When you hurt yourself in reality you feel pain to let you know that you have hurt yourself. In a video game, do the characters feel pain? Yes they do. But in a video game they make a noise to let the player know your character is hurt...or blood appears on the screen...or they yell...or they fall over...or they blow up!
Imagine that you are walking along and step onto a sharp object and as soon as you did you would see in your vision a health bar indicating how much health you had left, how much you had in total.
How cool would that be? You would know whether or not you needed to eat and since you wouldn't be hungry (unless that was a game mechanic) you would only need to eat in order to refill your health bar not your hunger (unless there was a hunger bar...then it would become the...hunger games hahahaha get it?)
In Castlevania you would whip a wall and a piece of roast would appear and as soon as you walked into it it disappeared and you were given more health. Now unless your game life is made that way, that won't work when you see food.
Your health bar could be any type - actual coloured bars that change in colour, a percentage out of 100 that slowly goes down to zero or it could be a visual animation.
In Call of Duty when you get injured there is no energy bar or similar indication of how much health you have left. The screen gets bloodier and bloodier the more you get hit and eventually you die because you are hit too much.
However if you go somewhere to hide from enemy fire and attack you can regenerate your health slowly until you are ready to jump back into the fight.
So...what happens when you die?
