Re: Instant Death


8 Mar 1995 05:34:10 GMT

Christopher E. Forman <ceforma@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu> wrote:
>Neil K. Guy (neilg@kits.sfu.ca) wrote:
>: Over the past few weeks I've downloaded three or four free or
>: shareware games from ftp.gmd.de. And have been very disappointed by
>: all of them. Why? Because all of them killed my character without any
>: real warning after a handful of turns.
>
>: Am I the only one old-fashioned enough to find this damned tiresome
>: and rather rude on the part of the author?
>
>I care. I don't like dying without any warning any more than you do. But
>if used sparingly, and if some sort of notice is given in advance, it can be
>a good technique.

Ok, why is it a good technique? If you die you must have done something
wrong, right? But does it enhance the enjoyment of the game? It seems to
me that for dying to be meaningful there has to be some penalty for it.
If you can just "undo" or restart where you left off, then you don't
really feel that your character has died, only that you (the player) did
the wrong thing and will have to try something else. So in that case, you're
not really in the game environment any more - your character died, but you
didn't. You don't identify with your character.

Now if there is a penalty, you might actually feel the loss, and
so you feel more attached to your next character (knowing of its mortality).
The problem is, if you can resurrect your character (as with restoring
a saved game) you're in a different scenario again. In this case you feel
the loss (as you might not have a recent save, and have to go back far),
but you aren't feeling in the role of your character - in fact you might
be more concerned with when you last saved (and making sure that you
always save at critical moments) than you are with the game itself. This
seems even more distracting than the "undo". You are worried with the
"real world" problem of getting you character back and keeping up to
date saves, and not the situations in the game itself.

The only approaches that seem pleasing to me (that I can think of) are
not being able to die at all (as in "Myst" for example), and dying being
permanent, but you get plenty of warning and can only die by behaving
really recklessly.

The no-die treatment may seem extreme, but consider this; how often do
you die in real life? Yet most people find real life compelling (well,
some of the time at least). What is the role of dying? Surely its
an ending, not a middle. Certainly other people's deaths are part of
our life stories, and so is our own, but only once.

Oliver