This past weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, which has outgrown its webcomic roots to become one of the top video game conventions in the nation, hosted a a Q&A panel addressing the new possibilities for storytelling in games afforded by advances in technology.

Titled “Once Upon a Time… Storytelling in Games Today,” the panel consisted of Dave Grossman, creator of The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, also of LucasArts, and Sly Cooper developer Nate Fox. Moderated by Chatterbox Radio’s Alon Waisman, the three developers addressed a number of interesting points, including user created content, linear and dynamic narratives and AI involvement, all of which are quoted in Gamasutra’s coverage of the panel.

One of the most interesting and most often undiscussed subjects visited by the panel involves death in games, which is ironic because only an absolutely infallible gamer could avoid it. All of us have led our protagonist into the gaping maw of death only to have him spat out in shame, perhaps minus one of his collected “lives,” and sent back to face the barely-surmountable odds once more.

“I think the death of the protagonist is just one of those things where the belief has to be suspended. I think in games people just don’t think about that. You don’t want to kill people to introduce frustration, I think death will just be one of those languages of our medium that people just don’t think about,” commented Gilbert.

Death is so common in games that it becomes mundane. That demoralizing exclamation of “Game Over” loses any significance it holds in real life, loses any significance at all beyond annoyance–all it takes is a quick tap of the reset button to start anew. However, the protagonist’s death is not without its repercussions.

“Interruption of the narrative is much more important to me than anything else,” said Grossman. “I don’t like what happens when you have to restore from a saved game. I try to avoid it.”

Reloading from a save is basically telling the player that he conducted the narrative incorrectly. The game pulls the player out of the story, turns back the pages, and tells him to do it over and to do it right. Tragedy becomes remediable, but when it does strike, it’s much more violent than in the narratives of other media.

The player spends hours alongside a game’s characters–investing time in improving them and sometimes even creating, changing or becoming them. Because of this long period of proximity, tragic events surrounding the protagonists become all the more shocking, as is evidenced by that memorable death in Final Fantasy 7.

Grossman encountered the precariousness of implementing tragedy when working on Bone and the Great Cow Race. “It’s spelled out in the book that your character must lose the cow race at the end,” he said. “How do we make it important to play when you have to lose? We made it that it was important to survive during it, not so much to win.”

In most gaming experiences, protagonist has to win and has to survive–engaging gameplay supplants engaging storytelling. Hopefully, creative developers will find cunning new ways of injecting tragedy into their story without sacrificing the gameplay.