Games don't treat death like death
Lately I've been listening to a podcast called You are a storyteller. In one of the episodes they mention the idea that death is not the solution to a conflict in a story. They say that if one of the characters die, the conflict is still not solved. They are still enemies, it's just that one of them are dead.
Death in video games are quite a different thing though. You die and nothing change, it returns back to the same state it was in a few moments ago. It’s even less a solution to a conflict than in a common story, it just halts everything. Outside of games a story can continue without the main character. In a video game death is an error in the fabric of the universe. Which means death of the player doesn't really exist, it's just a punishment framed as death. The closest thing to actual death is if the player gets bored of the game and doesn't return, after that it's to actually lose something they won't see again (like a newly generated world).
The point of death in games is usually to motivate you to keep playing the way it was meant to be played. This is different from storytelling, where death means more than a characters ability to cross a spikey pit. Games that are completely focused on storytelling doesn't have this problem, because they're just like regular media. But it's almost always there if challenge is the focus.
In lots of games you die if you jump into a river. If you try to cross a river in Death Stranding you can get swept up and carried downstream. You either lose or damage your gear. Which leads to exciting moments when you try to scramble to save yourself and your stuff. It has this funny effect on me though where I seek out those moments, even though they are supposed to be bad. I like the chaos.
The beautiful thing about Getting Over It by Bennet Foddy, is that there's no literal death. You climb and fall down. It’s just your excitement and the risk of losing progress. Since there are no arbitrary checkpoints I find it’s easier to accept the progress I lose.
But sometimes death is necessary. If you never died in Spelunky, it wouldn't be the same experience. Your mistakes would just be minor inconveniences if they wouldn't bring you one step closer to losing some progress.
Death in video games is not really death, it's just making you turn back a page. The less you die the more it will seem like the real thing, probably because most of us have never died. If you get too used to it, the desired effect runs off. The effect we want is not for the player to be frustrated, it's to be thrilled before it happens.
The best video games don’t default to kill you as an outcome and when they use it they do it with intention. If things like falling into a trap, being discovered by an enemy or getting hit by a physics object result in something else than death, then systems and interactions imidietly become more interesting or meaningful.
In real life death is a heavy subject, it’s quite clumsy to use it so thoughtlessly to solve so many things. In the end it should be thought of as a metaphor, even more so than in normal stories. When you die again and again in Spelunky it's a death to your luck, a 100 stabs in your patience.
Death might not be the way to resolve a conflict in a story, in games maybe that saying should be something like "making the player retry is an opportunity for them to replay the good parts".
If the whole game is the good part, make them replay the whole thing.
