You emerge into daylight. Before you, massive steps ascend toward the clouds. You reflexively scale them. Below, a large pipe juts out of the rocky valley, and a carnivorous plant peers out of its opening.
When you fall into the valley, the plant has vanished into thin air.
"WELCOME TO WARP ZONE!" reads the message appearing in its stead. Below the text is a big number "1." The pipe is an escape from this world. But it's a faulty escape -- the pipe goes backwards, to World 1-1, and your reckless exploring has trapped Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom's plumbing system.
You're afforded one other option: On the other side of the pipe is a hole in the ground. You have played the Mario games enough to know that this hole leads only to death. But unlike every other hole you have run and jumped over, this one is an invitation from the creators to suicide. You know that by killing yourself, you can avoid this pipe trap by having yourself resurrected at the start of World 3-1. It's a chance to start over and find the right way out. But you're not really conditioned to kill yourself.
A former coworker of mine, who remembered this esoteric suicide scenario from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, once told me that the offering blew his young mind. As Mario, we have always been able to kill ourselves by letting the timer reach zero. But that's passive, not active, suicide.
The vignette raises questions about the way that games treat life and death -- questions that still haven't been answered. Does a surfeit of lives cheapen our notion of life, rendering it as easily dispensable as coins or bullets? Or is the cycle of life, death, and resurrection a rich platform for contemplation?
Speakers at the Game Design Challenge during the 2010 Game Developers Conference acknowledged that games seem to trivialize life. According to Portal designer Kim Swift, deaths in the average game are "passing inconveniences" that signify imminent load times -- rather than, say, themes of tragedy, passage, or endings.
For the event, titled "Real-World Permadeath," Swift and other designers imagined games that would address the actual -- or permanent -- death of a human being. Erin Robinson and Heather Kelley based their Last Game & Testament on the process of will creation; Jenova Chen's HeavenVille reinvented Facebook as an extended eulogy to the deceased; and Swift's Karma had her playing through the days leading up to her own hypothetical death.
Each game distinctly resembled a ritual, as if in petrified response to the subject of real death. Robinson and Kelley's was arguably more utility than game; Swift's was unremittingly somber. Only Chen's winning entry managed to be playful. Implicit in the permadeath challenge was the idea that, by their nature, traditional games -- where killing is impulsive and dying is inconvenient -- do not perceive death. An authentic death in a game must be a real one that occurs outside the game, for whatever dies in a game is as inconsequential as the aftermath. That includes you.
It's illustrative, then, to dismantle gaming moments such as the suicide cliff in World 3-1. These moments, often buried in the mechanics of gameplay, confront you with your avatar's own mortality. What happens when your violence is turned on yourself? What does your extra life mean at that point?
