Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter. — Welcome to the *Souls* series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

Thanks for reading, everybody. Please share and send feedback, if you’re so inclined.