I recently heard Maddy Myers of Polygon.com and Triple Click fame refer to everyone’s favorite red-hatted plumber as “the immortal being that is Mario.” In Mario’s most recent appearance on our screens and in our hearts, the 2D hit Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Mario’s new voice actor Kevin Afghani embodies the veracity of Myers’ statement by actually laughing when he misses a jump and plummets to his death. The choice is strange, cute, and overwhelmingly true to classic Mario form. It got me thinking about death in video games, from the realistic rendering of the Call of Duty: Black Ops multiplayer matches I played on my PS3 in middle school all the way to the other side of the spectrum, to Mario, Kirby, and crew. Does death hold meaning in video games, or is it just a design choice to produce pleasing friction for players? And does gaming change our perception of death for better or worse? The glaring truth of the matter is that us humans will never respawn. How does that knowledge influence the way we play?

Let’s first imagine a reality in which our games mirrored what it was like to really die. You mistime one parry, misjudge one of Mario’s jumps, forget to look in that shadowy corner of the map where an annoying player on the other end of the network has been camping during the entire match, and you pass away. Your game goes black. It’s corrupted, unplayable, for your character has – in fact – ceased to exist. Perhaps in multiplayer games and/or those with faceless main characters, you would be able to re-enter from the home screen, but all your progress would be lost. Meanwhile, in games like Mario and other branded franchises, your game’s protagonist would be deceased. You’d either have to buy another copy or wait for the next iteration of the series, redefining permadeath in video games for the rest of time. Not great marketing, if you ask me, but gaming sure would feel a lot more lofty. A grounded and grave experience as living sometimes is and has to be. We would have far fewer players in this world, and those who did play would likely believe in themselves enough to make it to the end. Otherwise, why invest in an object that is only going to become unplayable with one mistake? And when a player did make that fatal mistake, they would likely feel an actual sense of grief, for the loss of their progress, monetary investment, and time in a thing that is now, effectively, nothing. 

You might be thinking that my thought experiment above is ludicrous. That video games would not exist if they had to be designed in such a way. But we exist, and that is our reality. One grave mistake and all is lost for us humans. However, the majority of us live a life so removed from the gravity of death that we’re able to abstract and often completely ignore its consequences. In fact, we are advised not to dwell too much on death, as it is a supposed sign of poor mental health and can cause us to be distracted from living our lives to their “fullest.” Video games mirror this ethos in the way they handle death as a minor setback, an inconvenience to challenge players to learn the rules and rhythms of the world they’re entering when they play. That said, some of the most critically acclaimed games in our canon are those that treat death with more gravity than others. FromSoftware’s coining of the entire Souls-Like genre hinges upon mechanics that make death meaningful in its negative consequences, and people can’t seem to get enough. That said, these games also trivialize death itself by their designers’ decision to make it always close at hand and create situations where characters can die in goofy ways, thus spawning an entire genre of YouTube videos and memes with titles like: “I fell in a hole and got killed by cursed frogs.”

So, yes. Death holds meaning in video games, but that meaning often only serves to reinforce the way we trivialize aging and dying in modern life, as something that happens to other people and will eventually happen to us, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so what’s the point in worrying? The point in worrying, my friends, is that thinking about and understanding one’s relationship to real death has the potential to enrich the experience of living. Staring at the sometimes horrific truth that we’ll all one day be dust makes each day we spend alive feel full of color. It makes a hug a salve, a milestone accomplishment a marker in living growth, a meaningful connection with a friend a light to guide the way in darkness. 

Gaming unintentionally has the potential to be ruinous by reinforcing harmful notions of death as an outside phenomenon that happens to us rather than what it actually is: one part of a living, breathing cycle that we participate in as organisms bound to rise and shine and fall. If we made a practice of holding death and what it means for us as people closer when we chose to game, it could make the investment of our time feel all the more meaningful. Death in games could become a healthy lens through which to interrogate the ways we attempt to get to know others and ourselves as beings who share at least two things in common: the certainty of birth (because we’re here) and dying (because it happens to us all). However, such a radical reevaluation of play would beg a more thoughtful generation of players willing to engage with games as texts, as pieces of art rather than just rowdy, hedonistic playgrounds. 

This transition, though, would mean that dying in Call of Duty might be as satisfying as an elite Kill:Death ratio. Maybe, then, we could actually engage in discourse surrounding first person shooters and their potential influence on gun violence in the United States. Maybe, then, perceptions of gamers and gaming would take on a new angle: one of the potential for measured thought within our demographic alongside the classic image of a caffeine-addled, late night romp for one. Perhaps then Mario and Mercy would bring about similar thoughts of what self-preservation means in a simulated world of color-blasted obstacles and what, if anything, is worth taking away from such an experience. Something tells me we’re light years away from a world in which this is possible, but I wouldn’t be writing about games if I didn’t love to dream.

In the meantime, during your next respawn opportunity, I encourage you to pause for a second and think about what such a common mechanic means for us as creatures prone to fear death. Is it a crutch or a boon? A tonic or a teardown? And how can we elevate the ubiquity of such a commonly applied design technique in games with the reflection it deserves? Perhaps you’re the one to start gaming’s death revolution, in which players use the moment in between failure and their impending second chance to reflect upon the value of being given one in the first place and how games can help set us on the journey toward a more fulfilling life.