The Disappeared

When my kids were younger I introduced a small fiction about the fate of avatars and monsters I encountered in games.  They did not die, I did not kill them, they just disappeared.  Intended as a gentler exile, it was also a softer verb that blurred cause and effect...

As my kids have grown older the fiction has become merely convention.  "Dad, don't kill that one... err, *disappear* that one."  I should point out that they don't play MMOGs.  They play other games.   But they sometimes catch me playing. This separation likely strengthens their willingness to participate in this bit of decorum.

To disappear still seems to me apt to describe the process of exiling critters of MMOGs: so lacking they often seem of narrative substance... Or maybe it is just that whatever substance they had has become diluted by our endless marches through their fields shedding their carcasses...

How quickly their carcasses tidy themselves after us!  In the early days of the first Everquest I thought carcasses lingerered longer than they now seem to.  I could be wrong.  Places now seem to move players along more quickly, corpses at times seem to jump up into life when you turn around.  No respect for the dead, none.

Would we be better served if in the carnival of our virtual worlds the NPCs could lay a stronger fictional claim to life and death? 

For a moment a while back I managed to entertain my sons by "toasting hares."  In World of Warcraft hares are a first level creature that yields a pathetic squeal when subject to a fiery spell.  My daughter put an end to this: "it is horrible..."

While the virtual frogs at which we pelt stones can only disappear, how do we reflect against their waters?

Comments

[Michael Chui]

1.

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

-- Tempest, William Shakespeare, IV.i
http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/tempest/8/

[Matt V]

2.

Death, be it that of a player or NPC, is such an unexplored aspect of gaming. By eliminating the permanence of death and substituting, at most, the slight inconvenience of a time out or a stat loss, game cultures lose many of the social constraints that the "real world" has to offer. How many idiotic actions would be prevented if a player knew that death was the end? I would love to see an experimental WoW server, call it the Reaper, where players were always flagged, but PvP death was permanent. One death and you are a spirit in the ether forever. I think a lot could be learned from player interactions on such a server.
Of course, a game built with death as a true feature would be better. Have any MMORPGs used reincarnation yet? Perhaps you play one avatar until death and then must create a new one, with only the barest remnant of old game stats to draw on. Starting fresh, but not as fresh as a purely new player.

[Richard Bartle]

3.

Matt V>I would love to see an experimental WoW server, call it the Reaper, where players were always flagged, but PvP death was permanent.

They have rather too many levels in WoW for this. If they multiplied all XP received by 5, that might help alleviate the problem.

Richard

[Anon]

4.

Just to make the title implication more explicit: The Disappeared

[Jade Lily]

5.

In Diablo II, it is possible to play a "hardcore" character that remains dead when killed. At least, this used to be the case back before Second Life came along and stole me away from that world. However, it's up to that player to choose whether his character was to be hardcore. I don't remember if it was possible for a non-hardcore player to permanently kill the hardcore one, but I assume so.

[Mike]

6.

Two words: polygon count.

As computing power rises, expect the bodies to pile up. ;)

[Torley Torgeson/Torley Wong]

7.

Mike points to something I wanted to elucidate on in greater detail when I felt sorry for some Goombas in SMB and wanted to give them a funeral. But, they got flattened, and disappeared. My relationship with Mario (and, to a lesser degree) Luigi in the years to come was increasingly antagonistic. ;)

Second Life, my homeworld, holds a lot of promise for exploring death of an avatar deeper. In addition to several memorials that I've attended, I've dreamt of a world called Second Death which is like the flipside counterpart. It'd have regions named Styx, Necropia, and Atrophy and in addition to possible entertainment value, it'd also have a lot of education.

Howso? Whelp, one example is when my biological Dad died some years back, I grieved. As is natural for human beings to do. I wish I had SL to help me then. The cemetaries I've seen in SL on a yearround basis are mostly set up for Halloween and with a not-totally serious perspective to them. They're kind of like out of horror movies, and not so much for support.

Just like great things like Virtual Hallucinations have done to educate about schizophrenia and Brigadoon has done for autistic Asperger's Syndrome (which I have) people, Second Life and online worlds could be used to help the living cope with death.

One of the morbid things I wanted to do after my Dad died was go in with the coroner and see his corpse, to confront that fear of mine. My Mom advised me otherwise, and I respected her wishes.

Now, it wouldn't necessarily have to be like the Mutter Museum, but more exhibits about death would be really welcome. Including the historical traditions of how bodies are treated, and the rituals we who are not-yet-dead have assembled throughout the ages.

Even in 2005 A.D., death can be such a mystery.

It's beautiful when sufficiently advanced technology can shine a light!

[Steve Williams]

8.

Death is the one thing I have thought most about in MMOs. Personally, it is a disservice to the fiction of the world AND a disservice to the design of the game to not address this issue.

I've talked about the spirit journey in various fora. Games should address why people do not die when they are killed; there is a property of the place that allows PCs to come back to life. What is it?

Even more telling is the lack of discussion as to why Joe Named comes back five minutes after he is killed. Could it be he did a corpse run on himself? Imagine his frustration at finding his beloved sword/armor piece missing when he does!

If you die, and have sufficient will to live, you come back. Goodness, there is plenty of stories about such a thing! It is an explanation for the gameplay conceit of "why does Joe Named come back for me to kill over and over?"

Yet, this remains the undiscovered country of our MMOs. I'm sure someone can fill me in on the exceptions (like AO, IIRC), but it seems that our MMOs fear to tackle this thorny issue.

When a player dies, why does he come back? When an NPC dies, why does HE come back? Surely we spill electrons on less important fiction than that? Why not explain this basic fact of life in MMOs as well?

Personally, I wish for more. I would like to see a full-fledged spirit world when I die in a game - one in which deceased mobs can be seen making their way back to their corpses as well. If we must have death, why not show some real consequence for it. Not debt, not experience loss, but a consequence of time that shows another way of looking at your game world.

With such things, players begin to think about their actions in a new light. I would be interested to see what conclusions players would come up with in a world where death is such a constant companion to gameplay.

SW

[gus andrews]

9.

One of the things I've noticed in WoW is how different the death of animals looks to different professions -- specifically, skinners and everyone else. Having raised my first av, a human rogue, as a skinner, I periodically come across a field full of dead wolves left by a non-skinner and believe I understand what it must have felt like to be an Comanche or Nez Perce during the age when the U.S. Government promoted the mass slaughter of the buffalo. In that era -- I think it was the 1800s -- white men would pass through the countryside, often on trains, shooting at herds of buffalo without a thought to making use of the remains. All those corpses just lying around. What a waste! My rogue is left to clean up the carnage -- not that she doesn't make a pretty penny doing it, now that she can pull heavy leather. I now play an herbalist/enchanter alt on another server, and I feel a twinge every time I have to leave the corpse of a boar untouched.

[Player]

10.

"While the virtual frogs at which we pelt stones can only disappear, how do we reflect against their waters?"

I play a game with my Feeddemon RSS reader where I try to guess which TN author wrote which article before checking the site.

With a line like this at the end, it is always our Nathan: a link, a question, and some tediously oblique, crossword-puzzle references: Private Eye's pseud's corner was made for it.

It's a shame because the material is usually quite good. Better than shoe-horned Korean creation myths...

11.

In Diablo II , it is possible to play a "hardcore" character that remains dead when killed. At least, this used to be the case back before Second Life came along and stole me away from that world. However, it's up to that player to choose whether his character was to be hardcore. I don't remember if it was possible for a non-hardcore player to permanently kill the hardcore one, but I assume so.
No, killing a hardcore players as a non-hardcore player is not possible.

[RangerSWG]

12.

> One of the things I've noticed in WoW is how different the death of animals looks to different professions -- specifically, skinners and everyone else. Having raised my first av, a human rogue, as a skinner, I periodically come across a field full of dead wolves left by a non-skinner and believe I understand what it must have felt like to be an Comanche or Nez Perce during the age when the U.S. Government promoted the mass slaughter of the buffalo.<

So true. I played, for just over a year, a Ranger in Star Wars Galaxies. As I made part of my 'living' from know what creatures dropped what types of meat, hide and bone and from being able to harvest those items from critters that I or groupmates had killed, it seemed an awful waste when I came across fields of slaughtered animals where the combat grinders had mown through.

For that toon the death of an animal wasn't just a means of getting a bit of combat XP but a way of aquiring a resource that'd go on to be sold to crafters. Leaving it lying wasting in a field seemed just 'wrong'.

The death of a player character in PvP/PvE was a different matter. They'd just clone and run back to rejoin the fray. It was just some 'time out of game'.

However, the death of a players character because they were leaving the game, that was an entirely different matter and the guild members who remained ingame often expressed shock at the fact they really did feel a form of grief at the 'real' loss. This despite the fact that the player was clearly alive and well and trading IM's or trading emails....

The way that games and gamers deal with death ingame is an area I'd like to look at in more depth sometime.