Death and Death Penalty

        Klastrup's article, “Digital culture, play and identity”, is a study of the mechanic of death and dying in the MMOG World of Warcraft. There are thousands and millions of enthusiastic WOW users who spend many hours playing it, and they must all have experienced the death within the game. Death is one of the repeatable activities just like fighting mobs and achieving quests. However, many or almost all the users are very annoyed by death and its penalty.  Dying in games like WOW is very unlucky nuisance that slows the flow of playing the world as game because of the death penalties. According to the article, players are given three options: player can run back to the corpse, ask spirit healer for a help to revive, or resurrected by a healer character. Why is it so hard to revive in Wow? The reason is that death can be seen as a way to teach players to handle the game aspect of the world in a more successful way because it forces players to be attentive and thoughtful during the game. Because there are such things as death and death penalty, players are forced to fight mobs that are in similar level as the players, which keeps players in the right track of the journey. Moreover, the deaths play an important role in deciding the difficulty of the game. Since it is difficult to resurrect and crazy death penalties in WOW, I believe WOW is considered as a hardcore game. Thus, death and death penalty are essential parts in video games. Going back to the topic, the aesthetics of death, encountered in landscaping, characters, and NPCs, serve as a constant reminder that death and life are fundamentally interconnected, and that death is part of life in World of Warcraft. In order to fully understand the game concept and the nature of game world, one must explore design, graphic, storyline, setting, culturalization, and most importantly the “death”

        Excerpt from the reading, “the permanent destruction of a character the first time it dies is certainly an option and possibility, but current MMOGs, including World of Warcraft, rarely employ it.” I agree with this quote because I used to be a big fan of Diablo 2 (2000) and its expansion set (2001), a MMOG game just like WOW. Diablo2 is one example of a classic game that applies permanent destruction of a character option. Not many people played as permanent destruction mode because the game basically ends once a character dies. Thus, death designers removed the permanent destruction mode, and current MMOGs do not employ the mode.

        Do you think deaths and death penalties motivated players to create hacks and mods because they don’t want to waste time, money, and experience by dying?

        And if so, do you think hacks will bring more fun to games?