Should Dying In Games Have More Consequnces?

December 06, 2012 by Ryan Ball

Back in the good old days of Super Mario Bros. and Sonic: The Hedgehog, games were more about the skill of the player then trial and error. The reward came from finally clearing a world, rather then making it to the next cut scene. The reason being, if you died you started the world all over again and you tried and tried until you made it to the end. Today if you die you simply appear back where you fell, with no consequence to the story at all. The result of this is that players don’t put as much effort into a game because they know they have unlimited tries. Games today are so life like that it seems odd that developers leave out the most inevitable thing in life.

There has been much debate as to whether games today are to easy, and to answer plainly, yes they are. The main reason being, that after being killed in a game you simply spawn back where you fell, or at least to a very close checkpoint. The down side of this is that it causes players to become lazy, adapting a trial and error method instead of working out the problem beforehand. This then leads to a very unsatisfied feeling when you finally beat the game. No bigger culprit of this is Call of Duty, where even in the campaign; after you die you simply pop back to life. While this is not bad, it has grown a new species of online gamer, who is basically a kamikaze. Even extremely realistic games stick to the familiar pattern, such as Drakes Fortune. Despite taking on the persona of Drake, you still fall short of it being totally realistic when you warp back to a checkpoint. On the contrary games such a Skyrim tried to change it a bit by spawning you back to where you saved last, and depending on that, it could cause you to go back quite a ways. However, this causes you to be much more involved in the game, working out strategy to defeat all the enemies that are surrounding you.

Don’t get me wrong I would much prefer to spawn at the exact point in which I died; however there was no greater feeling then finally beating Super Mario Bros. or Skyrim because you went through the same hardships as the character did. You felt every defeat as if you were the one falling to your death. While you were alive, you really worked at the game to make sure you didn’t die again, and eventually you got better and better until you could beat it. In games today you simply push your way through to make it to the next cut-scene and feel no benefit when you finally do because you have had infinite chances. It has simply become playing out a movie, with no consequence of failing, and personally I would much prefer to have the feeling of victory and the pain of defeat then simply walking through a game to see a movie play at the end.