Games have the hardest time when it comes to creation. If you get to a word you don’t understand in a book, the book doesn’t close until you find a dictionary. For a game, the players ability is what drives the narrative. You can literally play a game that you CANNOT beat. I’m pretty sure my mother could never get through Halo CE if she were ever to try. But even someone who can’t read could have the story told to them, and unless you are blind you can get through a movie. You might not pick up on the subtext of either of these mediums to truly “get” the piece, but you’d have a rudimentary understanding of it. That’s what easier difficulty levels afford us.

I was so excited for Heavy Rain when you could lose characters at any time. I came close to buying a PS3 for that game. But the inconsequentiality of it all keeps me on my PC.

Since I was just reading your article on Starcraft I’ll use an example from SC2. There are a few choices you get to make as you go along the story line, because, of course, making choices is cool! At least these weren’t tied to a morality mechanic… Anyways, each choice changes the game a bit, but they all resolve in your favour. The only way you should be making these choices is due to how you want the next missions to play out. But other than that they’re meaningless. Unknowable information comes to the fore and it turns out, hey, great choice!

I’m fine with games putting check points after each turn. As long as they give me an option to turn it off. Diablo II certainly did it well. It’d be hard to make a game that you could sell to everyone if you permanently died while you were trying to get the hang of the game.

I think achievements can play a role here. If the game says you’ll get a reward for beating the game in under 3 hours without dying, you know it’s possible. This gives you something to shoot for and notoriety if you do it. I say, give us the speed runs and the hardcore modes. Always.

Games like Mass Effect 2 claim that the story develops based on decisions your character makes, when in truth its more like a mad-lib where you toss in names and verbs.

Video games are like interactive storybooks for me, and I would love to see truth death for all characters in every game, but that would require an extreme amount of hardware power since the storyline of the entire game could be changed if key character was killed too early on. It would require game designers to put a lot more effort into the actual game and not what it looks like.

I imagine we’ll be waiting another 10-20 years before true death is in out vidya.

Spelunky is an amalgamation of Roguelikes — with the typical permadeath and random level generation — and action platformers. With a strict time limit (an instakill monster spawns in almost each of the 16 stages after 2.5 minutes, and there’s a prize for beating the whole thing in under 10 minutes) each run doesn’t take much of a time investment, so every moment becomes more valuable as you play it. And yet, as soon as a Yeti bounces you off a wall into a set of spikes, you want to dive right back in.

The character dies, but the player gains the experience necessary to improve at the game and eventually win.