I have difficulty coming to a firm decision on this. So in lieu of actually voting, I'm going to present some case studies:
*
Contra DS. The player dies routinely to skip even very short pauses, since dying lets you "jump" over long gaps.
*
Gradius. A death is used here because the fully-powered-up ship prompts the game to make a boss fight last longer; dying and resetting the ship to baseline is faster than the longer bossfight.
* The current Metal Slug runs. Deaths are used to restore the players' grenade supplies, to spawn heavy machineguns (available when the player continues), and to change the active characters (purely cosmetic change). Additionally, dying in Metal Slug X allows a few segments where the players must shoot down an incoming train to be skipped.
I'm fine with the deaths in the first two, but not so much for the last, and I'm trying to rationalize that.
In Contra, the deaths don't stop the action at all; the player dies and almost immediately respawns, so things keep moving. Moreover, all of the deaths
look intentional, e.g. jumping out into open space when there's clearly nothing in range to land on. Thus the issue that dying usually looks "not skillful" is averted.
In Gradius, the death is a very WTF moment for anyone remotely familiar with the game. By all rights, dying and having your ship get
downgraded should not make the run faster! Here it's the counterintuitive nature of the speedup that makes the death entertaining. And though it's harder to make an intentional-looking death in Gradius without losing time, the player dies to something that could have trivially been avoided had they been trying at all.
In the Metal Slug games, in contrast, the deaths
don't look intentional. They look like the player was too focused on attacking to notice an incoming bullet until it was too late. Obviously it's difficult if not impossible to make an intentional-looking death that doesn't lose time here, but that, combined with the lengthy delay before the player respawns, combine to make the deaths look bad strictly from an aesthetics standpoint. Add in the fact that the deaths make the player
more powerful as opposed to less (Note that dying in Contra reduces you to the peashooter) and the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Does this generalize to some kind of arcade vs. console rule? I don't know for sure, but I'm leaning towards no, despite that earlier I was pushing for the judges to come out with an official rule. Sorry guys!
I'm sure there are console games (that aren't ports of arcade games) where dying restocks your supply of smartbombs or gives you a limited-time power boost. Would we frown on a player who makes use of deaths to speed up bossfights? What if they used a continue to "restock" their deaths? I think we'd run into the same entertainment vs. speed debate without even having to consider the coin issue that arcades add in.
So in short, I'm on the side of entertainment, wherever it happens to lie. I
suspect that in most cases arcade games will be more entertaining to me if they don't add extra coins; so far that's proven to be the case (barring obvious exceptions like SDR's excellent fighting game runs) but we have a very small sample size as yet. That doesn't mean they'll be more entertaining for everyone, though; entertainment is a fairly personal thing. Which is a big reason why I'm having trouble voting; it feels like my trying to dictate to other people what they should enjoy.
