Death matters: understanding gameworld experiences

This paper presents a study of the staging and implementation of death and the death penalty in a number of popular MMOG's and relates it to players' general experience of gameworlds. Both game mechanics, as well as writings and stories by designers and players are analysed and discussed. The preliminary study shows that the death penalty is implemented much in the same way across worlds; that death can be both trivial and non-trivial, part of the grind of everyday life, and of the creation of heroes. In whatever function it serves, death however plays an important part in the shaping and emergence of the social culture of a world, and in the individual player's experience of life within it.