By Mark Brown, Wired UK

In One Single Life, an experimental indie game for the iPhone, designer Anthony O’Dempsey tries to illustrate why most games fail to evoke genuine emotions like fear or anxiety.

He first figured it out in late 2009. Writing on his website, O’Dempsey explains: “The reason I was never truly afraid of that ‘perilous’ jump in an otherwise thrilling adventure game was that deep down, I knew the worst possible consequence was having to start the level over or be returned to the nearest checkpoint.”

Games might feature leaps between skyscrapers, firefights with aliens and cliff-top dirt-bike racing, but death is never more than a speed bump or a momentary setback. When Lara Croft bungles a jump and plummets into a bed of spikes, you’re sent back a few minutes to replay her last steps.

These days, games are more forgiving than ever: Hardly any games deal with the archaic notion of “lives” anymore, checkpoints are closer together than ever and a recent Prince of Persia game simply picked you back up and dropped you off at the nearest foothold whenever you accidentally tumbled off into the abyss below.

In today’s games, your penance for failure is replaying the last five minutes. In the days of arcades, the consequence was a little higher: The machine gobbled your 50 cents and wouldn’t let you continue unless you slotted in another coin. Dempsey wanted to go one step further. “What if there was a game with literally only one life?” he asks.

That’s the deal with One Single Life, out now for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad for free. You play a tie-wearing free runner who plans to leap between two rooftops. You can practice in a simulation until you get the timing right, but when you’re on the building it’s do-or-die time.

Make the jump and you’ll get to the next stage. But if you fluff the event — jump too early and you’ll slam into the adjacent skyscraper, jump too late and you’ll trip over the edge and plummet to your death — it’s game over, forever.

(Well, unless you delete and reinstall the app, but that’d be cheating, right?)

“Like the pro footballer walking to the penalty spot in the World Cup Final, agonizing over exactly the same question, I wanted to make a game which asks: ‘Do I have what it takes when it matters most?’” O’Dempsey explains.

So, do you? Let us know in the comments below how far you got before screwing up and plunging to your death.