Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
hopesandfears.com

Realistic death doesn't tie into the general character animation model because they're skeletal-based animations and not physical ones (again, fake). When rag-doll physics is employed the skeletal-based animated body is simply swapped-out in-place. It's _really hard_ to physically simulate 'a bullet going through a human stomach', and honestly there are more important things in games to focus on financially.

> the most apparent conclusion is that games are using this fatalism as a crutch, because they don't know what else to do with it.

It's sentences like these that make me think the author has completely neglected the technical and financial difficulty of game development.

Morally, the author does a great job portraying the non-gamer (read: "normal person") ideology of what death should be: special, eventful, meaningful, a thought-provoking once in a lifetime experience and conclusion to your story.

As someone whose dealt with death more in his life than most probably will in their entire life -- it's not any of those things _to the person dying_.

Death for you _is_ a binary switch, and once you're gone, you are gone. Games do a good job portraying that.

I'll end this with just one of my favorite quotes.

"Nothing" isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... Nothing..." - Aria Stark, GoT

In real life, we prefer to avoid things that can kill us, for obvious reasons. In video games, the effect of death is to keep people playing, not just in an abstract "making things interesting" sense, but in a measurable Skinnerian sort of way.

Also, one of the reasons why 1980s arcade and NES games were so brutally, unforgivingly difficult (with "no continues" the norm rather than exception) was to keep people playing. The oldest games weren't actually very big: the original Dragon Quest 1 was under 64 kB. Constantly killing the player (with no continues) allowed a game that might take 30 minutes for a skilled player to take 20-40 hours for a beginner. By the time someone could actually win one of these games, they had a deep expertise and that shared knowledge was enough to create cultures around these games, which made them both "viral" in their time and lasting into ours.

It's odd to think that something we aggressively avoid in real life was, in no uncertain terms, a killer (pun not intended) feature for video games.

Death acts as a convenient lose-state because it's at first approximation a loss of control---transitioning from life to death (for a player-controlled avatar) is transitioning from a state where you can control an aspect of the world directly via your will to a point where your will no longer has bearing on the simulation playing out. It's convenient to use that no-control state as an indication that the player has done something "incorrect," i.e. "You messed up, we're going to punish you by time-out in the corner" (even if the time-out is just the few moments it takes to respawn).

All of that having been said, I wouldn't agree with the author that death in games is a "crutch," per se, but I think there are other facets of death that are explorable that most games do not. Some games do; Wing Commander and the much-maligned Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor have the interesting aspect in that your decisions in play would cost you members of your team---and those costs were permanent (for a given session of the game's linear narrative). But in terms of what the player directly experiences, death is often just cutting of the strings between the controller and the on-screen avatar. Maybe there's room to grow there?