When seven-year-old Maya lost her grandfather, her parents noticed she was not crying or talking about it. Instead, she spent hours building a memorial garden in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, planting flowers around a tiny in-game grave marker. She visited it daily. Her mother, a child psychologist, later reflected: “I thought she was avoiding her feelings. What I did not realize was that she was processing them — just in a language I did not speak.”
This scenario is playing out in countless homes, and the research increasingly validates what many grieving families discover on their own. Interactive play offers children something that traditional grief interventions often cannot: a safe, controllable space to approach one of life’s most overwhelming experiences at their own pace. As Kelli Dunlap and Christopher Leech write in their chapter “Good Grief” from Video Games and Mental Health (2024), games are “excellently positioned and uniquely capable of significantly impacting public experience and understanding, and shifting larger social norms, around grief and loss.”
Understanding Grief Developmentally
Before examining how games address grief, it is essential to clarify what grief actually is. Grief is not simply sadness. It is the natural reaction to significant loss in its totality — encompassing physical, emotional, psychological, behavioral, social, and spiritual manifestations (Dunlap and Leech, 2024). Grief is distinct from death (an event) and from mourning (culturally structured external expression). For children, these distinctions are critical, because children process loss very differently from adults.
Modern grief theory has moved decisively away from the rigid stage models that popular culture still embraces. The Kubler-Ross Five Stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — were developed from interviews with terminally ill patients, not with bereaved individuals. As Dunlap and Leech note, this model “has been inappropriately applied to all people and to all kinds of grief” and its focus on “orderly progression through neat and tidy stages has been widely criticized and rejected by mental health professionals.” Contemporary frameworks view grief not as something to resolve but as something to integrate — what researchers call “continuing bonds.” This is precisely where video games excel: they allow children to maintain connection with what was lost while learning to navigate a permanently altered world.
Three Categories of Grief in Games
Dunlap and Leech organize grief portrayals in games along three dimensions of increasing directness.
Grief-Adjacent Games: Loss is present but not central. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, despite its cheerful appearance, evokes genuine grief when beloved animal neighbors move away without warning. During the COVID-19 pandemic, players organized virtual funerals in the game, placing graves on their islands to commemorate real loved ones. For children, these games serve as gentle entry points to the vocabulary of loss — absence, permanence, change — in a context that feels safe because it is not real.
Grief-Centered Games: Loss is core to the experience. What Remains of Edith Finch has players explore a family home where every room contains the story of a relative’s death. Gris uses art and wordless narrative to move through the emotional territory of loss and recovery. These games work because they allow children to feel difficult emotions without being overwhelmed — what the researchers describe as a safe emotional space where “death is not really death and loss is not really loss.”
Death-Positive Games: These directly confront the silence around death. That Dragon, Cancer places players in the hospital rooms of a family watching their child die. Spiritfarer casts players as a ferrymaster for the dead, teaching that love and loss are inseparable and that letting go is an act of care. A Mortician’s Tale normalizes death through the routine of preparing bodies and supporting grieving families — even preserving grief’s humor, disrupting “the common misconception that there is a right way to grieve.”
Clinical framework: The grief-game matrix (Dunlap and Leech, 2024) categorizes games along three dimensions. Grief-adjacent games introduce the vocabulary of loss in a safe context. Grief-centered games allow emotional processing without overwhelm. Death-positive games challenge stigma directly. Each serves different developmental and therapeutic needs.
Practical Guidance for Parents and Clinicians
- Play alongside them. The most powerful thing an adult can do is ask to watch or join. Grief is isolating, and playing together communicates willingness to enter the child’s world.
- Let the child lead. Children approach grief content at their own pace. If they replay a sad scene repeatedly, that repetition likely serves a purpose — mastery, processing, or simply feeling the feeling until it becomes manageable.
- Use games as conversation starters. Few children want to sit down and talk about their feelings, but many will talk at length about what happened in Spiritfarer or why they built a memorial in Minecraft. These conversations are grief work.
- Match the game to the child. Games like That Dragon, Cancer are intensely emotional. Age ratings and content advisories matter. The grief-game matrix can help clinicians recommend appropriate titles.
When Professional Support Is Needed
- Complete withdrawal from all activities other than gaming
- Intense distress triggered by even gentle grief-adjacent content
- Obsessive, repetitive play without narrative variation — potentially signaling being stuck
- Significant regression in daily functioning combined with intense gaming
- Expressions of hopelessness or self-harm
When these signs appear, gaming should be integrated into a broader therapeutic plan rather than removed. Many grief-informed clinicians now use games as therapeutic tools.
Conclusion
Grief is the price of love, and children pay it across their entire developmental arc. Video games provide one of the most accessible ways for children to approach this territory — to build a memorial, to sail a spirit to the Everdoor, to feel the phantom ache of a missing button on the controller. For clinicians and parents, the task is not to keep children away from these experiences but to be present alongside them, helping make meaning of what they find.
