"On the one hand, this vanishing-body thing is such a blasé convention of gameplay that it's barely worth mentioning. No big deal, right? Often the designers make the bodies disappear for reasons of gameplay, because leaving all the bodies piled up is ludologically impractical: If every monster killed in World of Warcraft hung around forever, Azeroth would be so chest-deep in stinking corpses that you couldn't walk anywhere. The sheer metric tonnage of killing in our favorite games essentially..."