Death In Video Games Research Paper

To many people, death is the ultimate end, when nothing continues, and the book of life closes. However, in the majority of video games, death is a failure state. Due to the primarily action-focused nature of games, death has served as a failure-state for thousands of games, from Mortal Combat to Pac Man. The question is, how do games use death, beyond that of a failure state? To examine, we’ll see an extremely common method seen in FPS’s, such as Doom or Wolfenstein the New Order, a newer method in Dark Souls, and one of the earliest methods of dealing with death through a more modern title, FTL: Faster than Light.
To begin with, we’ll start with an examination of what a videogame is: A videogame uses interactive elements to create either …show more content…
Dark Souls uses death, with overcoming death being a core theme of the series, to create tension and suspense, rather than discourage certain methods of play. When you die in dark souls, your Souls (The currency of the game, used for nearly everything) is dropped on the ground, and should you die again, everything you have done is at risk of being lost. So you must move forward unerringly, to reclaim your fallen souls, and overcome that you died to, and overcome the death given. It uses it’s death system to encourage one to continue playing and to not give up, which (despite its bleak tone) is one of the core themes of the series, while also building …show more content…
Setting fire to opposing ships med bays, knowing missiles travel slower than plasma blasts, ion blasts slower than that, and the use of venting oxygen to asphyxiate boarding crew, the value in upgrading your doors, and learning to time attacks together are not something you would learn from the very beginning. Through this method, the improvement in the player 's own skill provides an overarching sense of progression and accomplishment as they see their opponents peppered with lazers. The practice gained from the many runs also ensure proficiency in the skill, as the player slowly begins to feel less like a player of a game. The player begins to feel like the captain of a star ship, trudging their way through space to serve the federation for the good of all mankind. It’s a feeling that is difficult to replicate through a book or a movie, and requires a lot of player investment, but it’s a wonderful feeling,