About Game Design

First of all, I’d like to distinguish between “I died”, as in “Mario ran into a funny turtle and did a crazy animation and fell off the screen”, and “I died” as in “an alien with twelve rows of teeth sucked out my brain and then bit my head off”.

In the first case, I failed and most likely my flow was broken, but everything that happened was well within the boundaries of the Mario universe. My experience was disrupted a bit, but the immersion wasn’t broken. There’s little to fix here.
In the second case, immersion has just taken a severe hit. I DIED! How horrible! I guess I should be shaken. Oh, wait – I didn’t. I just re-spawned at the latest checkpoint. Sooo… why was it necessary to decapitate my avatar again?

Keeping the universe intact

In a game of Super Mario World, many players may say things like “I just died 50 times on level 3”, but what most actually mean is “I just failed 50 times on level 3”. Even though they apparently “died” and were reborn shortly after, the immersion wasn’t truly destroyed. Little harm was done. Mario lives on. That’s just how the world of the plumber works.
For the more hardcore players, the mechanic is too transparent to actually represent death, since the game obviously continues, and for the more casual ones – who are positively oblivious to game mechanics – the animation just doesn’t represent death either.

There is no actual “death” involved here; it is just a figure of speech. Thus what needs to be handled is more accurately “failure”, not “death”. So if you want to keep the player playing and in a positive mindset, try telling him “you have not succeeded (yet)” instead of “you failed”. That should be less of a disruption and actually help the player feel and succeed better.

… or not

However, if the setting of the game is so realistic that it involves what can clearly be visually and acoustically identified as “true tragic death in that universe”, things are different.

With the casual players you will face the problem that they will be shocked, as they have just “died” instead of failed, which is something that few other games (e.g. board games, or sports) ever do to them.

Whatever you did to get them playing such a game in the first place, most likely they won’t be too eager to continue at that point, since most people (speaking of the general population) don’t play games to experience “dying” in the first place – they came for fun and entertainment. So unless conveying this message once was your goal in the first place, or your game is about dying instead of about kicking butt, you are now officially in trouble.
Also, as a side note, most forms of death probably aren’t exactly pleasing, so in addition to being shocked they will most likely be disgusted as well because of their expectations being to completely violated, and will walk away with a less-than-positive picture of video games.

For the hardcore players you will face a completely different problem: Since they know most genre’s mechanics inside-out, in order to cause the feeling of “death” instead of simply “failure”, the sensation will have to be so very strong that you will have real problems conveying it – especially since most gamers probably haven’t experienced real biological near-death yet and thus have nothing to compare the game’s equivalent to. The permanent death of a character that the player leveled for weeks, or even months, might come close, but will probably not suffice.

That leaves us with the question of why to include “death” – especially the frequent kind – in the first place, if not for audio-visual impressiveness or shock-factor (which you might deem an appropriate reason). In most cases I suspect the reason may be trying to stay true to the universe to save immersion, since there is very little actually “cool” for the player about being killed, so it can hardly be for the player’s enjoyment.

But let’s face it: the immersion is gone in most cases anyway. “You just died! Oh, wait, you didn’t. Oops.” How many more effective ways to kill the illusion can you think of?

Some ways to fix it

If you definitely want to stick with the immersion-oriented solution, I would recommend trying something less jarringly disruptive. Recent games have demonstrated realistic and “real-world-fitting”, but far less drastic ways of the player becoming incapacitated, like falling “unconscious”. Of course it’s still quite a stretch, but at least not THAT bad.
Many others have introduced new and unrealistic, but relatively immersion-friendly representations for stopping the action and recovering balance, like rewinding time in Prince of Persia, re-tuning into memories in Assassin’s Creed or spawning at a Vita Chamber in Bioshock.

Such kinds of “incapacitating” the player, in conjunction with giving him the information that the mission has failed already anyway (e.g. a radio transmission, or the enemy triumphing loudly), thus removes the need to actually take the immersion-threatening action any further.

The other way of preventing the immersion break is simply keeping the player alive and rocking for longer in the first place. There are lots of ways to keep the balance from spiraling out of control, making the player fight first against the setback and afterwards for a comeback. Recent first-person shooters have included mechanics like de-saturating the screen completely, making continuing to fight rather difficult, but running away to recover still quite feasible.

So if it is your plan to portray a relatively real-life-like universe, please don’t accidentally destroy it while actually trying to keep intact.
For those of you who are working with one of the more crazy settings out there, rest assured that even though it’s a lot of work to create something fresh and consistent yet transparent, there are also quite a few things that just won’t cause you as much of a headache as they would have to somebody working on “Super-Realistic Shooter 3”.