Death In Games is Emotional

From the beginning of the video industry, games like Pacman and Space Invaders simulated death as the ultimate punishment.  In Lisbeth Klastrup’s article, “What Makes World of Warcraft a World?  A Note on Death and Dying”, she interprets death as an important pivotal design element that every player experiences sometime while playing games.  Klastrup argues that death is the consequence of a player’s poor actions in the game and adds a level of difficulty.  This challenge induces entertainment for the player.

                Throughout the past several years, I have played a wide variety of video games, each with different death sequences.  According to Klastrup, “Through their [game designers’] design, understood in a broad sense as comprising both game mechanics and aesthetics, they are able to affect people’s experience of gameplay and death.”  Depending on the video game, dying can provide very different reactions to me as a player.  For instance, falling into a bottomless pit or running into a goomba in Super Mario Brothers seems to be no big deal for me.  I personally do not mind restarting the level.  However, the drastically steeper difficulty of Resident Evil 4 makes death far more annoying.  On my first run-through of the game, I found myself dying about 70 times and having to repeat the same events over and over again.  Though a similar game engine, Dead Space’s death sequence is gruesome and horrifying, causing me to cringe every time the aliens kill Isaac.  But then there are the games that people play just to get killed because of how entertaining it can be.  A popular example would be the Grand Theft Auto series.  Players have access to many real world possibilities.  In a virtual space, they are able to perform countless illegal activities.  For some individuals, the thrill of running over pedestrians, breaking into buildings and having a shootout with the police force permeates much entertainment.  Which video games instill certain emotions to you as a gamer?

                In video games, death appears to be the staple result of a player’s consequences.  If there was another method of consequence in games, what do you think it should be?