This week, we played Faster Than Light, a pixel-art, 2D roguelike where the player controls a spaceship fleeing rebels, trading with pirates, and navigating randomly generated sectors and events. As is typical of roguelike games, death in Faster Than Light is permanent. If a crewmember dies, perhaps due to lack of oxygen or an enemy soldier infiltrating the ship, they don’t come back. If you’re ship runs out of health, it explodes… forever. Well, at least until you reset the game.
For the uninitiated, a term like permadeath might sound overspecified: death is known for being one of the more permanent things in life. But death in video games is a broader term, and permadeath is a term used to describe the kind of death that you can’t come back from.
What other kinds of death are there? In most modern video games, death is a temporary inconvenience. Dying in video games often amounts to nothing more than a few-second delay before the player is brought back to life, only to die again a short while later. It is often used as a mechanism to manufacture danger without going so far as to end the player’s experience after their first failed attempt.
I would argue that the kind of death in roguelike games like Faster Than Light is not true permadeath. Sure, your ship explodes and the game resets, but what or who permanently died here? On your next playthrough, you’re ship is repaired and the crew is revived. You, the player, can still play the game, no? The only thing that’s really dead here is the progress you made and the procedurally generated world you were in.
The real essence behind true permadeath should be that something meaningful was lost. Maybe that’s a life, perhaps that’s a potential future that is no longer accessible, or maybe that’s losing something more abstract, such as time or memories.
A game that exhibits this heavier kind of permadeath is Minecraft, particularly in hardcore mode. Just like in a playthrough of FTL, the player spawns in a procedurally generated Minecraft world with none of the items collected from previous worlds. If you die, you cannot respawn and must start a whole new world to continue playing.
I don’t care all that much about the upgrades I accrued over the last 10 minutes of playing Faster Than Light; I can just buy them again in my next playthrough. But Minecraft worlds last on the order of weeks, months, and years of real-world time. In that time, I might have built a castle, amassed a collection of rare items, or racked up in-game achievements through hard work, creative expression, and long-term investment. If playing on a multiplayer server, I made real memories with friends along the way. You lose more than your time and progress when you die in Minecraft hardcode more; you lose something that you put a part of yourself into.
I think permadeath in roguelikes primarily exists to make finishing the game more valuable. If I can always respawn, I’ll eventually make it to the end. Having to frequently go back to the start dramatically increases the game’s length. But this death, while permanent, doesn’t really capture the meaning that real-world death holds for human beings: it’s a bummer, not a tragedy. The permadeath in FTL just doesn’t hurt the way I think permadeath should.
Bibliography:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6659156
