days of a dog’s life knowing that the end was coming. There were so many cheeseburgers and hikes and cuddles, it was a sendoff befitting of how much our furry friends mean to us. I knew that when the end was coming for our princess, she’d be treated like a queen. But her decline was swift and severe, and we lost her under circumstances that were so upsetting that I can’t bring myself to type them.

[Redacted] in Spiritfarer made me come to terms with this. It is ignorant to think that loss can always be controlled and predicted. You can’t plan out something’s final days because mortality is that unpredictable.

That was my takeaway lesson from Spiritfarer, but the lessons from others have been researched in work by Eum et al. [13]. They conducted in-depth interviews of six players who reviewed the game on Steam. The questions focused on two topics: their own personal experiences with the game, and whether they related any of these experiences to real-life losses. The researchers identified three themes from the interviews via thematic analysis: how players related characters in the game to those in real life; taking care of the remaining ship passengers after an in-game loss; and the process of taking characters through the Everdoor.

Let’s start with relating characters to those in our lives. Spirifarer has a sweet little old lady character called Alice, and taking Alice through the Everdoor helped recontextualise the loss of one participant’s grandmother with dementia:

When you have to let Alice go, that kind of hammered home how much [of a] good thing it was that [my grandma] sort of could rest…it made me kind of appreciate it more…

This is interesting as Stella is primarily a caregiver in the game. It’s possible that people only see family members putting on a brave face for others. But when you play as a caregiver that is relied upon, you see the vulnerable sides of characters and gain an appreciation for how tired and weak they must feel. Which brings us to the next theme of caring for the other passengers.

For those who haven’t played Spiritfarer, sending a character through the Everdoor is a private moment between you and the character you are ferrying. The cast say goodbye, you ferry them to the Everdoor, and it’s right back to the bustling ship of feeding hungry passengers and hugging them and mining and gathering and all of that good stuff. When you’re wiping tears out of your eyes (definitely not me though) after the departed’s farewell speech, it can be quite daunting.

But isn’t that just like real life?

Several participants picked up on the idea of the sequence of loss in Spiritfarer mimicking real life: you’re hurting and in pain, but there are always things to be done and other people to care for. I adore how Participant 3 phrased it, so I’m going to quote their words:

The game helped me remember that [people you care about] may be gone, but their memories are still there and you still have all these people in your life that you need to care about…you need to continue to move forward without being stuck on some loss…the game helped to remind me that no matter who you lose, there’s going to be other people that can help you through it.

An intriguing aspect of this experience is how it mirrors another psychological model of bereavement. While we’re tempted to think of the Five Stages of Grief and the idea of linear progression, many of us with experience in grief know that it isn’t always linear.

A model which acknowledges this is known as the Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement [14]. This model acknowledges that you are primarily dealing with two types of stressors during bereavement: loss-orientation, where you long for and miss the deceased; and restoration-orientation, where you try to process life without the deceased and try to find some sense of normality in the world of bereavement. This Dual Process Model seems to mirror the experiences of myself and other participants: with tears in our eyes and noticing the absence of the dearly departed, we still need to mine for and feed and hug our beloved passengers.

For the final theme, I mentioned how you have some private time with the character before taking them through the Everdoor. This time might be spent cluing you in on the rest of their backstory, or it could simply be you calming and reassuring them. However, astute participants picked up on how not all losses are like this, including with my favourite character [redacted].

I’m once again going to directly quote a participant as their experience is quite poignant. Participant 5 shared:

I thought if there is a world after death, [my grandmother] would have regretted that [she didn’t leave a message]. In the game I sent away other characters besides Summer, and they told me some stories they had in their minds. So I thought…by telling me their stories they got the determination to leave…I thought I should leave a note or something I wanted to tell people around me before I leave, so that they can know even if I die by accident. So, I wrote them down.

Playing Spiritfarer had a real-world impact on Participant 5 in encouraging them to leave stories and notes for their family. Participant 2 also saw real-world benefits from playing Spiritfarer, leading to discussions with their girlfriend about the character of Alice and how they miss their grandmother.

A video game encouraging people not only to speak about bereavement, but to make plans regarding bereavement is more impactful than you may know. Even taking the example of dementia from Participant 2’s grandmother, a big problem facing those diagnosed with early-stage dementia is the idea of loved ones refusing to have difficult conversations surrounding dementia care and end-of-life care [15]. Failure to have these conversations can have tragic consequences, such as those with dementia being placed in full-time care earlier than they actually need to be [15].

Games such as Spiritfarer have the power to help us come to terms with mortality, provide comforting thoughts surrounding mortality, and can even encourage us to confront mortality by making plans and opening up surrounding bereavement. I can’t help but wonder if people who have played games like Spiritfarer would be more equipped to have difficult conversations surrounding bereavement moving forward.

Jocoi: Dealing with Having Said Goodbye

This section mentions, but does not detail, the topic of child loss. Please skip to the next section if you do not wish to read this.

This will be a game that not very many people have heard of, but is an example of what can be achieved when academics set out to design video games specifically around the topic of grief.

Jocoi is a game developed by Harrer et al. [9], an academic whose body of work was once again very helpful in writing this article. Their motivation for designing Jocoi was the millions of stillbirths that occur every year [16]. The effects of this type of loss cannot be understated due to the high risks of depression, anxiety and distress in these grieving parents [17].

What makes Jocoi so fascinating is just how much of an active role grieving mothers played in the design and creation of Jocoi: nearly everything, from its design to its gameplay, was heavily influenced by focus groups with four mothers, referred to within the project as “muses”. These mothers had little experience with video games – with some even commenting that video games “weren’t for them” – but their voices were heard and their ideas were used.

From consultations and collaborations, Jocoi was born.

In Jocoi, you play as a sheep looking after her little lamb while a flock of sheep meander around you. The sheep and lamb are attached by an invisible string, and pressing mouse buttons allow you to eat and feed the lamb which elicits music. At random, an earthquake happens which separates the sheep and lamb. This event specifically happens at random to prevent mothers thinking that the loss was their fault – they cannot control loss.

After this loss, they see a young wolf cub in the same colour palette of the lamb and an adult wolf sitting around a campfire, with its intended purpose to communicate that they are now spending time with their grandparents or great-grandparents in the afterlife. The only prompt in the game encourages the mothers to, after a certain time, look away from the scene and live their own lives. To complete the game, you need to collect the flowers that elicit the same musical notes that played during the wolf cub scene. You move on but with the memories of the little one still with you, just like in the Dual Process Model of Grief.

As mentioned, changes were made to Jocoi following feedback from the mothers. For example, the random element of the earthquake was tweaked to happen only after a certain point: this allowed grieving mothers to care for their little lamb for a bit more to derive comfort from the game. Another change actually dealt with the flock of sheep in the background. One mother felt their inactive nature was too similar to unhelpful family members who are there but do nothing post-loss. While the mother-child bond is still the central focus of Jocoi, the flock was changed to be more helpful and interactive to the mother.

Jocoi elicited some very interesting reactions from the mothers. One mother even reported yelling “Where is my lamb? Oh God, my lamb is gone” following the earthquake scene. Mothers reported replaying the game so that they could spend time with their little lamb again, but also to derive meaning from and work through their own experiences.

Something that I found fascinating was the alternative readings of the transformation into the wolf cub: some mothers felt that the adult wolf had fed their lamb to the little wolf, harkening to a cycle of life and death and rebirth. That’s something I love about games: a developer can have a certain idea in mind, but projecting our own experiences can help us work through our own thoughts and hardships through such an interactive medium.

While I appreciate that Jocoi won’t have been playing by as many people as Final Fantasy VII, it’s a beautiful example of how games can be deliberately designed to deal with grief while also being designed by people who think games “aren’t for them”.

The Psychology of In-Game Memorials

On May 6th 2021, the world sadly lost Kentaro Miura, the creator of the manga series Berserk. The grief was palpable on social media, with fans sharing their devastation and how much the work of Miura meant to them. But these tributes weren’t just happening on social media, and they weren’t just happening via text.

Memorials to honour Miura took place across pretty much every server in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. These memorials were well-oiled machines: two parallel lines of players in the capital city of Ul’Dah would switch to the Dark Knight job (harkening back to Berserk’s protagonist Guts and his giant sword) and stand with their sword piercing the ground while a campfire was lit below them. Didn’t have a campfire? Don’t worry, a kind soul in the crowd probably noticed you didn’t have one and gave it to you, cutting in to their own money and/or crafting resources.

Gamers pay tribute to Kentaro Miura in Final Fantasy XIV. Image credit: https://bit.ly/3WsIwxG

Despite not having read Berserk (which I’ve since corrected), I attended my server’s Miura memorial. I thought about how we have come a long way from the World of Warcraft guild who had their memorial service attacked and laughed at. So what has changed? Why do we use video games as a method of paying tribute to others?

Perhaps the most poignant explanation is something called disenfranchised grief [18]. This term refers to grief you feel for a loss that is deemed to be socially unacceptable or excessive. In my current workplace, the HR department have curated a nice little hierarchy of grief. You lost a dearly beloved uncle? That scores you one day off, you’re going to need to go higher up the family pyramid before your grief is taken more seriously. And you probably guessed it, no time off or compassion for pet loss which turned me into a blanket-ridden sobfest distracting myself with video game speedruns.

I noticed that those who wrote multiple tweets about Miura often mentioned self-care at the end of their thread. They were going to wrap up and read some Berserk, they cancelled their scheduled stream or the remaining work they were supposed to do that day, or they were quite simply going to lie down and take it easy. I can imagine that outside the realm of a curated follower base of fellow nerds, telling someone you weren’t working for the rest of the day because a comic creator passed away would lead to raised eyebrows and a lack of sympathy. But online communities allow us to express our grief unapologetically without running the numbers on whether we are entitled to feel devastated at this person’s loss or to consult the HR department’s hierarchy of grief.

As Walter [19] points out, gaming memorials also benefit from their secular nature. As someone who was raised Catholic but then fell away from religion in my teens, it can be incredibly hard to untangle religion and grief. Paying tribute to someone in my offline environment is uncomfortable and can feel like a numbers game. Do I kneel and recite the prayers that I still remember but don’t believe in? Do I sit at the back and not participate, but then attract gossip as to why I’m not participating? There is no such discomfort in online memorials, any and all beliefs are welcome as they tend to be secular in nature.

Before concluding with a slightly sinister side of gaming memorials, I want to mention a quick positive note. Kentaro Miura had fans all over the world, and global fans cannot all feasibly travel to Japan to extend their well-wishes and express their deepest sympathies. But these events gained media attention and show Miura’s friends and family how loved and missed he is around the world. And these community outpourings of love and support, although not made directly to the families of the bereaved, can ultimately still be helpful: for example, grieving widows of public figures may state how supported they feel from outpourings of love [19]. So we can stand there paying our respects, be screenshotted, be written about in the press, and can act as support and reassurance for how beloved the deceased was.

While the previous point argues that we do it to make others feel supported, there might be a harsh reality that part of us attends gaming memorials to be self-indulgent or maybe even due to peer pressure. People may have attended the Miura memorial due to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), they wanted their character with their pretty costume to be included in screenshots of the memorial. Or perhaps they teleported to Ul’Dah, saw the massive lines of people and just didn’t want to feel left out. However, there can be a darker side when it comes to peer pressure. In Walter’s work [19], a participant details how their school bully passed away and they privately passed on their condolences to the family, but argued with friends because he did not join the Facebook memorial page due to not being very close with him. If I didn’t attend the Miura memorial that day, could it look like I was being disrespectful towards the legacy he has had in the world of manga and gaming? Man, I better go so I don’t look rude, wouldn’t want to look rude.

Critique

As no body of research is perfect, I like to conclude articles with recommendations on how the field can be strengthened.

As you may have noticed, the main grief-focused studies that I have cited today involved small sample sizes: the Spiritfarer study interviewed six participants and Jocoi was designed with four grieving mothers. This is an understandable limitation though as interviews and focus groups result in many hours of audio to transcribe and analyse and discuss with other researchers regarding themes. Moving forward, it would be great to gain even more perspectives on grief and gaming, especially as we’re about to see how this can be beneficial.

Some participants in the Spiritfarer study were more unwilling than others to connect their personal experiences with in-game experiences, with one participant using the phrase “it’s just a game”. It might be presumptuous to assume that everyone can benefit from the topics that I have discussed today; some people may simply take games at face value and not relate to the content before them. I would love for future research to explore what makes people more or less likely to relate to video games and the stories that they tell.

Finally, it would be nice to get more organic research behind video games and grief. The participants for the Spiritfarer study were found by reading through Steam reviews and reaching out to reviewers who mentioned their own grief experiences. The justification for this was to minimise harm as these people had already been open about their experiences, but I find this sampling method to be a bit too biased for my liking. It would be great for future research to involve playing the game as its study design and speaking with people directly after (and potentially before as well); this research could also give us more clues on the people who do and don’t relate to grief narratives.

Summary

Those experiencing grief may be tempted to turn to video games to keep their minds busy while also gaining support from online friend groups. This distraction and support method may be beneficial to alternatives such as anti-anxiety medication while awaiting support from a grief counsellor.
Games such as Final Fantasy VII and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons can passively teach us about loss and remembrance. Those who cling too strongly to the past in FFVII may find themselves backtracking and even crashing their game rather than progressing the game’s story and learning new team tactics. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons shows us that we can become empowered during moments of weakness by remembering what our loved ones would have done in that situation and keeping their memory alive through your progress.
Research shows that Spiritfarer can help players reshape and come to terms with their grief, and can even encourage players to make end-of-life plans and to have more candid conversations about loss.
Designing video games directly for those experiencing loss is a promising new field. The game Jocoi was designed with grieving mothers with little experience with video games, yet helped create a game that they liked to play and helped to bring them comfort and self-reflection.
Video game memorials are becoming more popular as a method of expressing sympathies in a secular manner, providing worldwide displays of support to grieving friends and family, and as a method of expressing disenfranchised grief (i.e. grief that others may not approve of due to having too many degrees of separation away from the deceased).
Research on gaming and grief can be improved in the future by using data from larger sample sizes and using more organic methods of sampling participants.

Credits

A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image and to LoopyGc for drawing the header art.

This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, Kyle T, redKheld, Hagbard Celine, Aprou, Austin Enright, NotGac, Shaemus, Joey Rodriguez, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Dr. Jhin, Mulgar, Tobias Svensson, RK_Rammy, John Bauman, and Gamma Ray Garrett. Thank you!

I would like to clearly state that I have no unethical connections with any authors of books that I have recommended in this article — I just like their work!

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References

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[2] Iyadurai, L., Blackwell, S. E., Meiser-Stedman, R., Watson, P. C., Bonsall, M. B., Geddes, J. R., Nobre, A. C., & Holmes, E. A. (2018). Preventing intrusive memories after trauma via a brief intervention involving Tetris computer game play in the emergency department: a proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial. Molecular Psychiatry, 23, 674-682.

[3] Cole, H., & Griffiths, M. D. (2007). Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Gamers. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 10(4), 575-583.

[4] Stavropoulos, V., Anderson, E. E., Beard, C., Latifi, M. Q., Kuss, D., & Griffiths, M. (2019). A preliminary cross-cultural study of Hikikomori and Internet Gaming Disorder: The moderating effects of game-playing time and living with parents. Addictive Behaviors Reports, 9

[5] Halliday, G. (2018). Heartbroken Belfast widow told there’s a six-month waiting list for counselling. Retrieved October 2, 2022 from https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/heartbroken-belfast-widow-told-theres-a-six-month-waiting-list-for-counselling-37382829.html

[6] Ford, C., & Law, F. (2014). Guidance for the use and reduction of misuse of benzodiazepines and other hypnotics and anxiolytics in general practice. Retrieved October 29, 2019 from www.emcdda.europa.eu/attachements.cfm/att_248926_EN_UK59_benzos.pdf

[7] Kübler-Ross, E. (2011[1970]) On Death and Dying. What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, And Their Own Families. Kindle ed. Simon and Schuster.

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[9] Harrer, S. (2018). Games and Bereavement: How Video Games Represent Attachment, Loss and Grief.

[10] EDGE Magazine (2003). The making of: Final Fantasy VII,108-113

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[12] Packman, W., Horsley, H., Davies, B., & Kramer, R. (2006). Sibling bereavement and continuing bonds. Death studies, 30(9), 817-841.

[13] Eum, K., Erb, V., Lin, S., Wang, S., & Doh, Y. Y. (2021, May). How the Death-themed Game Spiritfarer Can Help Players Cope with the Loss of a Loved One. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6).

[14] Schut, M. S. H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death studies, 23(3), 197-224.

[15] Orsulic-Jeras, S., Whitlatch, C. J., Szabo, S. M., Shelton, E. G., & Johnson, J. (2019). The SHARE program for dementia: Implementation of an early-stage dyadic care-planning intervention. Dementia, 18(1), 360-379.

[16] World Health Organisation. (2022), Stillbith. Retrieved September 28, 2022 from https://www.who.int/health-topics/stillbirth

[17] Campbell-Jackson, L., & Horsch, A. (2014). The psychological impact of stillbirth on women: a systematic review. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 22(3), 237-256.

[18] Doka, K. J. (2002). Disenfranchised grief: New directions, challenges, and strategies for practice. Research PressPub.

[19] Walter, T. (2015). New mourners, old mourners: Online memorial culture as a chapter in the history of mourning. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 21(1-2), 10-24.