Deaths

In games, "dying" has no external consequence. You simply place the pieces on the board again or hit the reset button, and you get another chance. As we've often been told by our parents, "winning or losing doesn't matter, as long as you have fun." So when does dying actually matter in games? Some might argue that death can matter the most in multiplayer games, where the death of a player leaves resources or possibilities for the players still fighting (e.g., in Civilization two players who ally to defeat a third might then have to fight each other).

But when does death within a game have consequences outside of the game?
Jesse Venbrux (who also made Karoshi and Frozzd), has come up with a way that a player's death will mean something outside of the game you play.

Every time your avatar gets hit, it leaves behind pieces of the body. These pieces are saved by the game and stored on the Internet, so they appear in the next player's game. So your death tells the next player that you died at a certain place in the game. Deaths is an easy platform game, but with many booby traps you won't see coming. And that's where dying becomes of significance; the corpses left behind warn players of approaching danger.

Jesse Venbrux has labelled this game a demo, and will not work on it further unless there is more enthusiasm for it. But even in demo form, it demonstrates many possibilities for this new type of player interaction. Here's hoping that presenting the game here will stimulate Venbrux to continue working on this brilliant idea.

On a more personal note: I once saw something like this before in a game. In World of Warcraft, I decided to try out the patch 1.11 test-realm, where the Eastern Plaguelands would feature much new content. Upon going there, I found hundreds of corpses scattered on the ground. It turned out that many players went there, encountered enemy players, died in combat and decided to abandon the test-realm for the lives realms, leaving their corpse behind. The corpses warned me that staying in the Eastern Plaguelands would be a dangerous thing but I found the sight to be so impressive I fought until my own corpse would be added to the mass grave.