Memorializing the Dead with Games

That was a hell of a campaign, son!' Rick May was the voice of 'the Soldier'; a celebrated and iconic character from Team Fortress 2 (TF2) (Valve 2007).He died on the 8th of April 2020 following a stroke and complications related to COVID-19 (Wilde 2020).In the May 2020 patch notes for TF2, Valve, the game's developers, announced a month-long tribute to Rick and his voice acting work for the company (Valve 2020a(Valve , 2020b)).During the month of May, the opening screen and main menu of TF2 featured an image of the Soldier standing at attention and saluting.A rendition of "Taps" called "Saluting the Fallen" was also added to the soundtrack and played over the main menu.Bronze statues of the Soldier were placed on the game's active maps.The statues featured the Soldier standing at attention and saluting from the top of a marble column.The column carried a bronze plaque with the inscription, "Rick May 1940 -2020" followed by an iconic line from the Soldier, "'That was a hell of a campaign, son!'"As players approached and remained in the vicinity of the statues, the game played randomly selected lines from Rick May's repertoire of voice acting for the Soldier.The tribute ended after a month, but the statues have reappeared every year on the 8th of April to mark the anniversary of his death.A permanent memorial was added to the Granary map later that year (Morton 2020).The memorial evokes a short TF2 promotional video, "Meet The Soldier", which was set on the same map.In the video, the Soldier is instructing a squad of soldiers in the manner of a deranged drill sergeant.The video cuts to reveal the gathered soldiers are severed heads arranged on a wooden farm gate.The permanent memorial features the Soldier statue and the severed heads from this iconic video.Scholars studying death have noted that death in many western countries has been undergoing something of a transformation in recent decades (Arnold et al. 2018;Jacobsen 2021;Khapaeva 2017).Grieving and rituals for the dead have become less formal, more personal and private, and less bound by the funerary traditions of the past and the rites and rituals of the major world religions.As part of this general trend, forms of memorialization to mark the deceased have drifted away from the grave and the final resting place of the deceased and can be found across many public and