Cute. Couple of things come to mind...

Action-arcade games are all about timing, button-pressing, and spatial positioning. Within this context, you''re trying to beat a system. Death is used to tell you you''ve failed to beat this part of the system.

You don''t necessarily have to use death itself, but arcade games have a pretty strict "right" and "wrong" way to play them, and something has to reinforce this. Since we usually and automatically relate to death being a bad thing, it''s what''s most used. It''s an undesirable condition that forces us to try to do better.

You can stretch death out, make it more or less frequent, create varying degrees of it (the health bar), but it all comes down to letting the player know he''s not playing well. If you stopped doing this, you''d be branching out into another genre (not necessarily a bad thing).

Alternatives to death? You''ve got to reward success and punish failure. You could deny certain goodies and treats to a failing player, but if they''re required for victory that''d probably just make them fail more. You could not allow them to see certain levels (kinda lame). More radically, you could change the system as the player failed, maybe creating various types of failure... Lemmings comes to mind, in that you can get trapped Lemmings, the wrong Lemming in the wrong place, etc. Defender''s another great example... not just personal death, but the loss of humans creating NASTY monsters.

Unfortunately, though, when it comes to arcade games mechanisms, death is pretty hard to beat.



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Just waiting for the mothership...