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The Beginning
With “game-over” screens being introduced in arcades. These screens usually prompt after dying in the game and offer you to pay to continue or try again depending on the game. This provided a way to get video games more into our society with its competitiveness and desire to beat high scores, forcing users to spend coins to play after their defeat. This was the start of the arcade era where games were beginning to slowly take place from arcades to homes. -
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Different Approach to Gaming
These games were more story-driven and had a very clear end point but no particular time frame in which you needed to complete them given its more at-home atmosphere with consoles being introduced and starting to take over. It would still be your regular game over the screen you’re familiar with but it was not the end. These companies fleshed out their stories for you to play and immerse yourself in rather than your usual four-bit spacecraft shooting purple bug aliens from space. -
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Evolved Storytelling
Now we shifted focus on cutscenes, player choices, and dialogue trees resulting from your choices. Moving more into narrative scenarios and death playing into that whether it be story progression. These things move and strike a balance of narrative and gameplay where death sets in, that is it being used as a tool to get emotions like suspense and drama of course because if you’re invested in something to that degree you don’t want to let it go which would advise against your death in the game. -
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Conclusion and Direction
The game-over screens depend mostly on the game now, it’s no longer simply a screen with a continue it’s become catered to the audience and emotion provoking which gives the game a more serious sense of depth even after the player’s death giving it a sense of “we need you to progress the story because no one else can,” which always results in the player coming back and trying again. We now have a story to tell and a message to convey whether it be for our upcoming future or even mature audiences