Permanent Death

PD is not the same as PvP. PvP means that one PC can do things to another PC that the latter didn’t agree to; PD means that if a PC suffers death, it is consigned to oblivion. When PvP and PD are combined the result is player killing (PKing): One PC can directly cause the PD of another PC ¹. Players often use PD and PvP as euphemisms for PKing, but the distinction is there and is very important. Many of the benefits that advocates of PKing cite are primarily due to PD; some of the strongest objections to PKing are due to its PvP element, rather than to PD.

Like PvP, PD has consent issues. These are not, however, with other players; rather, they are with the virtual world itself. As our Chapter 4 analysis of virtual world physics showed, players are normally quite happy for the virtual world to model the real one, because it reinforces their immersive experience. In the real world, though, none of a virtual world’s players have had the experience of dying.

Because the whole aim of virtual worlds is to bring the character and the player together as a persona, players will routinely consider their character to be themselves. On the face of it, then, their character’s PD would thus be like their own death in reality. In practice, players at the persona level of immersion don’t feel anywhere near as bad as players who are approaching it, because they have the duality of player/character sorted out. The character has died, but the player is the character, and the player (clearly) hasn’t died, therefore the character hasn’t either. The character can be reborn in a new manifestation, much as a PD mobile respawns from scratch. It’s not a pleasant experience—it’s like losing three months’ work while trying to back up your computer’s hard drive ²; frustrating, but not the end of the world. Players who are near to total immersion but aren’t quite there will suffer the most, because not only do they lose the work, but they also feel they’ve lost a dear friend. The word “gutted” is frequently used to describe the experience, but even that doesn’t come close to how bad it can feel. Unlike the death of a real person, though, virtual PD grief can be overcome relatively quickly. Players usually can rationalize what has happened and come to terms with it after giving it some thought; the emotional impact is strong, but at an intellectual level all that’s gone is a chunk of over-anthropomorphized computer data. If they can cope with the emotional hit, the intellectual gain can more than make up for the loss. If they can cope with the emotional hit….

There is a quantitative difference between the emotion felt at losing a character to the virtual world and that of losing it to another PC. In the former case, players will be incredibly annoyed but will rapidly conclude that it was either their own fault or the result of incredible bad luck ³. In the latter case, though, they’ll be angry, too ⁴. For long-term PKers (as opposed to newbies), if they started the fight and got killed, then their self-image will fall even lower than it was before. For the victim of a PKer (or, worse, a pack of them), there is the sense of unfairness that the heavily armed attacker will have selected a victim on the basis of their likelihood of winning, and therefore the odds were stacked from the beginning. Unprovoked attacks cause enough indignation to blow an industrial indignationometer.

Consent is an issue. Emotional attachment is an issue. Wasted effort is an issue. None, however, are the issue. The issue is that people don’t like losing. PD amounts to a statement of total, that’s-all-folks loss. There’s no wheedling out of it; it’s final. That’s what people dislike about it. Whether this is merely a passing phase due to virtual worlds’ comparative immaturity or a permanent situation rooted deep in the human psyche we shall examine presently.

For the moment, the important thing to come out with from all this is the sense that PD is not popular. People who fear it are as much—if not more—against it than people to whose characters it has actually happened. Returning to the gambling metaphor, if PD is the potential result of losing a fight, players are wagering a very, very high stake.

Such a stake is constant across all combat, because in a PD world it’s the only thing a player can bet. Because of this, the risks of losing must be small or the rewards for winning must be high (or both). Unfortunately, this can make matters even worse because it means PD actually occurs only very infrequently. Players aren’t expecting it to happen, therefore when it does, there’s the shock to contend with, too.

In real-life gambling, if a risk looks too great you can usually pull out of the bet and lose only a fraction of your stake. In virtual worlds, it should always be possible to cut your losses and flee from a fight. There may be tangible consequences for the partial defeat, but the main loss will probably be your pride. Only if you decided to stay (for example, because your opponent looks like they’re going to die sooner than you are) would you risk losing your whole stake.

PD is not appropriate for all virtual worlds. It would be ridiculous in most non-game contexts, and doesn’t add greatly to games without combat, either. For virtual worlds where non-PCs can (and regularly do) suffer PD, though, it has serious contributions to make.