Death is a ubiquitous element in video games. One of the most common views in the literature is that death is essentially a didactic mechanism to teach players how to improve their gameplay. However, we argue that beyond this function death has other roles, aims and possibilities. On the one hand, an essential function of death is to make a game challenging, which is achieved through the notion of “death penalty”, and thus to provide the ludic experience that is a constitutive property of games. Without death, one might say, there is no game. On the other hand, we examine how death can be a source of meaning and an emotional enabler through the notion of OSGON games and games with a permadeath feature. Finally, we show how death in video games can be associated with a process of grief, whether for fictional characters, the games themselves, or real people.