A few rejoinders to perma-death as a positive game feature…

Just a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post: I’m not asserting that video games offer more intense, memorable, and immersive experience if they all completely removed the option to save and reload your game. Far from it. In fact, doing so would completely alienate and frustrate a significant percentage of the gaming community who are more interested in an easy-going, relaxed gaming experience. I mean, I think back to my days playing the wonderfully addictive Diablo 2 where I died over and over again, often in rapid succession, due to being overwhelmed by large forces of enemies.  Had each death resulted in me having to recreate my character from scratch, I would have gone crazy with rage and immediately quit playing the game. The same is true for World of Warcraft. So much investment is put into leveling, shaping, and equipping your characters in the game that permanent death is just outrageous. Furthermore, some game genres are all about experimentation and penalizing the player in this way for making a simple mistake is just foolhardy of any game developer.

But, going back to the point of my earlier post, having players incur a significant penalty upon death does increase the tension and, in some cases, the overall enjoyment of the game play experience. It makes your decisions and choices tangible. More real, in fact. The trick is not only coming up with fair but powerful penalties but also identifying the games where these penalties would serve to actually increase overall enjoyment of the game. Further, if such penalties are imposed on the player, even if they increase the immersion and connection the player makes with the game world, the general mechanics of the game must be thought out and implemented well. Can you imagine incurring some harsh debt, or even permanently dying, in a game like Tomb Raider if the collision detection programming was poor? Where, if you approached the edge of a cliff suspended high above a deep ravine, the game failed to accurately take into account how close your avatar’s feet were to this edge and concluded that you should fall to your death even if such a decision made no sense given the visual information presented on your screen? In such a case, not only is the sloppy programming no fun, but the fact that the sloppy programming caused your character to experience permanent death is just a slap in the face. A deal breaker. A precursor to the game console being powered off. So, in conclusion, I’m not advocating perma-death being a robust feature in games, but rather that the imminent feeling of death without the option of restarting from an earlier save state (or other stark penalty) can act to create powerful tension in games that pull the player more into the game world and bridge the player closer to his in-game representation.

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