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This paper investigates the well-known problem of player death in games, providing both thrilling experiences and frustrations of replaying the same events repeatedly. The scope is limited to avatar-based, single-player games to strengthen the focus and avoid areas of ambiguity.
The paper tries to form a rough typology on major tendencies of player death implementations in games, presenting four models: the Arcade, Classic, Save/Load and Checkpoint Model.
It also discusses exactly how the concept of player death supports the game structure, balancing the difficulty, and uses its metaphoric strengths to provide both intensity and anxiety.
Furthermore, the paper investigates how exactly player death breaks the illusion of player agency by ignoring and erasing the record of agency, and how this can be avoided by eliminating player death altogether.
Alternatively, the game must utilize a different set of punishments, acknowledge the actual avatar death in the game world and provide cues of danger to enforce the idea and fear of player death.