Super Dodge Ball, it turns out, is a bloodsport. The player is meant to play until every member of one of the teams is dead. As a little kid who had spent some time on a dodgeball court, this felt unsettling and more than a little bit sad. I was only six years old, and an 8-bit dodgeball had knocked loose my sense of mortality. But when you're six, a new video game is a new video game, so I played through the discomfort.

In the years since my incompetence ended the life of that virtual athlete, I've experienced seemingly every conceivable manner of in-game death. I've crashed planes and fallen into vats of acid. I've been shot into space. I've been decapitated by more things than I could possibly count. (I've even died of old age.) My deaths have both caused and prevented the end of the world. Experiencing death is a cornerstone of nearly every video game above a certain scope and popularity level. Which, given the informality (occasionally even levity) with which games tend to treat death, feels strange.

When a player dies in a video game, they experience death in first person (as in, via the player surrogate), in real time (as in, not as a flashback or flash forward), and as a direct result of their actions. In many games, this happens almost constantly, with death having almost no practical consequence. In other games, when a player's character dies they die for good, and the player is forced to continue with a different surrogate. The second case is unusual enough that what would otherwise be the world's most unnecessary portmanteau--"permadeath"--was coined to describe it.