On this episode (which is my longest yet), Fred Hicks and I kick off the long-awaited series on mechanics with a discussion about "points of tension," relating both to Don't Rest Your Head's Exhaustion mechanic and Mythender's Mortality mechanic. Fred starts with a wacky assertion -- that conflict is underutilized in RPGs -- and goes from there. Afterwards, Ryan brings up three things: the now-in-preorder Don't Lose your Mind (which he's proud to be the editor of), Levi Kornelsen & Amagi Games, and a new podcasting project with Paul Tevis called This Just In From GenCon. This time, he remembers the Design Watch bump.
I think the ur-example of this is the SANity mechanic in Call of Cthulhu. It'd be theoretically possible to play a whole CoC campaign without anyone losing SAN, but it'd really be missing the point.
A quasi-related concept is something more like structural conflict -- I'm thinking of games like Paranoia. There's all sorts of conflict inherent in the situation, but I'm not sure it's exactly based in mechanics, per se.
In my experience, it didn't really work for World of Darkness games I've played. But maybe that's just me.
The 'Survival is boring' thing is interesting. It seems most applicable in games where death results in the player ceasing to participate. So the options are "Do option A, or stop playing this game." Which, yeah, isn't really all that gripping.