When game over means game over: Using permanent death to craft living stories in Minecraft

Abstract

The play style of 'perma-death' (permanent death) alters the videogame player's experience by adding harsh consequences to the usually trivial event of character death. While perma-death has a long history as a fixed constraint in certain games and genres, there are numerous cases of players self-imposing the rules of perma-death play in a broader variety of games through voluntary acts such as opting to delete a save file if their character dies. Such self-imposed cases of perma-death radically alter how the player engages with the game. In a collision of fixed affordances and player-imposed rules, the tone of the game's conventional gameplay shifts from one of experimentation to one of vulnerability. To explore how perma-death functions and how it alters the player's experience of a game, this paper looks at a perma-death experiment conducted by the author in the game Minecraft. As the project progressed, its online diary gathered a committed readership. The fear of permanent death did not drastically alter the base game of Minecraft but, as will be explored, imbued the performance of playing Minecraft with a narrative weight. Copyright © 2013 ACM.