This week’s game and paper on Permadeath was so interesting. I never thought about the philosophical implications of games ending forever vs you being able to start over. But I can totally see how Permadeath makes every action feel so much more consequential in a game like Faster Than Light.
Faster Than Light definitely felt like one of the Top 2 most violent games we played all quarter, and more of the kind of games that, in my mind, dominates the “gaming” industry and that made me avoid calling myself a gamer for so many years. So I cannot say it was my favorite game; unfortunately I did not enjoy it. The shooting and the violence of it felt completely inconsequential to me as a person who is moved much more by world-building and relationship-building types of games — and through sampling different kinds of games in this class is actually how I came to this realization of myself as a “gamer” identity. And I must admit — due to my procliviites as a gamer, I didn’t realise the fact of FTL Permadeath until I read the paper. To me personally, in other words, losing the game didn’t resonate either way, Permadeath or not.
But hearing how the class talked about their feelings on Permadeath was beautiful to witness. The thoughtfulness of the paper was also appreciated for me.
It’s interesting to think about how callously games usually treat “death” as simply a start-over point, which can be disrespectful to the notion of death and the seriousness of the reality of the act. It was a fact that I hadn’t pondered before, so I appreciated getting to do so through reading this paper.
On analysis, it seems as though Faster Than Light presents a “permadeath” in that it is a more intense death than in other games, since you lose all accrued powerups etc. But it isn’t truly “death” as it doesn’t restart a new life — it’s the same basic characters, ship, situation, etc. Thus, I would argue that it is not “fully” permadeath.
It would be interesting to design a game which mimics a lifelike notion of life and death– i.e. in every rebirth you are born completely anew. Ofcourse, I can see how this would be difficult to maintain as it would take a lot of time and resources to build enough iterations of the game that players would be realistically able to play a brand-new “life” at every turn. But if anything, I think this just points to another possible use case of generative AI and how it could help us produce new levels forever. I would love to see a game in the future leverage GenAI into making permadeath and the notion of life and rebirth more realistic than ever possible before.
