"Killjoy: How Inconsequential Death Took the Fun Out of Virtual Life" at the Escapist

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This intriguing article discusses the way in which death in RPGs has become nothing more than a minor inconvenience, instead of the fairly drastic penalty it is in life. In true pen & paper roleplaying, there are many other consequences to failure; the character is forced to play through them, and this adds to the roleplaying experience.

It begins, It's tense frustration, really; at best, anxiety. The feeling is familiar to most people who have played a single-player computer RPG recently. Leading your party down a dark and mysterious cavern, your finger is poised over F2 or F5 or whatever button quicksaves. Every so often, you tap the button, watch a progress bar move, the action pauses for a moment, and then you get back to the tunnel. Suddenly, a spike thrusts up from the floor. Your wizard is dead. So it's F3 or F7, a longer pause - "LOADING" emblazoned on the screen - a hang in the music, and then the wizard's alive again, a few feet farther back. Perhaps you're wondering how your versions of the indomitable Conan, Gandalf and Robin of Locksley started dying faster than Dirk the Daring. More likely, though, you're just muttering about why developers can't find a way to speed up quickloading. It's supposed to be quick, after all.

However, the more often the character dies in a game, the less tension is caused by a fear of it, trapping the player in a "save-kill cycle." Death, which began as the ultimate, game-ending penalty, is now nothing more than a hassle that lasts only as long as a game's loading time. Meanwhile, because players keep a book of dozens of saves for even a single dungeon, lesser penalties - such as injuries or broken items - are quickloaded away just as deaths are. The save-load mentality dictates that punishments are transitory, not lasting. As a result, few RPGs today would ever dream of permanently lowering a character's strength or taking two levels from him, as older games often did. Why bother, anyway, when it will be quickloaded away?

Roleplaying has always been a genre that revolves around overcoming heroic obstacles. What happens when you replace the element of danger with tedium, and how can the gaming industry recover from this flaw? Read the rest here.

 

I understand their point of view, but I don't see what other options game designers realistically have to implement death in games. Several CRPGs experimented with "true death". In Dungeon Hack you could enable that option, and once your character died that was it - all the save games for that character go away too. It was fun to try out, but no one would ever finished a 25-level dungeon with this enabled. Older CRPGs used to have something similar as well: being able to save in only specific places (Bard's Tale had just one!) and having to replay a substantial part of the game to get back to where you were. In some cases you could say it was just a limitation of the technology, but in others (like Dark Forces and Prince of Persia 2) it was clearly a design decision instead. And while it is more realistic than "the wizard's alive again, a few feet farther back", it's also much, much more frustrating.

 

Having played enough Japanese console RPGs, I'll note two things about the save point system:
1. There tends to be one before every major boss fight and/or area you can't easily leave,
2. You have to be trying very hard or never bothering to level for an ordinary monster encounter to kill you; if in doubt, run away, and once you're out of the battle screen they won't pursue.

They weren't talking about perma-death as an alternative to die-reload, though, they were talking about options like "Negotiate a surrender, lose gold" or "get knocked out, wake up a few levels/stat points lower" - something you won't like that isn't as, well, final. ICA=ICC and all The Dungeon Hack alternative does sound a bit extreme to me as well.