Gaming is getting more attention these days, and it's not all negative! NYTimes has taken a look at gaming and dieing, including in SWG and EQ. I copied a couple tidbits to entice you to read the entire article.

Mr. Humble decided to make changes to EverQuest in 2001 after months of internal debate and at least one sleepless night. At 4 a.m. one wintry day, hours into a game session, his character died. "I couldn't log off because I needed to get back to my corpse before I logged off or else my corpse would decay and I would lose all my stuff," Mr. Humble said. "That's not fun. That's when I decided, you know what, we're going to modify this."

I remember those days in EQ and now experience the following in SWG.

In the world of online games, the EverQuest penalty is still pretty severe. Star Wars Galaxies, set in the science fiction universe imagined by the movies, has a much lighter penalty: characters that are killed can "spawn" at specific safe areas, with their equipment somewhat damaged but otherwise intact. "It's by no means a huge punishment," said Haden Blackman, producer of Star Wars Galaxies for LucasArts. But Galaxies exempts characters from any death penalty if they are killed by other players rather than by computer-generated monsters, to create an incentive for players to take one another on, Mr. Blackman said.

You can read the entire New York Times article here.