> Ok, why is it a good technique? If you die you must have done something
> wrong, right? But does it enhance the enjoyment of the game? It seems to
> me that for dying to be meaningful there has to be some penalty for it.
> If you can just "undo" or restart where you left off, then you don't
> really feel that your character has died, only that you (the player) did
> the wrong thing and will have to try something else. So in that case, you're
> not really in the game environment any more - your character died, but you
> didn't. You don't identify with your character.
I do. It's part of the suspension of disbelief, kind of -- as part of
the internal game of identifying with the character, I feel like I've
made a fatal mistake when my character dies. Then I restart, but the
thread has been broken, and the "snap" is still in my kinesthetic
memory, if you see what I mean.
Probably I had to learn to do this, but hey, I had to learn to read, too.
It helps if the game does something to emphasize the break. Even
something as trivial as blanking the screen before presenting the
"restore/undo/quit" prompt.
> The only approaches that seem pleasing to me (that I can think of) are
> not being able to die at all (as in "Myst" for example),
As I've said many times before, I feel that this produces inferior
games. Just about every unlosable game I've played has given me less
enjoyment than a decent losable game. (The argument has hashed out many
times before too, so feel free not to engage in it if you don't want to.)
> and dying being
> permanent, but you get plenty of warning and can only die by behaving
> really recklessly.
This reduces to one of the previous cases. If they can save or restore,
it's not permanent death, it's just the Infocom solution where the
restore command includes running the game. If not, it's an incredibly
annoying variant where people have to go through the beginning of the
game a zillion times.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."