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Most computer games treat the death of the player’s avatar as a temporary inconvenience, followed by resurrection at various minor costs depending upon the game and situation. Dungeons and Dragons Online is especially death-oriented, including memorials for the two deceased creators of the original D&D game and numerous missions into a necropolis filled with tombs. Statistics on killing and being killed from EverQuest II and World of Warcraft show how significant death is in highly popular gameworlds. Most deaths occur when a player kills a nonplayer character, but the reverse occasionally happens, and some game environments encourage player-versus-player combat, which often leads to the death of one avatar at the hands of another. Memorials for real deceased persons are found in World of Warcraft and Battleground Europe, and some entire gameworlds have met their doom, commemorated in YouTube videos, notably Tabula Rasa and The Matrix Online.

This chapter analyses Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as a case study for the investigation into how a seminal fantasy imaginary world has been represented through 40 years of gametexts. It does so by focusing on the grand metaverse within which players play this game. It sees in the construction of this metaverse critical elements that facilitate the harmonization of the different settings. For example, the different ‘planes’ of existence, as well as a godswar demonstrate how the designers have consistently crafted these imaginary worlds with both an ability to embrace highly textured and disparate details, as well as a sense of continuity and cohesion. This chapter addresses several of the most popular settings, such as Mystara, Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Krynn, Spelljammer, and Planescape. It focuses on the Forgotten Realms as a stellar example of how a fantasy gameworld develops as a shared universe into a realized world.

The religious concept of the immortal soul offers a popular but incorrect picture of the human mind, because in fact it is neither immortal nor truly unified. It is not surprising that a concept invented thousands of years before the development of cognitive science might make such fundamental errors, and computer games offer more modern ways of thinking. Insights about heroic fantasies of the soul can be gained from running avatars through two Star Wars games, Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Galaxies. The fragmented nature of the real human mind is illustrated by the secondary avatars, operated simultaneously with primaries, in Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Guild Wars. The possibility of running ancestor veneration avatars fulfills one of the ancient motivations for religion, and suggests that each of us is a mosaic of other people.

Cults are novel or deviant religious groups, typically small and new, that function as subcultures or even distinct cultures in their own right. They abound in computer games, and one of the most fully developed radical religious movements is the Scarlet Crusade in World of Warcraft, which seeks to purify the world of the undead. The Cult of the Magus in Warhammer Online illustrates how cults often arise in the real world, as small groups centered on a leader who possesses charisma. Games such as Dungeons and Dragons Online and EverQuest II show how cults may be either enemies or friends of the player’s avatar. Cults may also be conceptualized as works of art, living dramas in which people play symbolic roles, even total works of art, as defined by opera composer Richard Wagner, combining many different art forms.