Is there an alternative to death in video games?

Death is the most commonly used punishment/incentive against failure in video games. However, “death” is usually nothing of the sort – it’s simply a temporary inconvenience, and a frustrating one at that, as it requires tedious repetition of parts of a level that have already been beaten to get back to the point at which you died.

Some video games have made the constant respawning more plausible (In Planescape: Torment, for example, your character is immortal and the story centers around your quest to die), and some have circumvented the need entirely (in a new game, Braid, you can simply rewind time to a few seconds before your “death”). Are there any other possibilities or alternatives to death that you folks can think of?