Death in videogames is, oddly, opposite to death in real life. In real life, we prefer to avoid things that can kill us, for obvious reasons. In video games, t

Death in videogames is, oddly, opposite to death in real life. In real life, we prefer to avoid things that can kill us, for obvious reasons. In video games, the effect of death is to keep people playing, not just in an abstract "making things interesting" sense, but in a measurable Skinnerian sort of way. Also, one of the reasons why 1980s arcade and NES games were so brutally, unforgivingly difficult (with "no continues" the norm rather than exception) was to keep people playing. The oldest games weren't actually very big: the original Dragon Quest 1 was under 64 kB. Constantly killing the player (with no continues) allowed a game that might take 30 minutes for a skilled player to take 20-40 hours for a beginner. By the time someone could actually win one of these games, they had a deep expertise and that shared knowledge was enough to create cultures around these games, which made them both "viral" in their time and lasting into ours. It's odd to think that something we aggressively avoid in real life was, in no uncertain terms, a killer (pun not intended) feature for video games.