Serious emotional games are hard to do. Either they’re on point and really short (cool, but ultimately forgettable) or they’re probably too long to make their point. Furthermore if a player has no agency to avoid bad outcomes, it doesn’t really feel like a game. The thing you’re experience is forced. Easy to not feel accountable.
Fire emblem is a good example of this. It’s a strategy game where you have about 30 characters who permanently die when killed in any battle. Most players just restart each battle until deathless runs are achieved- either due to emotional or practical concerns. So, when someone dies, it’s not sad, it’s annoying.
You also lose empathy if a character dies due to unforeseeable consequences of choices or shitty AI performance.
Legacy board games address these problems well. Because the state of the game is irreversibly driven forward by physical mutation of the game, it forces you to commit to your fortune and errors. I hope we see more of these games made. I haven’t seen this model used anywhere, but I could imagine a video game where you buy the right to do one irreversible play through of a story mode, cloud saved on their systems so you can’t manage the data yourself.
There's also the interesting looking One Hour One Life that I haven't had a chance to play yet. It will be cool if it gains enough traction to really see mass progression due to how the mechanics work.
OHOL is fantastic and is, at heart, about parenting, aging, and death.
I'm a big Rohrer fan and death seems like a recurring theme throughout his games:
-Passage: where you pass through an entire life in 5 minutes
-The Castle Doctrine: a permadeath home defense MMO where you set death traps and try, often impotently, to defend your small family. When you fail to defend them, you'll get to watch the security tapes in detail and come home to their mutilated corpses.
I would also like to add x-com on Ironman. Losing a soldier because you got sloppy and arrogant; putting them in an indefensible position and watching them get slaughtered. Do that enough times and you literally cannot win with just rookie replacements. But yea, I felt actually bad for losing some soldiers in my Ironman runs.
Also Darkest Dungeon. But problem with DD is that though you may lose characters permanently, it is impossible to lose the game, as both time and number of new recruits are essentially infinite. Atleast in Xcom there is someway to lose the metagame, if enough countries withdraw support(I think), but in DD, it continues as infinitum.
XCOM has too much of an RNG factor for me. You can make the right choices (gearing, squad composition, positioning, targeting, etc.) and still lose soldiers due to streaks of misfortune. I personally hate being punished (usually brutally) due to factors outside my control, so I eventually gave up on the game.
In Moria/Morgul you spent forever to build your character, learning spells and getting nice equipment. Then you die of a poisionous rat and was presented with a gravestone and had to start over with a new character. It was painful to die to say the least.
The point of Hardcore mode is to play on the ranked seasonal ladders where you get permanent rewards for high scores, which means raising the difficulty.
"Games aren't hard if you lower the difficulty" is a strange argument to make.
The old Amiga game cannon fodder did this well - you had named soldiers that rose in rank as they survived missions, but if they died they were gone forever. The increased rank didn't improve them gameplay wise, so you wouldn't reload just to get them back (er, can't even remember if the game had saves in the first place), but you got pretty attached to them the same. Every dead soldier also added a grave to a hill in the mission select screen.
This is not a new concept in video games, usually known as "hardcore" or "ironman" mode.
I think a core issue for games is that loss is fundamentally at odds with player agency. In pre-written stories it ends up feeling cheap even if it was influenced by player choice. It is much better suited to games with emergent narrative, such as Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Crusader Kings II, or X-COM, but still stings more as an annoyance than something deeply emotional.
I enjoy emergent games and rogue likes (dungeon crawl!). A lot of people are recommending them, but I think it’s a different idea. Such losses are emotional, but not in the same way as well written narratives about mourning and acceptance.
Legacy board games have the same issue as you described in fire emblem though: players can ignore deaths by save scumming or not performing the instructed physical mutations of game pieces.
I've certainly been in a group that decided to ignore the outcome of a session where we had particularly bad luck on the dice rolls because of the expectation that it would've made subsequent sessions unwinnable/not fun.
There's arguably more incentive to do this in the board games because restarting from a 'ruined' game state in fire emblem requires pressing a few buttons, doing so in the board game requires spending $70 again.
Server-dependent games like Diablo hardcore are not interesting for me, because I can't control my Internet or my power. Single lag, my character is dead and hours of gameplay are lost, not because of my skill, but because of things I have no control over. Even if that does not happen often, I still don't want to even try.
I don’t think Diablo is emotional in that way. But besides that, I don’t think real time gameplay is a good driver of emotional impact anyway. Inevitably there are random variables that will screw in a way to take away agency.
Good emotional impact comes as a result of making choices for some trade off of greed, virtue, practicality, risk, etc.
> I haven’t seen this model used anywhere, but I could imagine a video game where you buy the right to do one irreversible play through of a story mode, cloud saved on their systems so you can’t manage the data yourself.
Ooh. I'd love to see a Fire Emblem style game like this. No main character, so any of them can die and not end the story. If a main character dies, someone else can take up their path, or it can slightly diverge. Ending depends on who's left alive at the end. It'd be a mess to do I think, especially dealing with when characters die and adjusting the storyline, but it'd be super interesting and you could easily get multiple playthroughs. I'd even say that the game allows you to do multiple ones, with each death/recruit being an autosave, so you can't undo it.
Hmm. That’s a really cool idea. I like the notion that the state of the game is driven purely by who is alive, and maybe, who they have relationships with. You, as the player, get to make no choices. A simple narrative justification would be that they just make decisions democratically, and each character has predetermined (and fairly predictable) views. So if you want to force a choice, your only option is to allow some people to die before the ballot is cast.
That is very true, and I feel a democratic discussion could kinda work in a game like Fire Emblem. Like, the overall story is the same, but if it's kinda an open world, you could do it in any order, and that would be dependent on what characters you've recruited and are still alive. The reactions and bosses and such would require that too as well.
Supports would be the harder to thing to find to influence the game at that point I think...But maybe you could even just do that down to NPCs commenting about how so-and-so look so in love, or how they glare at each other. Might flesh out the world a little more. Even maybe make them have rumors about ones who've died who they've heard about.
It's just a matter of bringing everything together I think. That's the annoying bit of it.
If you haven't played X-COM: Enemy Unknown, you really should give it a try. It's similar to the game you're describing, though the story for your characters is much less authored.
I bought the extra skins DLC pack and rewarded each soldier with unique armour when they reached the rank of Major. It was great.
Serious emotional anything, is hard to do i would argue. People react so differently to these things that you really have to distill a piece of the human experience, and present it in a novel way.
Buy even if they're short, they can be unforgettable. I would urge everyone interested in such a story to play "Brothers: a tale of two sons", which might have been some of my best 2-3 hours of gaming ever. Presenting it on this context might spoil some of it, but go in without any judgment or preconceptions and you'll have an experience that sticks.
NetHack only has permadeath mode, or hardcore mode as it's called in most new games. Savefile is deleted once it's loaded to make it slightly less easy to cheat but ofcourse you can make a backup of it before loading.
Both are strictly opt-in: the choice is made before you die (which can be very close to death, but then most deaths are related to not seeing the death coming, so that doesn't necessarily help), and disqualification from high scores (and/or community acknowledgement) occurs immediately upon making the decision, regardless of whether you subsequently die.
The default is assumption, however, is permadeath.
I've played hundreds of games, but Jason Rohrer's Passage is one that I keep coming back to in my mind. It's a 5-minute-long, linear indie game with blocky pixel graphics that was probably made over the course of a week. A game doesn't need to be a grand, million-dollar masterpiece to really and truly mean something to a player. In fact: I'd rather it wasn't, since empirically I remember almost nothing about the AAA games I've played, except for a vague sense of having had fun.
> Most players just restart each battle until deathless runs are achieved- either due to emotional or practical concerns. So, when someone dies, it’s not sad, it’s annoying.
How about balancing a handful of levels so that it's impossible to finish without losing someone? You could replay in hopes of saving a character...at the expense of losing a different character.
I feel like I have seen this a few times although I can’t name any off the top of my head. I don’t think it’s as effective because it feels like someone had to die. It’s really hard to set this up such that you avoid either having no control or complete control- and neither is effective for emotional impact I feel.
This is one reason Final Fantasy Tactics was such a powerful game. You could basically lose any character other than the protagonist and it really hammered in the weight of your decisions on the battlefield.
In the first Ghost Recon games all soldiers had permadeath and the incentive not to lose them was them gaining (significant) experience and abilities with each mission, which are lost with the soldier dying.
I think the “hardcore” gameplay, in an attempt to give more empathy about death, would not work as expected. Based off my experience with Diablo Hardcore characters, you just stop caring about individual characters, since you know they’re expendable. The only hardcore character I remember from Diablo 3 is the first - of hundreds.
one only needs to look at the team ico games to find examples of truly emotional games that don't handle player death in a realistic way. in each game you can die, fall off the level, etc. and you just come back after some ambiguous resurrection. but all three games have deep emotional content.
A way to design around the reload issue is to have long winded, chained, or cumulative consequences, meaning that the player would have to lose many hours of gameplay, and even then he may not be sure to achieve his goal. Thinking about Mass Effect or Heavy Rain.
The only game, that I have played, that made me cry is the first Bioshock. Somehow I managed to not kill any of the girls (probably because I didn't catch the benefits) and the ending was so rewarding. I don't think I can achieve that anymore, I tried many times
Well-written. I also find these kinds of games to be cathartic experiences. However, I think that the few games have saturated the market, or over-saturated, if That Dragon, Cancer’s poor sales are representative[1]. I suppose that might be because viewing the content of these games is cathartic enough, but it might also be because unless one is in the industry, playing one of these games once, or once per personal loss, is enough, and thankfully sudden losses like the author’s are still rare.
And yet, that one play through could offer a tremendous benefit in learning to cope with a heartbreaking loss. I wonder if there's room yet in society for prescribing video games like this, a la https://www.thestar.com/amp/opinion/star-columnists/2018/10/...
Trivial entertainment generally sells better than serious explorations of an important theme, regardless of the medium. Six of the ten top-grossing movies in 2018 were adaptations of superhero comics; several Oscar-nominated movies have barely recouped their costs.
Part of the reason for poor sales of a "play once and done" game is people can just watch someone do a "Let's Play" on YouTube and experience the (in most cases) linear narrative without having to pay.
Views on a Let's play are not equal to lost sales. Most of those people wouldn't have been exposed to the game in the first place and plenty of viewers go on to buy the game after watching a let's play anyways, even for linear story experiences. It's practically impossible to come up with an exact figure of how many sales a let's play drives, vs. how many it prevents, but for many games exposure through YouTube has gotten the word out to an audience many times larger than what a developer with a small marketing budget could have managed otherwise.
I don't think the op actually talks about games, but about interactive stories. In my mind, a game needs a challenge, the story is almost secondary. Take the Fallout games, the stories are there, but without battling the monsters, you don't get anywhere (yes, I know you can not battle the monsters, there is still a level of skill required to reach the various stages of the story). If you look at a game like Orwell, there is almost no skill involved and, in the end, you can't really win. You can't replay the game and get better at it. Probably this was the reason why Mass Effect 3 didn't have that many stelar reviews, 'cause in the end, it didn't matter what you did.
There is a place for these interactive stories, but hey are not video games.
Orwell is different though. It has multiple endings, you can possibly fail to come at the right conclusions at certain points which change the story dramatically, and you have to put in time and effort to actually find certain facts to get a good ending.
Drakengard (the first of the series) was written in response to the flippant way many games are framed: You usually score higher the more enemies you kill. Yoko Taro thought that only an insane person would actually think that way.
So he created a game where the main character is literally broken and insane, killing huge swaths of enemies in a continually escalating apocalypse beyond his control. Throw in additional party members who are also broken and insane, and some point of view personalities commenting on how utterly horrible everything is, and on if the player is as insane as the character is.
It's not a great game and quite dated, but definitely has a message to explore which makes traversing the horrible contexts worth it. He went on to make Drakengard 3 and the related NieR games as well.
I started the article hoping it would be about making death and life-threatening situations more severe in games, both to make them a little more realistic as well as making them more difficult and requiring more strategy. I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you. Probably there is, but I don't play a lot of games anymore.
> I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you.
first of all, there are plenty of games where the top tier of weapons can kill you instantaneously with a single headshot or even bodyshot.
the thing is, this concept is not particularly realistic. in real life, it is pretty rare for people to die instantaneously from a single shot. while there are a couple key points on the body where this can happen, usually people are going to bleed out over the course of minutes or hours. while this happens, the injured person can be anywhere between totally incapacitated and running around killing people, not even aware they've been hit. it's hard for me to see how this could be incorporated into a fun set of game mechanics. people like all kinds of different games, but in general I suspect they are looking for something a bit more deterministic than reality.
IIRC the very first Rainbow Six was aiming to achieve this. It felt realistic because you or team members could be wounded and required time to heal across missions, or could die. At some point though an invalidating bullet is statistically equivalent to death gameplay wise. Sadly attempts at simulating wounds were and still are generally implemented in a very simplistic way.
Lots of military shooters will kill you with one or two bullets. I've thought that what would really make a shooter "realistic" would be if players who get shot are maimed (rather than being able to run and jump just as well at 1% health as 100%). But who knows whether that would actually be fun.
Arma 3 does that. If your legs are hurt you still can move and the walking animation is the same, but the speed can be close to zero. if your arms are hurt, you cant shoot straight anymore. They also have a way better (whatever that might mean) visualiation of pain and dying than other shooters.
"Escape from Tarkov" is also praised for "feeling" realistic, but I can't say much on that.
All of that started with a mod for Quake 2 called Action Quake. You could break your legs by falling or bleed out, and had to bandage, that kind of thing. It was the predecessor to Counter Strike, which in turn birthed a lot of modern shooter mechanics.
I used to play Action Quake 2 for years pretty seriously. Looking at the gameplay videos of it now it looks so much like a pre-pre-alpha version of CS:GO still to this day.
Ive wanted a FPS bullet sponge game where one of the random enemies getting killed starts a flashback to everything thats gone wrong in their life to become a private military contractor after their wife said “its time to be realistic”
A game about physical therapy sounds interesting. Although I'm not sure how to adapt spending dozens of hours on the phone with insurances and billing centers.
it's not exactly like that, but if you're looking for an FPS that makes you feel weird/bad about what you're doing, you should check out spec ops: the line.
There was a game on Steam a while ago that was an FPS with a limited pool of lives for all players to share, and wine the lives ran out, the game was shuttered. I believe the same company is working on a game that gives you one life, and then the game refuses to run again (without cheating I’d guess).
The truth is that sounds a bit stressful to me, and the reality of how online PvP frequently evolves I’d be surprised if it worked out long-term. Part of the joy of games is being able to try again and again and perfect your gameplay. A game that punishes exploration and growth sounds dull, not daring.
Go play you some old school Counter Strike - with a handgun containing 7 bullets, you can frag 7 players. Also, 1 other player with 1 bullet can frag you just as easily(or not, headshots are tricky).
> I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you.
Real life simulators tend to be boring / tedious compared to mass market games. "Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3" is probably one of the least generous (as far as health goes) games I've tried to play, and it was tedious and boring. That's not to say one example means the idea is inherently as bad as that one game, but it does limit appeal significantly.
(Often the same FPS game will let you scale the difficulty from easy to something where being shot multiple times probably means death/restart/whatever.)
Arma, Counter-Strike and Insurgency all fit that model and have each been around for 10-20 years with continual updates. Rainbiw Six used to fill that niche as well.
Siege is tuned towards esports. The TTK is still relatively low and it's very much a tactical game but it's not as brutal as the one-shot kills in RS3.
Perhaps more profound are games like Combat Mission or Graviteam Tactics, which try to simulate battalion and smaller level engagements. Even with save scumming, it's not uncommon for over 30% or even over 50% of your forces die or get seriously injured. It puts the realities of symmetrical warfare in context.
I find games that try to depict real life suffering to often be too on the nose for the medium, but I love games that deal with themes like loss, grief, etc. through good story telling. Some indie games have done a really good job of this, even when it's not the focus. Celeste for example toes the line of being too on the nose in my opinion but is a great example of a game taking on a serious topic (anxiety.) Plenty of other examples out there.
Some of the most fun I've had in games were in the situations where killing was optional. And I wish more games were designed around that concept.
The original Splinter Cell comes to mind. You were supposed to be a stealthy spy, so killing was often counter-productive to your goal. But if you were really careful, you could go beyond that and opt to not commit violence at all, by thinking of the best way to sneak past, trick, and divert your enemies.
Putting aside the morality of it all, from a challenge/fun perspective, games make it all too easy to kill, but so much more difficult to avoid it. But some of the most satisfying experiences can come from thinking about the perfect strategies to not kill your enemies.
It is curious though, why so many games require killing/violence to be fun, when there is arguably a lot of untapped fun and new strategies to be had without those mechanics.
Completely agree, it's surprising more games don't reward alternative outcomes to melees.
I've been fascinated by the consumption of violent content in general over the last few years, but I struggle to find good reading on the topic, and my usual internet hangouts haven't been super helpful (I suspect some redditors think I'm an anti-gamer by asking about research into violent content consumption).
There's plenty of games built around that these days though - look at the 0451 games which heavily reward gameplay that avoids killing (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 1, 2 + their DLCs and excellent masterpiece Prey (2017)).
I think the name of this medium undermines the discussion.
"Games" instead of the interactive experiences they are
Pretty much any heavy topic has a gamer saying "I think we SHOULD we able to have [this controversial thing] in games!" and it sounds horrible.
From the gamer's perspective it is as benign and intense as reading a book, or watching a movie, but calling it a game, VIDEOgame even - something in the minds of the population as a play thing for children, and coupling it with adult controversial peril - just won't get the message across.
Of course we aren't for censorship in mediums, which means anything goes.
I think the way this topic is framed - primarily due to the name of the medium - has slowed this discussion down.
But interactive mediums and games are different. It is hard to define a line, but in my experience you get the best of both world when proper games (those that are more natural to call games that interactive mediums) have deep messages.
For me the perfect example was (the particular run I had in) Undertale. Where if you never watched the trailer you only learn the truth at the very end.
For what I have tried of "interactive mediums" they are harder to build an emotional connection than books, movies, and games.
Debating what videogames should and shouldn't do is always going to undermine its own message with people that don't really why adults are talking about videogames
Games are made to be fun - it's not called electronic entertainment for nothing. If it's to remind you of the pain of living constantly what's the point of playing them?
Games are made to be entertainment, and like any other genre of entertainment (literature, movies, television, plays, etc.) they can encompass the entire range of emotion and experience, not just "fun."
I think it's a sign of the medium maturing - more adults are playing and demanding more complex experiences than just collision detection and pattern recognition can provide.
> more adults are playing and demanding more complex experiences
Where do you see that? The same genres of games are as popular as ever. At best you can say a niche is forming but that's about it. Nobody is "demanding" anything.
It seems to me that a "niche" doesn't form unless there's a demand for it. I've seen enough indie games with "adult" themes like That Dragon Cancer and Papers Please to lead me to believe somebody is looking for games like that.
I don't think that's a market in the sense that you mean it. It's more akin to "curiosity". Something stands out of the rest so a certain % of people will want to try it. And then, come back to normal games afterwards. For example, I know a bunch of people who played Paper Please (including myself) and enjoyed it, and then returned to play what they have been playing for x years before. It did not change their gaming habits.
Video games can be a form of art. Art is not always "fun". But even so, why is being honest about death equivalent to being reminded about "the pain of living"? Death can also encompass experiences of heroism, mystery, even beauty, and much more. It doesn't have to be nihilistic or cynical.
Hey, Rakuen was plenty of fun, even if it is a little weird for an RPG to talk so much about the Kanto earthquake and tsunami. It actually makes sense that you can't access an area yet because of flood damage.
Some games do explicitly investigate death, but they are far from the norm. One I found quite touching was "To The Moon", which is a quirky but surprisingly emotional story around the death of an old man, and his lifelong struggles and regrets. It's short, but well worth a look (as is the sequel).
I think this type of narrative-driven investigation of a complex and uncomfortable topic is something which games can do extremely well. But few games attempt it. I wish more did; it adds a level of depth and intimacy which I haven't experienced with other media such as books or film (though some came close).
Some games have done a great job of conveying complex emotions. Metal Gear Solid 5 - The Phantom Pain, for all its faults, either inadvertently, or through genius, managed to deliver the feeling of "Phantom Pain" by launching an incomplete game. By pitching the installment as the end to a 25 year old epic saga, the game simply ends with a seemingly unsolvable problem.
Earlier installments also killed off characters (The Boss, Big Boss) in tragic fashion.
The Last of Us & Final Fantasy VII also had some good plot points that dealt with tragic deaths.
A friend of mine who's a lifelong fan of MGS says he always gets phantom pain when someone brings Phantom Pain up. A tragedy to see the series wrap up like this.
Not to make light of this but we could say that more romances should be honest about love too.
Fiction (and games are a form of fiction) separate parts of life from their context so that we can experience them by themselves. It's always going to have appeal.
I love hardcore modes of video games. I once made it to The End in Minecraft on hardcode mode and as I materialized on the platform near the island the Ender dragon swooped over, knocked me off and that was it. Quite hilarious! But I also play full loot PvP games that are just basically unloved by the mainstream video game player. It is too much loss for most.
I distinctly recall speaking at length to a Buddhist monk about the "dharma" potential of games, in the early 90s. This monk was quite literate in religious teachings, and also a good desktop publisher with his Mac. Guess what - lots of "death" in Buddhism !
I wonder if there's any Buddhist metaphors to a game like Devil Daggers. You're caught in an infinite cycle of life, chaos, suffering and death, and the only way to end the cycle is to cease your "desire" to play.
They obviously shouldn't. Games should feel worth playing. If your video games confront you with little other than heavy-handed suffering porn, any random real life activity will surely beat them. "death" is abstract in video games just as it is in chess. The purpose of this is to encourage exploration of danger without its very real drawbacks.
It doesn't make much sense to expect this from games. They're not "honest" about anything else, like the skills and effort required to accomplish something and getting many/infinite tries for everything. Games are pure escapism and suppression and shouldn't be expected to address real life issues in any constructive way.
Almost nothing is pure escapism. Most games that have little plot or content have a deep social nature (fortnite, LoL, online Call of Duty).
Also being "honest" or "constructive" does not mean being "heavy". The best stories almost always leave lasting life lessons, in this regards games are not different from any other popular medium in the history of humanity.
This is exceptionally callous way of looking at things. Video games are certainly a medium for discussion: "Papers Please" is a discussion point on legal immigration for example. (Its not true across the board: "Prison Architect", is NOT a discussion point on prisons).
I'm not one to play "political" games, but IMO, they are no different than political or personal movies, poems, or letters. Video games are just one more medium of which society can use to connect and communicate with other people.
Have you played the "This is fine" flash game? Its actually a deeply personal + political discussion point as well.
The argument is that the article has nothing to do with gaming. The author just happens to be a game developer, and so this is their outlet to deal with their grief and/or guilt. The text itself talks about games, but that's not really the topic being discussed; they're just advocating for others to pay attention to their cause.
^ Also an exceptionally callous way of looking at things.
It is a discussion just by its setting. Into it you can read clues on how the author or the community perceive some stuff. But it is not meant in any specific way to communicate a point, or to be a critique or prisons, or even to just make you think.
It does not make you feel bad when you slaughter inmates, it does not try to portray them as people; not even as dehumanized people, this kind of analysis is just not in the game.
(Disclaimer: I played it a while back, maybe it changed from the last time I saw it)
The author is arguing that death is a fertile and mostly unexplored field to be explored by video game devs/writers, not that people should stop creating and playing fun fantasy games. His conclusion explicitly states this:
> I honestly believe that there’s room for everything within games. I’ve not hung up my assault rifle just yet. But I found genuine catharsis in making and playing videogames that deviate from safe themes to examine challenging subjects. Something as messy and complex as death has begun to make a least a little more sense.
I'm cynical enough to have gotten a similar vibe from the article. People tend to go through life never giving a second thought to others' misfortunes and suffering: disabilities, cancer, suicide, etc. Then someone they love is affected, and suddenly it becomes their lifelong "cause"; every waking moment is spent trying to make others pay attention to a topic they themselves turned a blind eye to for years because it never affected them directly. A new charity fundraising event every other week (and repeatedly harassing family/friends/coworkers for donations); or becoming a speaker who travels to "share their wisdom" - but nobody is listening because, just like the speaker's own past self, their audience won't care until they are themselves touched by the same tragic event.
tldr; Advocating to get others to give a damn about something that will be experienced by a minority of people falls on deaf ears, because people really don't - and won't - care about something until it affects them personally.
Fire emblem is a good example of this. It’s a strategy game where you have about 30 characters who permanently die when killed in any battle. Most players just restart each battle until deathless runs are achieved- either due to emotional or practical concerns. So, when someone dies, it’s not sad, it’s annoying.
You also lose empathy if a character dies due to unforeseeable consequences of choices or shitty AI performance.
Legacy board games address these problems well. Because the state of the game is irreversibly driven forward by physical mutation of the game, it forces you to commit to your fortune and errors. I hope we see more of these games made. I haven’t seen this model used anywhere, but I could imagine a video game where you buy the right to do one irreversible play through of a story mode, cloud saved on their systems so you can’t manage the data yourself.