I was playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 a while ago and enjoying it greatly. In my first sitting with the game I made it through the first 2 galaxies and accumulated ~30 lives. When I put down my controller and turned off the system I was feeling pretty on top of the world; however, when I started playing the next day, I quickly noticed something wasn't right. All of my lives were gone. Well, not all of them were gone, but I was back to the number that you start the game with. I was extremely disappointed. It's not as if I was going out of my way (well, not very far out of my way) to get, but I couldn't help thinking "What's the point of collecting extra lives if I don't get to keep them." It wasn't until much further in the game (Bowser's final castle if memory serves me correctly), that I finally hit a point where I exhausted my meager supply of lives and learned what purpose the lives actually have. When you run out of lives, you are forced to endure a stupid game over screen, kicked out of the level you were in, and lose your progress in the level (all checkpoints are reset). Now, this strikes me as just about as toothless as a game can get with regards to losing all of your lives, and about as worthless as it can get.
Let's contrast this to the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES. What happens in SMB when you lose all your lives? You lose the game. You can't continue any further. Is this harsh? Yes. Does it give you a very strong reason to stay alive? Certainly. So, in SMG2 the only pain we endure is the game wastes about 2 minutes + however long it takes us to get back to the checkpoint we were at. Is this harsh? Eh, more annoying than anything. Does it give you a strong reason to stay alive? Well, a little. All it does for me is make me want to quit. Am I saying that SMG2 should reset when you lose all your lives? Of course not. The game was designed to be played in multiple sittings. Losing all of your progress would invalidate. What I would suggest is doing away with the idea of lives entirely. They already have so little meaning, why not just completely get rid of them?
One of my favorite game types is the Roguelike. Now, I don't really like to play most Roguelikes, as I suck at them, but as a gameform (I don't like genre, so I'm inventing a word) I love them. One of the key features of the roguelike is permadeath (didn't invent that one, but I love the hell out of it), meaning when you die, you die FOREVER. Now, some people would (and do) get discouraged by this, but one of the other key features of most roguelikes is that they are procedurally generated. In this way, dying forever is actually a great feature as it gets to show off one of the key features of the roguelike, the dungeon generation. By randomizing the dungeon every time, one doesn't really mind all of the deaths, as you get to see new things the next time through. One of my favorite games and a real inspiration to me is Spelunky. Spelunky, if played perfectly, is a short game. Excluding the final level, the game can only take 47.5 minutes at maximum (well, unless you are really daring and good at dealing with the ghost). However, because the game is so unforgiving and the permanent deaths, the game derives much more playtime than those 47.5 minutes.
I'm not advocating permadeath in all games, but I think that many game designers need to think about death in their game in a holistic way. Does my game need death? Does death serve as more than just a temporary delay in my game? If it doesn't, what would better reinforce my core design.
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