Dying in Games

"Dying in real life is - religious beliefs aside - the end, the last event you'll take part in. Not so in computer games, where it's never worse than briefly infuriating. In World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) that 8.5 million people play every day, your death just means you have to spend several minutes trekking back to the point at which you died. And your avatar is temporarily weakened. It's an inconvenience. [...] There are bigger questions, of course. In real life, death is more than an annoyance. So should games reflect real life? Or should we redefine "dying" in the context of games? Isn't it more like tennis, where you can lose a set but go on to win the game? Or are there bigger lessons to be learned from games? (Kate Bevan, The Guardian)

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