Death in the casual game

[yanuart]

Okay when I said death, I literally meant death as in dying. I'm making a game about hospital.. sim thingy with casual/semi casual gamers (kids?) targeted as the main audience and I was wondering if it's okay to include death as a part of the gameplay.
For ex: when you failed to cure a patient, the patient then dies thus you lose points or else.

My colleague told me that death can be shown in light manner or funny way to add humour to the game. Personally, I'm okay with death in fps or any other action games and I actually could think of few funny scenes involving dying patients but my moral says it's so wrong to the depict death in that way especially when we talking about a hospital/doctors theme game.

Anyway, do I worry too much ? will I miss the important element of the game ?
Let me know what you think

[revve]

There was a commercial game by Bullfrog called Theme Hospital (or something like that) that sounds exactly like what you are doing. They were targeting the same market it souds like you are doing (this game is probably 10 years old now). When you mistreated patients, they died (nothing gruesome - they'd basically fall, eyes would turn to x's and you'd see a "spirit" of them rising to the heavens). Nobody complained, it was targeted at kids and was fairly popular.

Morale of the story? Do it tastefully, and I can't see you getting complaints about it.

[svero]

Well I dont know about casual games or hospitals, but I do know that Mr. Flack of squashy has made some of the most entertaining death stuff in his platform titles.. which i guess nobody here but a few have played. Bert the Barbarian if you can snag it somewhere, has great death. So does his new game.

[turbo]

Done tastefully and especially with humour, its just fine.
What better way to increase awareness and decrease fear of the natural reality of death. :)

[mahlzeit]

People die all the time on highly successful tv shows such as ER, so I think you'll be fine. Include euthanasia and abortion and your game will get so much press it's bound to sell a few copies. ;)

[Christian]

You can avoid death if you want, you have the freedom of creating a paralel world of your desire, use this freedom! dont do a copy and paste of reality!.

Maybe you can do that the patient that isnt cured in a period of time, leaves to another hospital, if you do this way you can have various hospitals that compete between them, making the player want to be the best hopsital of all of them, makes a more clear objective to achieve too, adding challenge to the game and thus making it more fun.