
Death. If you're reading these words, the chances are you've killed enough people to depopulate several galaxies over the years, whether up close and personal with a machete, or with a casual flick of the wrist from some orbital weapons platform. You've died hundreds, thousands, possibly millions of times, learning from your mistakes, finally facing retribution for driving a tank through a city centre for no better reason than that you could, or simply finding out what would happen if the evil overlord said "Can you think of any reason I shouldn't kill you?" and you answered "Er… no." The result of all this death is that by and large, we're completely oblivious to it. For the most part, it's a design convenience rather than anything emotional, a way to represent both failure and for a designer to retain control over the simulated world. Much like having three lives is simply shrugged off as the way things are (to the extent that when David Braben and Ian Bell created Elite, its... -
Amber