Death Has to Matter

In the early days of gaming death was something that infuriated young gamers. Why? Because it cost them a quarter. In arcades you could play as long as you could stay alive, if not you would have to go beg your parents for more quarters which ultimately ends your gaming session. When game consoles were first brought home they kept the same logic with a limited number of lives. If you lost all of your lives then you'd have to start the game over, from a checkpoint or from the very beginning. Today it would be unthinkable for a game to send you back a significant time.

The newest iteration of the Prince of Persia series demonstrates the modern approach to dying. Whenever the Prince falls into a pit he is yanked back up by his companion Elika. This is similar to the Sands of Time's rewind mechanic which allowed players to rewind time and undo their deaths. Both of these games aim to minimize death. One of the biggest differences between games and reality is the frequent and meaningless death in games. How can a gamer care about their character when the character's death becomes routine? Too frequently games have implemented instant death pits and spikes. This causes the problem of meaningless death and no real dangers, just obstacles to be hopped over. This isn't ideal since it takes a very real part of life that motivates our actions and defangs it completely.

One experimental alternative was Ben Abram's Far Cry 2 Permadeath Run. He led a number of bloggers in playing Far Cry 2 with the understanding that if they died they would quit playing the game and delete their save files. This kind of extreme punishment for death resulted in a more tense and cautious environment and gave the enemy bullets more weight. Of course the problem with this is that it can't be built into the game or large amounts of content would be inaccessible to the average player. And of course game development would change for the worse to accommodate that.

Two indie games I've played recently also have strategies that vary greatly from the two obvious alternatives above. Every Day The Same Dream forces the player to confront death, but as with almost every action in the game death only results in the beginning of a new day. The game is based around a small world that the player is forced to explore by being sent back through it again. In this way death is not permanent, but only a poignant part of exploring the world. Passage is another game that uses death to send players back to the beginning of the game. The farthest a player can get in Passage is the distance they can walk in five minutes. Death is inevitable and cannot be avoided or postponed by player choice. However once the five minutes are complete the player is left to reflect on the life they had lived in 5 minutes and then allowed to play again, making different choices and exploring different areas of the world. These games are tiny and such a retreading strategy wouldn't work with large games, but it's a fascinating take on what it is to have your avatar die.

The easy answer is that there is no perfect solution. For death to matter in games it either has to force repetition, hide game content, or punish the players in some significant and relevant way. The alternative, which is our current state, is that gamers are killed constantly in games. This conditions players to think that those deaths have no effect and demands a huge suspension of disbelief. Death is a major part of life and informs a lot of behaviors, but in games it doesn't matter at all. If we want games to get more immersive we need to ramp up the penalty for death while also to making it tolerable for gamers.