Games incorporate death, but most of the time you start with several lives and you can almost always get back to a (saved) previous state. It gets more difficult with a game like World of Warcraft. You can die, in a way, because the world moves on. Not being there does not mean it stops. Not being there for a long time might make you choose to start over, start a new life.
World of Warcraft is much like MySpace in this sense. Only there is no ‘end’, not death to a MySpace life. Because of the abundance of life time is perceived differently. Because life is not scarce, time is not highly valued. You can always start over! This makes it harder to get passionate about something, because it is difficult to loose it. It makes it harder to get a sense of purpose, because your trying to get what you want is not bounded by an ‘ending’. And what is meaning if you can start over and over again.
What if MySpace introduces something like ‘the end’, or death? Suppose you have only 1 life in MySpace. And that life has a certain lifespan. After you have lived your life you die. How would the life in MySpace be different from what it is now?
For one, the time spent in MySpace is much more valuable, because it is limited. If you value your time you will pay more attention to how you spend it. So spending time in MySpace must really bring you something, in life. As your lifespan will automatically consist of the familiar phases, translating to experience and status, there is likely to be more respect of ‘time spent’ as well. The elderly might be respected more because they can help the youth make more of their time. Introducing death also means introducing loss of people. Loosing someone that you have spent your (now much more valuable) time with hurts. You will be more careful with your relationships. Relationships end because life ends.
I think introducing death into communities like MySpace is necessary for the survival of this ‘format’! What the form of death will be we can only speculate…
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I do think that death exists in MySpace and that is absent in a game like World of Warcraft. You are right, that in World of Warcraft you can start over again very easily (as a matter of fact, if you get killed, you just have to fly back to your ‘corpse’, stand up and play again). Death in WoW is I think an element that determines the skills you need, or the difficulty in achieving your goals (winning, getting to the next level). So death helps you to get into FLOW.
MySpace is something completely different. It is not a game for most people, but an extension of the lives they live in the ‘real’ world. Do people make up identities in MySpace, perhaps some do, but most of the time, the pictures you see, the ‘virtual friends’ they have are real to them. People share their thoughts, the things they are doing etc, in these social networks as extensions of their daily activities. And death does occur, when the person behind the online identity dies in reality. There are multiple examples of this happening in MySpace. The spaces of these people (mostly young) become sanctuaries to their loved ones, that still leave messages behind to express their love…the person just never answers anymore. In your definition ‘death’ seems to mean, the disappearance of the online identity, in this case the disappearance of the MySpace. True, that might happen less often, because the function of the ’space’ changes.
Introducing an element of ‘death’ in MySpace, would, I think, result in just the opposite. People than get the ‘accepted’ opportunity to ‘kill’ themselves and start over again. Life will become, increasingly abundant…
i completely agree, but what if the ’start over again’ is not possible?
I don’t think the “death” is a requirement for a game or myspace, but more the possibility of failure (losing). In many games this translates to a virtual death as punishment for performing badly. MySpace already has it’s own failure, you can create a page there which gets no visits/negative feedback. (I think, I actually am not familiar with MySpace)
There are several aspects which can make a game fun, one of which is challenge, as long as there is a chance of failure there is a challenge.