The video game industry is one that honors its origins. Gameplay mechanics that were developed decades ago are still being used in modern games. Of them all, the ability for the player to continue the game after dying persists. From the coin-op development standpoint, it makes perfect sense: more money can be taken from the player by allowing him to keep playing. As long as the quarters flow, the player can do whatever he wants.

When a game is bought and brought home to play, however, that mechanic makes less sense. Included with the purchase price of the game is the tacit assumption that the player needn't worry about final death -- there will be a way to keep playing. Yet a character's death is still a factor. It's the most obvious way to tell the player that his play is inadequate to the task at hand. While there's nothing wrong with that type of feedback, it breaks immersion to watch the character die over and over again. There must be another way to create valuable negative feedback.

Depending on the genre of game, there are numerous alternatives to the penalty of death. For example, Final Fantasy 11, the MMO, takes away experience points from a character when it dies. Other MMOs offer similar deductions, but to character stats instead. World of Warcraft gives players the option of resurrection at the cost of debuffs for a duration of time and a concomitant portion of damage to weapons and armor. These are all fine as they go, but the character still dies. It seems an unnecessary additional effect, especially given the sometimes onerous task of having to "corpse run" back to the location of the character's death.

Mabinogi deals with defeat a little differently. Instead of dying outright, the player character is knocked out and goes unconscious. The player is then given the option to revive himself and lose experience points, be revived by another player, or be teleported back to the nearest town and revived there. This seems an acceptable alternative to outright death, as it maintains the fiction of the character's life.

What about games in which there is no consideration of experience points? Take the Legend of Zelda series, for example. Link's life is typically measured in number of hearts. With each hit he takes, his life is reduced by a portion of the total number of hearts he holds. When they're all gone, Link dies. However, he sometimes has the option of returning to life automatically if he possesses the proper item. In this case, death appears particularly arbitrary. If he can return to life once, he should be able to return any number of times; it is a magical world, after all.