Here’s another essay of mine for The Escapist, out this week. It questions why so many games use death as the main consequence for failure. In keeping with the week’s theme of indie games, I’ve pointed out a few examples (Passage, Karoshi and Urban Dead) that use character death for completely different means, instead of the usual die-and-respawn model.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the article, though it was a real challenge to avoid turning it into an essay on video game violence, lest my original intent be tainted. You can see in the forums, however, that there’s a consequence to leaving that stone unturned — people still think of video games in terms of shooting everything that moves and slaying villains before they kill you, and in this context the die-and-retry model still makes a lot of sense, so people have mixed feelings on whether death-as-failure works.
But ultimately, violence is another convention that needs to change. Indeed, my appreciation for Karoshi and Passage deserve praise for punking that mode of play as well.
