In These Games, Death Is Forever, and That’s Awesome

“Continue?”

Nearly anyone who has played a videogame has seen that word appear on the screen after their character “dies.” We know that death is just temporary, that another life is just a magic mushroom away. But as games become more and more realistic, some designers are saying this relic from the arcade era has overstayed its welcome.

Tens of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of labor are spent to enhance the war-like realism of games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II through lifelike graphics and weaponry that feels true-to-life.

But it’s hard to call a war game “realistic” when the soldiers magically resurrect after being shot in the head.

Jake Solomon, lead designer of the strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, believes that if death in games is to have any meaning, it has to be as irrevocable as the real thing.

“Permanent death brings real consequences to the games we play,” said Solomon in an e-mail. “It evokes dread and a real sense of loss in players, because it’s something that they don’t want and they can’t undo once it has happened.”

In XCOM the player controls a squad of powerful soldiers that they train up throughout the game. If a soldier dies in battle, he or she is gone forever. Even though XCOM involves a fantastical sci-fi alien invasion scenario, the fear of losing a valuable character is vastly more thrilling than any contemporary war game in which death has no repercussions.

“It’s authentic,” Solomon said. “It’s real. Those emotions are real. The loss is real. The challenge that arises out of that loss is real. In some way, that makes the game real.”

“Permadeath” has been growing in popularity among game designers in recent years. Although it can take different forms depending on which game you’re playing, the message is always the same: Mistakes have consequences.

Some games feature extra modes in which the player can only die once before being forced to restart the game (Diablo 3, Dead Space 2, Minecraft). In other games, permadeath is the only way: If a player dies, he starts over with a new character that can attempt to retrieve their previous avatar’s valuable equipment from the spot they died, which tends to be a pretty scary place (DayZ, ZombiU, Dark Souls.) There was even an experimental iPhone game called One Single Life that could never be played again after the first time the player died.

Before the advent of memory cards and hard drives that allowed players to save and restart games in progress, all death in games was permanent. You had three Pac-Men, and once they were gone, there was no other choice but to start over. When players gained the ability to put a checkpoint at the beginning of a level and try it over and over until they succeeded, designers had to start making the games more complicated, usually with elaborate storylines that were meant to be played through, not restarted over and over.

The downside of strong narratives, Solomon said, is that they’re usually a clue to players that the game’s hero will never be in mortal danger.

“If you have a hero character at the heart of your narrative, and you have 10 hours of story designed around that character, there is no conceivable way for that character to die,” said Solomon. “Unfortunately, the player knows that too. And so they know that the environment that you’ve created is not authentic. … They know they’re not going to die. The whole point of the experience is to prop the player up until the final cutscene plays.”

The games today that use permadeath as a feature are something of a hybrid of old and new. They have more storyline than Pac-Man but the emphasis is not on a heavily scripted Hollywood-style narrative. Rather, the game’s fictional worlds set the scene, establish a strong sense of place, but give the players more leeway to imagine their own personal stories.

“My desire was to tap into real human emotions,” said Dean Hall, designer of DayZ, a zombie apocalypse-themed modification for a PC shooter game called ARMA 2.

Hall said in an e-mail that permadeath makes players use “emotional reasoning,” rather than logic, to sort out problems. Players start to think with their hearts. They think about all the time they’ve invested to get where they are, and whether or not they’re willing to risk everything when they roll the dice.

In DayZ, once your character dies, that’s it — you have to start over again with a new survivor. Other players can kill you just as easily as the zombies can. This has led to bizarre scenarios, such as players reporting that they were taken hostage and forced to run missions for other players at gunpoint.

It’s unlikely we’ll see permadeath become common in big-budget games, said Hall.

“Videogame budgets are increasingly more expensive for the big studios; they can no longer afford failure, and need to guarantee they can ship at least [500,000] products in order to cover costs,” said Hall. “Permadeath and the aspects that come with it are very risky for your product.” Some players might like the challenges, but others might get very upset that they aren’t allowed to fail without consequence. If the latter group is larger, that would result in major lost sales.

Because of this, Solomon said that right now the industry’s focus is still on narrative games like Haloand Gears of War, so big-budget permadeath games are unlikely to become widespread in the short term. However, the growing popularity of permadeath over the past couple of years gives him hope for the future.

“I do believe that permanent death and real consequences are going to find their way into the toolbox of more game designers going forward,” Solomon said. “And that’s nothing but good news for all of us.”