Suffice to say that I'm extremely lucky to live in the UK and have my medical needs met by Britain's greatest post-war achievement, the NHS. Which, despite the attempts of successive governments to 'reform it' (code for privatisation) it into a machine for that puts generating profits for their corporate sponsors above patient care, continues to deliver universal health care based on need and not ability to pay to everyone in the UK.
A stark contrast to some other countries where, assuming I could afford medical insurance in the first place, I'm be reaching the point where my policy would cancelled or premiums raised to unaffordable levels to get me off the books. So whatever else happens I know my house won't be repossessed to pay for treatment or my family left bankrupt and homeless, nor the medical staff charged with my care dumping my on the street outside a 'public' hospital when my credit card's declined. If you live in the UK and care about the NHS I'd suggest supporting a group like 38 Degrees and not letting it become one of those things you only miss when its gone, because one day we're all going to need it no matter now wealthy or healthy we think we are now.
Anyway back to the main topic of my blog death in video games. Most gamers will tell you that in games death is seldom fatal, it's usually just a minor setback, that sees you respawn at the last checkpoint perhaps minus a few items that have be reclaimed or you restart the level minus any power-ups you acquired along the way. However, as Wired recently reported, one indie game studio Robot Loves Kitty is taking video game death to a whole new level in their upcoming PC game Upsilon Circuit. What they call perma-permadeath means that once you die in game you can never play again.
It's certainly an interesting business model, I can't imagine most people rushing to buy a game you can only play once. The general consensus among gamers, particularly those of us old enough to remember the birth of the industry back in the 1980's, is that games have been getting shorter, easier to complete and harder to die in. Which, given that most triple AAA titles seem to have budgets bigger than some countries these days, is hardly surprising as the industry needs you to keep buying to fund the next big thing.
I could of course be really glib and tell you it's art imitating life, but whether or not video games are art is whole new topic. If your interested I'd suggest the PS2 games ICO and Shadow of the Colossus as a starting point.
Whatever you think it's certainly a novel concept. An online Role Playing Game (RPG) where eight players are split at random into two teams of four, watched by thousands of others, must compete in an arena full of monsters and traps for EXP to level up their characters. Kotaku have some footage of game play. In some ways it harks back to the epic gladiatorial contests of the Roman Empire. The audience can help or hinder their favourite characters by tossing gifts or obstacles their way and ultimately decide how EXP is spent and which characters get to level-up. Will you become the champion of the arena or EXP fodder to be ground into the dirt? The catch is of course that whenever one of the players dies an audience member is selected at random to take their place and can suddenly find themselves being the one given the thumbs down by the audience. I think If I play I'm going to call my character Spartacus.
Permadeath is not a new concept in video games, being the death of a character that you cannot play as again, forcing you to resume the game with a new character. ZombieU makes you to select a new character when you die and reclaim lost items from your previous character who is now a zombie you must kill and XCOM: Enemy Unknown replaces your battle hardened veterans with inexperienced rookies when they die.
But Kitty Loves Robot are now claiming “The only way we can go a step up from this is if we actually start killing the contestants in real life.” Which suggests you wouldn't want to spend too much time in a darkened room with their developers. Who've probably spent two much time watching films like Hunger Games and Running Man.
However there is a concept know as Simulation hypothesis which suggest that neither we nor the universe we inhabit is real, but simply a vast and complex computer simulation of which we are all but one very small part. There is of course a long philosophical tradition dating back at least a far Ancient Greece and Plato that reality is little more than an illusion. Today we have increasingly complex and powerful computer models for forecasting weather, modelling the spread of diseases and climate change. So perhaps we're all just part of a post-human civilizations simulation of the past and God is just the ultimate systems admin or computer programmer? Or perhaps like Upsilon Circuit we're the post-human equivalent of a video game and simply the avatars of the players?