Permadeath

Permadeath means that when your character dies, the game is over. All progress, items, and experience is lost. The character is dead. For good. Most games don't have permadeath, and the few that do usually implement it in a "hardcore", non standard game play mode. Minecraft is a good example of this.

I've been thinking about permadeath and how it affects the perception of value. The value that the player places on the character, the world itself, and the value of the experiences had in that world.

Think about a Super Mario game. Lives are basically endless and extra lives easily obtained. If you die, you try the level again as many times as it takes to beat it. This means that dying doesn't matter. There are no consequences. The upside is that everyone can be a winner. The downside is that there isn't much sense of accomplishment when failure isn't even possible.

Mario is an extreme example, though. It goes out the way to avoid failure at all costs. Without a doubt, this works in Mario's favor. It would have never gotten the mass appeal that it has with something like the idea of permadeath. Even so, the original Super Mario Bros. was arguably a pretty difficult game, at least compared to more modern Mario games.

When I played Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS I realized that I was done with Mario. It was a fun game, but after beating it once I never played it again. It was just too easy and winning felt meaningless. I couldn't lose. No one could. So what's the point? Okay, maybe the point is just to have fun while it lasts, and it succeeds on some level. But without adversity, there can be no sense of achievement. No sense of investment in the game. No replayability. No point.

But that's Mario. The concept of "hard" has never really been a thing in Mario. Even in notoriously hardcore, old school MMORPG Everquest, there was no permadeath. By today's standards, dying in Everquest was still pretty brutal. Experience was lost (you could even de-level), your corpse was left in the spot where you died, with all items on it, and you respawned naked and alone. Then you had to go retrieve the items from your corpse.

I once died in a place I never should have been. Running screaming into the depths of a castle way above my level. I lost all of my items because it was impossible for me to get back to my corpse alive. Oh, I didn't mention that after 7 days corpses would decay along with all the items on them, disappearing from the world forever.

However, it was this reason underlying every battle or venture into the unknown that gave it all such a sense of weight. Dying mattered. The consequences were real. And that made coming out of bad situations alive more meaningful. It added to the sense of immersion in the world, and the sense of accomplishment.

Permadeath probably had no place in Everquest either. Losing a character that you may have invested years in wouldn't feel right, and no one would like that. So, where does permadeath fit, and does it have a place in any game?

I don't know. I like thinking about it. It's kind of like an extra puzzle piece that doesn't fit anywhere. Or a rare item that you can't equip, and it doesn't seem to be used in any quest.

You know it must be important, but it seems useless. Most people throw it away because it just takes up inventory space. No one knows what it's for but you keep it anyway.

Just in case.