A while ago I played Limbo on my iPhone. I played it with a friend over the course of several weeks. The most thought provoking part for me was the elongated death scenes. I was often so eager to move on after a failure (and there were many failures) that I got impatient with the animation. Every time I died, I had to watch my character be impaled, or sink, or drown… The animations were intricate and individualized and beautiful. Clearly a lot of attention was paid to the death scenes and they were important (in a morbid way). After a few occurrences my own irritation became obvious to me and the lightness with which we take death and failure in video games. With a single minded commitment to completing the puzzle, and given the opportunity to immediately restart and often not deal with the consequences of failure… games that force the viewer to experience death in a slow and (slightly inconvenient way) really interrupt the gameplay and for me make me think of the incongruousness in experiencing failure in games.
