Game death and someone else gaining a kill, rather than you repeating a level

You know, I think there's maybe something to stuff like quake live or other FPS shooters in how you die so often as part of regular play.

I mean, compare that to an RPG - how often do you die in them? It's typically pretty rare.

And it's not even the concept of dying that's really important - it's that you die and someone elses score goes up. You can't go to town and rest that off. You can't drink a healing potion and make that go away. Thier win count keeps going up.

But that's drifting on a little - the main thing for this blog entry is, there's a sense of vulnerability, of not having a clean slate in terms of winning. There's always a black mark to clean up.

And the way you lose is alot different - in alot of platform games you go all the way back to the begining of a level. In a FPS you just respawn in a different spot. This facilitates the ability to lose a heck of alot more than repeating the same ground over and over again. Some of the games I've made recently are repeat the level types and I'm wondering about it now...

There's something else to it as well, I'm going to mull it over further...