Explicit statement of the stakes

The driving force pushing the narrative along in games is usually the protagonists preventing some bad thing. Usually some big scheme or plot, often (sometimes exclusively) just trying to survive. The player feels a need to progress. The more the player understands and is threatened by this bad thing, the stronger this need. Where games succeed or fail is often to push this onto the player.

Let's consider the death of the player in gameplay. Sometimes, you just don't care. Playing [Half life:] Opposing Force recently, I found that if I'd just saved then I wouldn't care if I died, indeed I was reckless often just running out of cover guns blazing, expecting to die. A couple of minutes later, I found myself having survived a couple of very hard encounters. I was hidden beneath a staircase reloading a shotgun and listening to the pattering of a female assassin's feet around me. The assassin could appear and fire off her gun in a fraction of a second, killing me. I managed to reload two shells just before she appeared and as she ran across me and crouched into a firing position, got her with both barrels. It was one of the most tense moments of any game I've played recently. Opposing Force has a quick save system, that at any point you can save and return to that spot if you die. Of course, I could have saved while under the stairs, but that would have made the encounter trivial and destroyed any tension.

Saving in the middle of a fight removes any threat of losing something, in this case losing progression made. Thus when playing Opposing force, I choose not to use the quick save.

You can give a constant punishment for dying- perhaps your game continually saves, and dying sends you back to where you were 5 minutes ago. Perhaps you lose a life, or money, or your character becomes uglier each time they die. This should keep a constant level of tension. An example of this would be the gameboy game Mario, where you are constantly at threat of losing a life, right from the start.

You can use a checkpoint system- reach a destination and you automatically save. This is nice as it provides a sawtooth shape graph of tension against time- as players get towards a checkpoint, they have more and more to lose, so each encounter becomes more threatening. At the checkpoint, the player can then relax. This is less mentally tiring on a player and gives a broader range of emotions for the player to experience. The highs are higher because he has lows to contras with. A checkpoint system trivialises the game just after the save, but this also lets the player mess around. With too many checkpoints, as in mass effect 2, you rarely accumulate any progress to worry about losing.

I don't care about dying for another reason. If it's too easy.Each time I die I only feel "meh, if I'd really been trying that wouldn't have happened. Also, the game got lucky there." A game will never be an exciting fight for survival if the player does not have to engage his brain.

Gameplay aside, consider the narrative of the player's life. Ignoring supposed-to-lose fights, the player is rarely sent on an impossible mission. If his mission is to kill the Russian president, then all of the Russian army, then blow up the moon, in an hour or so the player will probably have done so. Being told that the player is a supreme bad ass when there was no other option carries little weight, and can smack of macho posturing (there was no other option, so it's not surprising you managed it). Similarly, a protagonist can expect to survive a cut-scene, suicide mission or falling building. While it's comfortable to have a game roll along like a sitcom, everyone back to normal at the end of each episode, we sacrifice both threat and character development - by which I mean that many good narratives have characters who change as the story unfolds. Grand theft auto has this for most missions.

By contrast, consider the end of the game Mass Effect 2 (Spoiler Warning!). Here, the charecters who have previously led a charmed life die a variety of random, sometimes unfair deaths. The first person in my party to die was crushed in his own quarters by a girder! Not a heroic end for someone I'd come to know so well. Once my party member were falling off, I started to really fear what my happen next. You know the cliche where someone falls off a cliff and is grabbed by the hand at the last second? I've seen this a dozen times in films and it never fails to make me yawn. You guess, sub consciously, whether the character is supposed to die at that point, and work out the result. Well, the same exact thing happens in Mass Effect 2. Two characters tumble towards the brink and I'm surprised to find myself scared for them. Consider the film Jackie Brown, directed by Tarantino. In the finale, one really does not know what could happen. It's a Tarantino film, so the antagonist could easily shoot everyone in the building and walked out with the money. What could be a spectacular but never tense end to another film, by creating the notion in the viewer that the normal rules of cinema do not apply, Tarantino is able to make the finale genuinely tense.

I have experienced enough games and films to understand that if one does play by unnatural rules about who can die and when, it requires immersion breaking suspension of disbelief and removes any tension caused by threat of the negative consequence.

Finally, lets look at explicit statement of the stakes. By this, I mean that you tell the player what they are risking. This brings to the forefront of the player's mind this threat that compels them to play. However, it only works if the player understands that the threat is real. Being told something a player knows cannot occur because of unsaid rules will only cause eye rolling. However, if the player believes the threat to be real, then this is a powerful tool. Consider Ordell (Samuel L Jackson) in Jackie Brown, at the finale:

"I go walkin' in

there and that nigga Winston or

anybody else is in there, you're the

first man shot, understand what I'm

sayin'?"

This man has killed several men already. We know he is capable. We know the director could allow this to happen. It's very effective, and means in the scene that follows we know exactly what to be worried about. Without this dialogue, as the men including Ordell enter the building, were it actually a trap, Ordell killing this man would be completely out of the blue. There would have been no tension as though we know all the information laid out at the top of the paragraph, we are not thinking of the threat.

This is of particular importance in historical games. Battles which occurred in the past are less relate-able, and it's easy to feel that as it's done and decided, there was not the same passion and fear that we experience now. It's hard to imagine the emotions running through a footsoldier in say, the year 1415, being expected to engage in a fight to the death with swords and spears. I've yet to play a game that really communicated this.

Games are more engaging when there is a realistic threat that the player is aware of, and we most make every effort not to remove this threat with unsaid rules about who is allowed to die and how.