Now, obviously RPGs take a radically different view of a game's reality than an FPS does. You might call it a top-down, deity-level viewpoint, wherein the more important facets of a character's makeup are expressed as mathematical measurements. So your character's health might be a seemingly arbitrary integer, such as 300, and this reduces with each hit taken until it reaches zero, which equals death. What's odd about this method of thinking, is that it includes the concept of Leveling.

When you Level your character, all of your statistics rise in value, including your health. You might go from 300 to 350, and that becomes the new base level. This bears almost no relation to reality at all, if you consider "health" as an approximate value between complete health and death. How can someone get more health? Either you're completely healthy or you're varying levels of wounded/sick. Again, this isn't complaining, it's an attempt to understand. I personally enjoy the process of leveling up -- the "ding", as World of Warcraft players call it -- there's a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that goes along with it. But it's one of those things you just have to accept with a shrug of the shoulders: a purely video game-specific contrivance.

Other game conventions are equally odd. Take, for example, any of the Zelda games, where Link will take a hit and suddenly begin to blink for a few seconds, during which time he's completely invulnerable to harm. If only this pertained to our real lives! I understand and appreciate the idea -- you've just experienced sudden trauma and need a quick breather to get your head together, sure, why not? And I can almost construct a rationalization, given the fantasy setting of the world. This convention extends to scores, of not hundreds of video games, however, and has now grown into one of those arcade staples where it's just what it is, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And on those rare occasions when a developer decides to go for it, the results are uneven. Case in point: Bushido Blade. This Playstation samurai combat game was justifiably famous/infamous for instituting a one-hit kill mechanic, which you'd think was an obvious result of a meeting between two homicidal warriors wielding sharpened pieces of metal. The problem was that while pulling off the one-hit kill was a matter of working up the required skill, your character was also vulnerable to the attack, and there are few things more frustrating than getting taken out with one hit.

Wherever your allegiance lies on the continuum of damage management, I hope we can all agree that the meta-level idea of constructing a virtual life complete with the ability to end it is kind of a kooky idea. Obviously there's no right or wrong way to do things, just "fun" and "more/less fun". Ultimately, you'll decide for yourself whether you can overlook an arbitrary-seeming mechanic for the sake of the gameplay it supports. Maybe one day we'll reach a level of sophistication with our simulated worlds that approaches our real lives, and on that day we might just discover the true meaning of life.