pixel for a thought: you only have one life

A few weeks ago, just before I headed out on a long-distance trip, I checked my Facebook and my texts and discovered that a friend my age had abruptly died in a house fire only a few hours earlier. She and I weren't particularly close, but I had known her for several years and we would hang out sometimes at various community activities and parties. I had last seen her just a few weeks prior to this sudden incident. She was lively, eccentric, well equipped with the sarcastic comebacks but sensitive enough to offer a smile or a hug when someone needed the sympathy. A very decent person, like everyone else in the world (whether they want to admit it or not), whose death came entirely unexpectedly and prematurely.

I couldn't cancel the trip for professional reasons, not to mention I thought the distance away from the impending social drama and instant Internet access would give me enough space and time for the shock to settle. A few hours later I had recovered, contenting myself with a few critical realizations:

• Everything, and everyone, has a time and a place and a purpose. Once physically gone, their purposes have been fulfilled.
• Life is now. Living means enjoying the moments and the people who are there with you.
• I personally believe in an afterlife/the underworld/Aslan's country/the Celestial Temple. Remember that we are only one step away between here and there.

As I thought more about these ideas, my thoughts abruptly turned to a (very unfinished and cliche) zombie FPS game I had designed and written for a scriptwriting contest back in April. Specifically, I remembered one of the mechanics I established in the design document regarding player-character death: when the PC's health is completely drained, if they are fighting with others an NPC will drag his or her unconscious body to safety, and the player is given another opportunity to try the mission again with recovered health. However, if the PC loses consciousness during a solo encounter, or a particularly critical mission, the entire game may end in the PC's death, or at the very least the player's narrative experience will be altered somewhat significantly (i.e. the mission fails and the team has to evacuate a game location earlier than designed). Given the game's somewhat real-world grounding, I thought it most realistic and naturally expected that if the PC dies, it's literally the end of the line.

Please don't misunderstand me. Whenever we choose to play a game, especially one from the casual market, we're usually looking for a quick distraction, a chance to socialize with friends, or just something fun to kill the time. We're not necessarily looking for a "real-life" simulation; if anything, we play video games to temporarily escape the absurd monotony or pain that life's pushed onto our shoulders. Besides, I'm one of those people who's strangely and horribly clumsy at Super Mario Bros. that I honestly appreciate the extra lives and encouraging words "try again."

But while the graphics are getting even more photo-realistic and the stories grow ever more psychologically complex and parents and lawyers stay persistently attached to the theory that video games are treating life flippantly—well, if opponents in Call of Duty: Black Ops can be dismissed with just a bullet or two, shouldn't the PC/protagonist be just as subject to the rules of mortality? We play Pandemic II safely behind a mastermind's computer lab, but what's to say that "you" couldn't just as easily get infected with your own airborne, vaccine-proof, climate-indifferent virus? It'd certainly be an interesting twist for a third edition if the creators ever decided to make one.

I don't think this ultra-realism works for all games by any means, and it's especially harder to justify in casual game design, because the last thing any designer wants to do is scare away new players, no matter that they need to overcome their impatience or acquire faster reflexes or simply pull up a walkthrough on YouTube. But we also can't deny that death is real and often painful, not just for the victim but especially for the people who are still alive. By treating the very pertinent subject of PC or even NPC death more seriously in games, the player grows a bit less daredevil, a bit more duly thoughtful, and eventually much more committed to his or her character and the game itself.