Quote Originally Posted by Darth
How does having the player die in real life if they die in the game accomplish that exactly?

Wouldn't just killing people only if someone tried to disconnect them do that?
It would, if you viewed SAO as only an experiment for a person's body management. I can't say what else Kayaba would have had in mind for creating a death game, but I can say that death makes life that much more tense and meaningful, be it real or virtual. You can't really take life seriously if there's a respawn mechanic.

The whole ethics and psychology thing comes into it as well. Remember GGO and the guy who goes around killing people?

It's all about pushing VR to the edge and seeing what that does. I can see lots of crazy and unethical "experiments" (Nazis etc) being a mixture of "Let's do this because it's useful" and "Let's do this because we can and we find it interesting."

"That machine that murdered thousands of people" is kind of a PR nightmare that the technology would never really recover from.
Stupid dumb masses. That's what happened to nuclear powerplants, and thanks to that we've been using the same old shit for 60 years because no one wants to support it, but they can't do without. Nerv/Amusphere wouldn't suffer the same shock because you can ensure it provides no real danger, unlike nuclear explosions. There's also no real alternative to VR, unlike energy sources.