Klastrup's article is a technical study of the mechanic of "dying" in the MMO World of Warcraft. She talks about how in-game death is an entirely unextraordinary event, as it happens to everyone fairly regularly with only a small price. There are a few different ways of getting out of the ghostly world of the dead, and each has its own cost. A friendly character can resurrect you, at a monetary cost to the player who brought you back. That cost is typically expected to be repaid by the player who died, but with this method, it is possible for the player to immediately return to playing without any delay. Another method is the corpse run. When your spirit is respawned at the nearest graveyard, you can run back to where you died and come back to life for free. This option's cost is only time, so if you died near a graveyard, this is a good choice. The last option is to be resurrected by the "spirit healer" NPC. This brings you back to life at a cost of damaging your equipment, and making your character unable to battle effectively for a period of time. This gives you a visible debuff which can be shameful, letting everyone know you've died recently. Even though there is a penalty for death, it is not too extreme and it is only temporary.
Because of this relatively minor cost of death, it is a thing that is almost always a viable option. There are some advantages to being dead. A dead character's ghost can walk wherever the character desires to investigate, allowing lower level players to experience new places or to scout the terrain of a new area before going in as a living character. When experienced intentionally, death can be a novel and fun thing to do in the game. One of the drawbacks is that you can't interact with the world at all while dead.
The main focus of this article is what makes death stories worth telling colloquially. Klastrup says there are three main kinds of death stories: "stories about heroes, stories about fools, and stories about the accidental nature of life in the gameworld." The hero stories are when someone sacrifices themself for the sake of the party's success. The fool stories are typically when someone gets everyone else in the party "wiped" by attracting too many monsters. And the last class of stories is sort of everything else, particularly very surprising deaths that occurred with no warning.
Death is an integral and important mechanic in WoW. Imagine for a moment that death was not such an easy thing to undo, or even if it was permanent for your character. How would this change the way the game is played?
There was a permanent death mode in Diablo II where if your character dies regardless of any reason, the character becomes inactive. I remember playing that mode once and died due to an excessive lag to a trash mob. I rememer how angry I got at that moment. If the death was permanent thing for the character in all MMO games, I believe there will not be as many players playing the game. Also, those who play will be extra careful of every action they do.
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