Player choice and The End.

[Bek]

So in the case of people killing themselves, its tapping into some metaphysical hope that maybe the stream of consciousness they are from their fleshy body can also live on into the simulation. Ultimately, its impossible to verify, which is partly what makes the idea so troubling.

Interesting thoughts; you also make a good point about the desperation of the setting which I think I have overlooked. But I'm still not too convinced about the suicide aspect. If it's a digital scan that gets simulated on a machine, we can be certain that nothing beyond the bits and bytes matter. Whether you kill yourself or not makes zero difference to the scan (which wouldn't even be running on a sim at the end of the scan, presumably due to how scans are loaded and simulated in the game) so killing yourself makes no sense. You're going to die eventually, doing so now makes no diff, so why rush it?

Also as a side note, there's some really cool discussion about SOMA's ending going on here.