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<\/a>Experiments with bombs take place in the background. The force of the explosion causes the boy’s body to be flung like a ragdoll. It’s gruesome, to say the least.<\/p>\nThere is this simple fact: death loses its gravitas, its solemnity, when it comes packaged with a quick restart. Even when the punishment for dying is severe (a loss of all of your accumulated gear a la Runescape<\/i>, or a loss of all of your souls a la Dark Souls<\/i>), the emotions felt by the player often amount to frustration. It does not feel like a death; it is seemingly impossible to generate the affect of filmic or novelistic narratives. Tocci does allude to the famous Final Fantasy VII <\/i>death scene. While this sequence proverbially tugs at the player\u2019s heartstrings, the problem remains that, assuming the player has failed previously, those deaths still has not meant much to player other than as a source of frustration. Certain deaths are given more weight than others, but the ones that matter appear to be those the developer has control over. But if you make the game too easy so that the player does not experience an \u2018unemotional\u2019 or trivialized death, would the game be any fun?<\/p>\n
While I did not find this article prior to writing my close play of Inside<\/i>, I believe my paper provides an example of a game that works to infuse death with player pain. Inside<\/i>, despite its trial-and-error mechanic, subverts the trivialization of death, countering the problem Tocci finds in many games. I won\u2019t go into detail explaining how Playdead imbues affect and genuine suffering in their player-character\u2019s deaths as I have already done that in my close play. But even in the case of Inside<\/i>, if the player dies enough, he\/she–I imagine–beings to be desensitized with the protagonist\u2019s deaths. I end my post here still pondering what the best balance is.<\/p>\n