Realistic death doesn't tie into the general character animation model because they're skeletal-based animations and not physical ones (again, fake). When rag-doll physics is employed the skeletal-based animated body is simply swapped-out in-place. It's _really hard_ to physically simulate 'a bullet going through a human stomach', and honestly there are more important things in games to focus on financially.
> the most apparent conclusion is that games are using this fatalism as a crutch, because they don't know what else to do with it.
It's sentences like these that make me think the author has completely neglected the technical and financial difficulty of game development.
Morally, the author does a great job portraying the non-gamer (read: "normal person") ideology of what death should be: special, eventful, meaningful, a thought-provoking once in a lifetime experience and conclusion to your story.
As someone whose dealt with death more in his life than most probably will in their entire life -- it's not any of those things _to the person dying_.
Death for you _is_ a binary switch, and once you're gone, you are gone. Games do a good job portraying that.
I'll end this with just one of my favorite quotes.
"Nothing" isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... Nothing..." - Aria Stark, GoT