I missed this last week but Kate Bevan's look at death in videogames is pretty timely. I was revisiting 360 zombie-fest Dead Rising over the weekend and I remembered why I stopped playing it - the bloody awful save system. Life really is too short to replay the same stuff time and time again. Thankfully Dead Rising is a rarity - today's gamers generally have it easy. There were no saves or checkpoints in the 80s. Three lives, possibly five, and that was your lot. Some games had passwords to allow you to skip levels but most of the time you had to throw the Competition Pro or Kempston joystick out of the window, calm down and try again. Veterans of Green Beret or Prince of Persia will know the physical anguish of a really tough game.
Of course, this was acceptable in the 80s when economics meant games had to last longer - £9.99 was a HUGE amount for a teenager in 1985 - but not so good today when you're trying to fit in an hour of gaming after putting the kids to bed. So I don't miss the days when death in games really mattered. A challenge is still important - I want to feel I've achieved something when I make progress in a game. But there has to be a better way than "dying". Maybe game death can be incorporated into the narrative? This is something The Darkness did very well. But I'll let Kate ask the questions:
"There are bigger questions, of course. In real life, death is more than an annoyance. So should games reflect real life? Or should we redefine "dying" in the context of games? Isn't it more like tennis, where you can lose a set but go on to win the game? Or are there bigger lessons to be learned from games?"
