# The Unfortunate Consequences of Non- Permanent Death LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt) --- Let’s imagine what the real world would be like if the philosophers of ancient Greece had discovered the secret of eternal life. If you take your daily dose of elixir, you won’t age and will live forever. How would today’s society be different? Well, it’s almost impossible to say, but one thing is for sure: Alexander the Great would still be in charge. In virtual worlds, this is called sandboxing—the people who are first to positions of power get to keep them. There is no opportunity for change. Ensigns on the Star Trek spaceship Voyager (which was transported millions of light years from home) did not have a great career path no matter how able they were. With no permanent death, virtual worlds consist of relentless progress toward either “the end” or some point of equilibrium (where the losses from whatever replaces permanent death balance the gains accrued in between such pseudo-deaths). When players feel they aren’t advancing, they can become very frustrated; most virtual worlds without permanent death therefore endeavor to keep losses lower than gains. This keeps players’ sense of achievement intact until they reach “the end,” although a side effect is that it devalues what that achievement means: If anyone can plod to success, no one successful gets bragging rights. What happens at “the end” is also problematical. “The end” is when highly experienced (or highly plodding) players run out of content. Ideally, these characters should be retired and new ones started. That, however, is too much like PD for many players to stomach. Remorting is a way of restarting with an existing character (as a different class), but it’s a cop-out that really only delays the inevitable. This irresistible rise problem is endemic in DikuMUDs. Eventually, high-level players will either join their virtual world’s administrators or find something else to do with their lives. Interestingly, this may involve starting a new DikuMUD of their own. Thus, although it may be bad for an individual DikuMUD that players leave when they run out of content, it could be good for the species of DikuMUDs as a whole. This isn’t possible for players of large-scale graphical virtual worlds; it would be like a big-shot movie director telling a complaining member of an audience that if they don’t like what they see on the screen they should go away and make their own movie instead. That said, there are many graphical worlds being developed by people who cut their teeth playing EverQuest, so in a sense the same well-worn path is being taken. Of course, if you’re a business that makes its money running an individual virtual world, you may not want your players to leave and set up ones in competition. Therefore, you need to encourage them to stay. The only solution not involving PD is to create new content, which is (as ever) expensive. There is theory behind this, which anecdotal evidence from EverQuest suggests has some basis. The idea is that when new high-level content is added, it benefits not only the players for whom it was created, but also those that follow. It’s called the trickledown effect, although it’s perhaps a misnomer in that content doesn’t trickle down so much as characters trickle up to meet it. Nevertheless, the point is that although it may seem that content is being added only for the benefit of a few very powerful players, eventually all players will benefit from it as they reach that level. It’s like building a road as people walk along it: The ones at the back of the line eventually get to use what was created for the people at the front of the line. It sounds all well and good, but it’s not without flaws: - To newbies, the finishing post looks very, very distant. It may indeed look so distant to some that they decide not to bother embarking on the journey. - Newbies (and not-so-newbies) feel they can never catch up. The people in front will always be in front, and there’s no way to overtake them. - The horizon advances at the speed you approach it. You’re a donkey following a carrot on a stick. It’s like running a city marathon. You know from the start that it’s a very long way, and not for the unfit or faint-hearted. You won’t beat any of the people who started two hours before you, so you can only judge your performance at a personal level. Oh, and the course keeps lengthening, so you’re not actually ever going to finish anyway. In a virtual world with no PD, you only get to experience a body of content once. After you’ve consumed it, you rise in power such that the old content is no longer a challenge, so you go on to the next content. Aside from the fact that this is a huge waste of resources (players will repeat content many more times if they can come at it from different angles, for example, with different characters or different strategies), it’s not necessarily even the content as it was originally formulated. When greater monsters are created, greater treasure must also be created as a reward. Any weapons, armor, or other kit that’s better than what a character has will be retained, and their old equipment sold on to characters at a lower level. These, in turn, will sell their old stuff to yet lower-level characters, and so on. The result of this is that characters often have better gear than they ought to have for their level of experience. They can better tackle the adversities they face, and when victorious the rewards they obtain may be less useful than what they have already. Thus, they’ll sell those on, too. It’s a form of inflation that devalues objects at lower content levels. The situation is not as bad as it sounds, in that there are more characters at lower levels than at higher ones and therefore they can’t all have overpowered equipment. However, it’s also worse because of deliberate twinking. Formally, twinked characters [^81] are ones that have acquired equipment that they couldn’t ever have obtained through the normal channels; in EQ’s case, this means killing monsters and trading with other characters. Although strictly speaking even trading to buy a better sword than you “should” have is a form of twinking, most people use the term to mean using your own high-level character to obtain goods for your low-level character. Twinking isn’t necessarily bad for a virtual world’s economy (especially if objects can wear out), but it throws a dark shadow over content. Newbies who are twinked by a high-level stranger are often very impressed; they’ll like the virtual world much more as a result. However, newbies who don’t have a higher-level benefactor are resentful of people who do—especially when those people don’t seem to see anything wrong with it. It’s like a Hollywood actor researching a role as a homeless person, who turns up at a soup kitchen, takes a bowl of soup, then produces a freshly baked baguette and some croutons to eat with it. That soup was meant for a homeless person, not a Hollywood actor; similarly, newbies who see experienced players consuming their content aided by luxuries no one else has will feel resentful. No amount of “I worked hard for this” is going to mollify them. It exposes the newbie experience as worthless. Even at higher levels, it’s an issue. If you experience content with a twink (or otherwise overpowered character), you have an easier time of it than the designers planned. It’s like taking a calculator into a mental arithmetic test: You’ll finish sooner and get all the answers right, but you won’t learn as much. Players with twinks won’t necessarily see anything wrong with this, of course, because in their eyes they already sat the test once without a calculator, their main character. However, that assumes that only the answers are important; in terms of immersion, how you answer can be more telling than what you answer. Twinking happens in virtual worlds with PD, but not to the same extent. This is because PD usually involves the total loss of all the kit you had with you when you died. If you get eaten by a dragon, the dragon gets whatever of your stuff survived; if your new character wants it, they’ll have to take it off the dragon. It’s not inherent to PD that object loss on death is implemented, but it usually is because it makes more sense. Virtual worlds without PD have moved slowly in the opposite direction, ensuring that even if you do “die” you won’t lose certain bound items to looters, lessening the impact of “death” even more. In some virtual worlds, you don’t lose anything tangible at all if a monster “kills” you. The trickle-down effect requires that new content be added. The highest-level characters, for whom it is intended after all, will invariably want input on this. It’s very tempting to listen to them. Power gamers [^82] are an excellent resource for regular computer games, and their opinions on possible changes will regularly be sought. Discussions on web sites devoted to Sid Meier’s Civilization III [^83] have led directly to several code modifications released in the official patches. Unfortunately, however, in a virtual world where people can plod to the top without exhibiting the slightest sign of imagination, it is not guaranteed that the players of highest-level characters are power gamers; they could just be people with a lot of time on their hands. If you do listen to your highest-level players in determining content issues, make sure you can distinguish between the ones who have good ideas and the ones who merely think they do. Note that these aren’t reasons why your virtual world should have PD; rather, they’re the situations you must tackle if you decide not to have it. One of the biggest things you’ll need to decide is what to do with the fiction. I listed earlier the more popular ways of explaining how come PCs recover from mortal blows, but the problem doesn’t stop there. In particular, if you want a rational fiction then you’ll need to produce some reason why the mobiles that the characters kill don’t recover when they die and why they themselves don’t go up levels when they “kill” characters [^84]. Note that saying nothing may be better than saying something unconvincing, as at least it leaves open the possibility that a plausible fiction exists; if you pass off some cock-and-bull nonsense instead, you’re stuck with it [^85]. It is particularly hard to reconcile non-death with historical or licensed worlds. When authenticity is a selling point, the inauthentic can be jarring. For example, setting a virtual world in war-torn France with PCs as members of the resistance could work, but it would rather lose something if the PCs weren’t ever in any danger of being killed. If the real-life French guerillas had been indestructible, the Nazis wouldn’t even have invaded. Non-PD isn’t the only authenticity issue with historical scenarios, of course (the fact that Paris was occupied for only 50 months somewhat limits the lifespan of a resistance scenario); it is, however, the biggest one. Even in original fictional worlds, effective immortality has major implications. Society would develop in entirely different ways if everyone knew they weren’t going to die. What careers would people have? How would laws be made and enforced? Would science advance faster or slower? Would there be war? If not, how would groups resolve their differences? Would there be religions? Jesus’ resurrection would be no big deal if the same thing routinely happened to everyone. Where would everybody live? What would children do when they grew up? Most designers take the point of view that these are not questions that need to be answered. The loss of immersion delivered from saying nothing on the subject is minuscule compared to the loss that would be incurred by dumping players into a virtual world that followed through the implications of immortality—it would be seriously alien to players’ real-world experiences. Under the circumstances, this is therefore the most sensible approach. Pro-PD people may still urge caution, in that systems which work fine in the real world may behave less well when applied in a virtual world with no PD. Example: If no one died it would play havoc with the housing market. It’s often the case that churn will take on the role that death does in the real world, though: Characters do die when their players quit, therefore a house will go back on the market if its owner cancels his or her account. There are some exceptions (for example, no PC would take out life insurance, therefore insurance companies would not be as rich as in the real world, therefore investment in stocks and shares would be lower) but these are invariably swamped by other factors anyway. A virtual world without PD can be created to address all these issues, some of which are, frankly, of the “clutching at straws” variety anyway. Most virtual worlds do, in fact—worlds without PD greatly outnumber those with it. You can have a successful non-PD world. So why is it, then, that time after time designers and long-term players will sense there is something missing from their virtual world, take a good, hard look at it, and conclude that, you know, maybe PD really isn’t all that bad? [^81]: Or twinks. [^82]: This term hails from the board games community, hence players are “gamers.” [^83]: Mainly http://www.civfanatics.com/ and http://apolyton.net/civ3. [^84]: Actually, in some virtual worlds they do. It’s uncommon, though. [^85]: This is especially bad for virtual worlds with a story arc, but they don’t have the option of leaving it unsaid, either. If you’re promoting story, you can’t be selective about it and expect people not to notice.