Grief itself is a difficult process to conceptualize by digital means, where failure and bad outcomes are so easily undone. More than any passive storytelling form, interactivity empowers the player to choose whether a result is acceptable and that may include anything from modifying the game to taking his hands off the controller entirely and walking away.

via ‘One Chance’: Playing with the Notion of Irreversible Consequences < PopMatters.

The author goes through a bunch of games, concluding that none of them really present the player with undoable or irreversible consequences. That certainly is important and interesting to gamers, but I was thinking how being a heavy game player, especially when a person is young, might form mental frames where shooting someone didn’t seem like it could have deadly consequences. Hmm.