About a year and a half ago I helped bring four of the world’s top game developers — Cliff Bleszinski, David Jaffe, Harvey Smith and Will Wright — together for a roundtable discussion.

We aired it online and later on MTV2. Harvey joked to me in advance that the conversation would resemble the kind of “nerd chat” game developers have all the time. And, I suspect it did.

But it also got more serious than I expected it to, especially when Harvey talked about the meaning of death in video games. Spinning out of a talk about creative freedom, he said:

I would like to make a game that explores our relationship with death, culturally and intimately. I would like to make a game with one player character that is in different phases of his life. So in the early mission he’s the five year old boy who… finds his dog dead in the back yard. And he’s trying to understand what has happened. Later he’s the teenager who’s grandfather died. Later he’s the middle-aged man whose wife died. Eventually he’s the old doddering man whose son died. And all of these things are about the different ways in which we experience death

The average video game has a thousand deaths in them and yet none of them are deep or real or intimate at all. And death has influenced my life a great deal. My mom died when I as six. My dad killed himself. And so I’ve got all this death in my background that I’ve had to overcome. And that as an artist is the sort of thing I would like to work on and no one will pay for it.

That’s the statement that I recall most often from the ”nerd chat.” It revealed how personal and how powerful games could be. It also suggested games’ limits. Watching the clip you’ll see David Jaffe raise legitimate concerns about whether Harvey’s idea could work as a game. I go back and forth on that.

The statement also struck me as an extraordinary indictment of games, a one-star review for a medium that has managed to convey little of the potency – little of the emotional heft – of one of the concepts it most commonly presents.

Video games, I believe Harvey was right to suggest, don’t convey the impact of death very well. I’ve come across few games that do. In fact, I’ve only come across one that makes gameplay-driven death hit hard. Of all things, it’s a Nintendo strategy game series. It’s “Fire Emblem.”

So I was alarmed when I learned at the Nintendo media summit earlier this month that one small change being made to the American version of the next “Fire Emblem” might undermine the very thing I praise in this series.

“Fire Emblem” is a strategy series. It began in Japan on the original Nintendo in 1990, but only made it to the U.S. in recent years, first with the 2003 Game Boy Advance game “Fire Emblem,” a 2005 GBA follow-up, a 2005 GameCube game subtitled “Path of Radiance,” and next month’s Wii game, “Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn.”

The GBA games first impressed me in the way they handled life and mortality. They did so without offering complex video cut-scenes. They rendered warriors upon battlefields as sprites upon simple 2D maps. The games played like complex chess, not unlike the “Advance Wars” and “Final Fantasy Tactics” series. I marched each unit square-by-square, picking where they would stand and who they would attack. It was simple, but deep. With little production garnish I cared about the games’ characters and I would be devastated when one of them would die.

I wouldn’t cry, mind you. And I’m not saying that because I’m a tough guy, but to emphasize that the “Fire Emblem” games were really no better than any other game in making you feel the emotional despair of someone’s departure from this world. But the games have been exceptional at conveying the impact of loss, the sudden presence of void. They do that by attaching dire consequence to every move you’ve made as the game’s battlefield general. In many other chess-like turn-based strategy games you can replenish any units that you march into harm’s way with new reinforcements. In “Advance Wars,” for instance, you usually can just build a few more tanks to replace the ones you just got blitzed. In “Final Fantasy Tactics,” you can restore an unconscious ally with a potion either during battle or once a skirmish ends.

In “Fire Emblem,” however, a character knocked out on the battlefield is essentially gone from the game. He is dead, and unlike in those other games or in super-hero comics, dead means dead (well, just about, as I’ll get to in a minute). The games have an auto-save feature that overwrites the player’s progress after each command. So if I send my Pegasus Knight to a quadrant of the map and that move gets her killed by an enemy archer, I can’t load up an earlier save file and re-do the turn. I can’t activate an un-do function. The move I just made is part of my single save file. It’s locked in. So I have to live with her death as well as the knowledge that she died because, when it was my turn to issue orders, I made the wrong decision and sent her to her doom.

The loss of a “Fire Emblem” character is even stronger because a relationship of sorts develops between the player and each of them. In the series, each character is leveled up by every successful action you make them take in every battle you enter them in. I might have been skillfully sending the Pegasus Knight into six previous battles, avoiding archers each time and gaining her valuable skill points by using her for strikes on enemy swordsmen. I might have been shoring up her weaknesses, gradually boosting her stats turn by turn. And then, just like that, she’d be gone from my game. She’s be gone because I made a bad call.

“Fire Emblem” games offered only one way to restore a dead character. The player could re-start their mission. This was a fine option if you were only 10 minutes into a battle. But having reached a mission’s 30th minute or 60th – having selected dozens of deeply thought move — the will to un-do it all just to bring back one character would diminish. I’d start these games confident that I’d do whatever it took to keep all my characters alive. But I have beaten three “Fire Emblem” games, and, each time, I reach the moment when I just have to accept that the deaths will happen, that I occasionally call a bad play and don’t have the time to re-start and keep everyone alive. I learn to accept the consequences, and it is painful each time.

At the Nintendo summit two weeks ago I was told that the new Wii game, set for release in the first week of November, will be tweaked from its Japanese original. Nintendo is adding the ability for players to manually save their game in the middle of battle, which will allow them to re-load a turn if it goes awry. I’m sure I groaned when a Nintendo representative told me this. He told me that he initially felt the way I did, but said that he had been reasoned with. This addition would make the game more accessible, he had been told and was now telling me. And, by the way, you didn’t have to use it.  

But wasn’t the finality of “Fire Emblem”’s system key? This design tweak introduces temptation, which essentially undermines it. I don’t think I can just decide to avoid using it. I can’t show that much discipline. As a gamer, I am supposed to find the fastest routes, the quickest exploits. If saving before each turn and re-loading that turn if it didn’t turn out the way I hoped is an available option, how can I not take it?

Nintendo’s game about death now seem that it will be just like any other game. Almost. The word is that the game’s “hard” mode will still operate under the old rules. That’s good news at least.

Until Harvey Smith gets his way, that’s my best bet for games to have an impact in this most unusual — and not necessarily fun — way.

(For the record, people with whom I’ve discussed this idea before tell me to try out “Steel Battalion” on the original Xbox as well as the PC role-playing game “Planescape Torment.” I will get to them in due time. Please suggest any other games that might help me explore this issue.)