The penalty of death in games (part 4)

Respawn timers are another method of punishing a player, making the player wait a preset amount of time before he can rejoin. This type of penalty is common in first-person shooters, and has been tried in action-RPG's. This method seems employed more often in games where player deaths will be frequent, so waiting in a high-energy game can break a player's rhythm just like a time-out can throw off a team's momentum in the NFL. The downside to this approach is that some find it incredibly annoying and deaths are made to feel “cheap” without a more serious punishment, which gives credence to the theory that zero penalties for death will discourage most gamers from playing. Another common method of punishment, often used in RPG's and MMORPG's, is the respawn location. In this scenario, a player will restart at a distant location from where he died, forcing him to journey all the way back to continue from where he left off. This method is sometimes combined with the loss of equipment and/or money, usually deposited on the player's “corpse” from his previous death. Surviving the journey back to one's corpse without equipment can be difficult, and in some games, the gear on the corpse is available to other players who might steal it. All of these punishments reverse the time a player has invested in the game, either by requiring meaningless treks across the gamescape, or removing hard-earned equipment and money. I don't know about you, but I don't have as much time to play games as I used to, so if a game cancels out my time investment, I'm going to move on to a game that doesn't.