Wherein Hooded breaks out a few modded gaming terms and examines them, just in time for Sunday services. 
 
The use of the word death was the very first schism between common culture and game culture that I was aware of. I still remember hearing on the radio explaining that when kids said "they died," they were just talking about video games. It piqued my interest; I'd done the same thing without even realizing it. I'd "died" countless times, and I'd describe it as such to others. It'd never occurred to me how absurd that might sound.
 
In the real world, death is the universal tyrant, driving us to distraction with its constant threats. It holds our loved ones hostage, it taunts us, it fuels our nightmares and our  hopes, and we spend most of our lives avoiding its truth so we don't collapse. Thanks to our ancestors, who pushed through despite death's grin, we carry the torch with the hope that life will be easier, or even better, for us and those in the future.
 
Death in games is rarely permanent. Even the "iron man" mode in roguelikes doesn't kill US or stop our ability to play the game, it only kills our character. (I guess an analogy would be a game you purchase once, can play as much as you want, but if your character dies you have to buy it again. Hmm... sounds like arcade games!) Here, even death is just another obstacle to surmount. It's something we deal out unthinkingly and try desperately to avoid, but we can still examine the phenomenon indirectly, as Perseus had spied Medusa.
 
We've even got "lives", something that was probably always a side-effect of the early arcade game's tension between payment and character death. Rather than tell a player "tough luck" right away, you tease them into thinking they can conquer a game through a little experimentation, allowing multiple tries. You may initially die on purpose or act recklessly to learn the rules of the world, but through multiple lives, or multiple coins, you may be able to master it; death only happens when you give up.
 
God, if only real life were that simple.
 
Even though I use the term "real life" knowing that gaming is part of common reality, there's still a sharp divide between the world we all share, and a hobby where death is a temporary setback, and a new life is awarded every 10,000 points.