Angels Don’t Die In Multiplayer

Angels Don’t Die in Multiplayer is a video essay developed from prior writing on the same subject, including the theory-fiction essay “Derealized Deterrence: Belief as Payload in the Theater of the Feed,” co-authored with Parsa Esmaeilzadeh and published by Diffractions Collective, as well as a related text published in SUM Journal (Issue 24).

The film emerged from observing how contemporary conflict is no longer experienced primarily through news footage, but through feeds, memes, and synthetic visions. During the 12-day Iran–Israel war, circulating images began to function less as documentation and more as signals: fragments that shape fear, belief, and emotional alignment in real time.

The work treats AI-generated and game-engine imagery not as spectacle, but as infrastructure. These images operate like hyperstitional objects, repeated until they acquire force, collapsing distinctions between irony, belief, and participation. The angel that appears in the film is not a promise of transcendence, but a networked apparition, hovering between myth, algorithm, and first-person shooter logic.

Rather than asking whether images are true or false, the film asks what they do: how they circulate, what they authorize, and how they rewire attention during moments of crisis. It is an attempt to think through war as an interface, and to treat image-making itself as contested terrain.

If you want this to be watertight, decide what you are claiming: did the film adapt the essay directly, or did it run alongside it as parallel research. If it is parallel rather than adapted, I can tweak the first paragraph so it does not imply a direct adaptation.