Nothing is quite as defeating in gaming as the dreaded “Continue” screen. Either you fell off a platform with one life left, or managed to roll into a grenade, the concept of death in any game seems to signify that your journey has ended and if you wish to continue you need to make that death non-canon. Please insert coins and all that.

Is it the fundamental idea that many games are a play on fantasy and ask you to live out the lives of the characters on screen? You’re essentially playing the role of the protagonist, and when they are no longer a part of the story, the story ends. Not so, says David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream, death is just the beginning. The upcoming game Heavy Rain seems to have the mechanic that allows the main character in the story to pass on through your careless mistakes and have the game continue. While not giving any particular details on the concept, whether it involves zombies, vampires or possibly Valkyries, the idea is an interesting one and brings up a lot of questions about how death is represented in a video game.

For most games, death is a penalty. It is the ultimate end for your character, and almost always has a severe negative connotation associated with it. Whether it is especially visceral with games like Resident Evil 4 where you are either subjected to a bloody, violent death or at least get enough context to hear the main character’s dying breaths, or simply just a sprite falling over with a quick, biting sound clip and a “Game Over” the end is always a jarring experience that pulls you from the game very quickly. Many games seem to get past this by adding a certain persistence to the experience, never allowing you to truly finish the context of the story. This is especially true for MMOs or online battles, which usually allow you to simply die and respawn at a different location with some penalty. Games like The Sims or Viva Piñata give you a different approach, allowing the negatives of the games to flow through that which you are tending to, whether it is a character or an animal, and live out the consequences of poor decisions through them.

While this seems all a bit existential, the concepts are out there in games. Even high-art games like Braid associate death as the final point for the game, although the time mechanics introduced seem to play with the idea of death and allow to explore other options. Games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time brought the concept of time reversal to the forefront, instead of relying on quick saves the player simply changed the flow of time to undo the decision they had made. Of course, this had limitations, ultimately resulting in situations where you did die and that concept is again the ending point. Rather than empathizing with the characters, though, it seems to bring you out of the world instead of making you think about it.

As long as games are tied to the story of a single character, it’s difficult to think that the concept of the Game Over would deviate from a mainstream concept, but the idea that Heavy Rain is taking in this case is an interesting one. Having a flowing story line that extends past the actions of a single person seems to be a concept rarely explored. While many RPGs will have you take on multiple roles, even they tend to lock down to a single set of characters who guide the story along.

In a more somber way, death is an essential part of living. Death is the final stop for many characters in the gaming world. Whether it is from drinking booze with prescription medication in Indigo Prophecy or running headlong into a goomba in Super Mario Bros., the gaming world seems ready to dish out that final curtain for anyone that deviates from the strategy they have imposed.