Dying in Video Games

Death.  The great leveller.  We’re all going to die.  Then eventually the whole universe will. As a player of games, we sort-of die all the time.  Its the game’s way of saying – epic fail:

Death is everywhere in videogames, a colloquial representation of failure. From the earliest days, you were given three “lives” to try and best the patterns of enemies and obstacles between you and the goal. Every lapse in reflex, memory, or reason led to death in the form of an obliterated pixel cloud radiating outwards. You did something wrong, it says. Pac-Man dies, Mario dies, Marcus Fenix dies, Gordon Freeman dies, Cloud dies, and even Sims can die.

This video says it all really: