Games and Death

I'm going to state outright that I was disappointed by the Death in Videogames article we read. There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with the article itself - it was just different from what I was expecting. In a discussion of game narrative, I expected more discussion of the abstract and literary concept of death, rather than a study of its effect on gameplay.

There are much deeper issues to be discussed here in terms of death with relation to the game's narrative. Why is death so prevalent in games? What are some of the ways death is handled in games, both in terms of mechanics and in terms of tone? How does it compare to the perception of death seen in movies or books? Are games desensitizing us to death? How has the common nature of death in games affected the image of video games as a medium? Death and killing were some of the first things to be simulated in a game. How does this reflect on the society that created such games? There could easily be an entire class dedicated to this specific subject (in fact, the importance of death and killing in games could be an interesting midterm question). And with all these thought-provoking questions that could possibly have been addressed, we have a comparatively mundane rundown of how death works in World of Warcraft, and how the social and strategic atmosphere of that specific game is affected by its small death penalty.

Once I grew accustomed to the fact that I was reading a selection about game mechanics rather than game narrative, I did find it interesting, if somewhat unrelated to our current topic in the course. That WoW players can use the death system as a tool to help them achieve certain tasks in the game was particularly striking, as this is clearly not what the developers intended, and is a great example of just how little control the programmer has over the individual player's experience. Klastrup also raises the issue of natural death, and how players may connect more with it than death in combat, something which is farther removed from the player's reality. She mentions how players are less willing to talk about these deaths, and instead tend to focus on the grandiose, larger-than-life deaths in-battle. This reflects to an extent that certain kinds of death are taken for granted in games, because they are something distant and fictional to the player. Because all the deaths discussed take place within the world of World of Warcraft, all it costs the player is time in-game to recover what they lost as a result of dying. This easy-going penalty strikes me as a brilliant tactic by Blizzard to both encourage and force players spend more time playing the game. The more time a player spends playing, the more money Blizzard makes on subscriptions.

What does in-game death mean to you? Is it an annoyance or punishment from the developers? Is it a tactic to artificially increase playtime? A mechanism to add difficulty? A necessarily clear demonstration of player failure? Does it have larger societal implications?