Some of you may remember when losing a life in a game would mean something along the lines of losing all of your powerups and going back several minutes or even worse, to start of the level. Hoarding lives was a necessity, if you wasted too many lives early on in a game there wasn't much point continuing. Game designers took pity on our frustration and made things easier by adding checkpoints. These were a real life saver for when you just spent a grueling 10 minutes getting to your current situation. In the last few years things have changed even further, with checkpoints becoming even softer, with players often keeping powerups and keeping some of the game state intact, such as no respawning of baddies in a cleared area.

Most of you would have noticed the trend toward 'soft killing' through the use of simple mechanics to resurrect players once they 'die'. For instance Prey had the spirit world, where you would reclaim energy from fallen spirits or Bioshock with it's revitalise chambers. Even more recently with the Prince of Persia, death doesn't even exist, with Elika saving you whenever you get into serious trouble. I suppose these mechanics came about because some people have felt that killing a player can be quite a jarring and frustrating experience and loses the flow of the game, particularly for the more casual player. The quick save feature of most games PC games and more sandbox gameplay may be also contributing to the changes being made.

Has this idea taken some of the fun out of games? I think so to a degree. Part of playing a game is for the challenge which is can expressed in terms of risk, where the ultimate risk may be considered losing a life. Is dying a game mechanic hang on from developers trying to chew up your spare change in an arcade? Probably, but it still feels like dying defines some sort of boundary to game play and can be use as an emotional tool that builds the feeling of tension and suspense within a game. I'm sure we can all recall accounts of barely making it through a game level with a tiny slither of your health bar remaining and how exciting it was. If you were immortal, you would lose this experience. Don't get me wrong I think they are a good evolution of gameplay, I just think that sometimes game developers need to be careful when treading the fine line between the tension, suspense and frustration of death and making things too easy.

At Rockethands we've considered several different death mechanics ourselves in our future titles. It becomes quite clear on discussions within the group that there are mixed feelings and nobody really knows exactly where they stand, just that it seems that dying doesn't work so well in some game genres any more, with dying seeming a little oldskool. It seems to depend on the style of game play, for instance an FPS without death seems a little pointless since survival is the key and the reward, but in an adventure dying is usually not a significant element, with exploration being the greatest reward.

What is going to become of the poor 1-up?