I'll be perfectly honest...I found this article to be not only pointless, but full of false ideas as well. I'd rather read Elements of Style all over again than

I'll be perfectly honest...I found this article to be not only pointless, but full of false ideas as well. I'd rather read Elements of Style all over again than read that poor excuse of an essay. One thing really irked me...the author states that initially "...death was a failure state because it required little explanation and was easy to quantify from a programming and visual standpoint." Bullshit. Death is a failure state because it's a natural mode of failure for a hero on an adventure trying to fight off a horde of koopas/moblins/thugs/zombies/aliens/etc. Developers used death not as an easy way to signify failure, but as a sensible way to signify failure. Sure, he can bring up games like Super Dodge Ball to illustrate his point that the mechanism of death was sometimes forced into the game to convey failure scenarios, but then what about games like Duck Hunt, Sim City, and Super Tecmo Bowl? In not one of those games did your avatar 'die' in any failure scenario. Failure was denoted in a multitude of other ways in those games.