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Analysis: Video Games' Regeneration Station
by Andrew Vanden Bossche
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October 22, 2009
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[In this column, writer Andrew Vanden Bossche discusses careful health management in two high-profile games, Half-Life 2 and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, offering a look at self-salvation as a key game mechanic.]
Live forever or die until you do. Nobody wants to die, but death is inevitable.
Death is when you drop the controller and sigh - or fling it across the room. Frustration is the consequence of loss. It means starting over, acknowledging failure, and trying to learn from your mistakes.
Most games that have you take on someone's life also have a way to measure it, a short space between life and death often called a health bar. In whatever form it takes, it is a measure of how many mistakes the player can make before having to start over. It’s a simple concept, but it can lead to some rather complex player choices and is often fundamental to the pacing of an entire game.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Half Life 2 are different games in many respects but one thing they have in common is tightly controlled pacing centered around the loss and recovery of health.
While Ninja Gaiden uses a regenerative health system and Half Life 2 uses a more traditional system of scattered health items, the different systems create a surprisingly similar feeling of tension and require similar feats of endurance from the player. Both use health to determine how skillful a player has to be at staying alive and both force split-second critical thinking.
No More Quarters
Health is seeing some of the same sorts of changes that lives and continues did when videogames moved from arcades to home systems and designers had to rethink the utility of that system now that players no longer needed to exchange money for life. As regenerating health becomes more widespread, it is offering new possibilities for designing how health is handled, and what system best serves the pacing needs of a particular game.
Regenerating health is most commonly associated with the run and hide cover system common to first and third person console shooters, but it has other applications as well. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 may have regenerating health, but it because this regeneration doesn't occur during combat, it doesn’t encourage this sort of behavior. NGS2 actually plays more like a game with static health for these reasons.
The static model of scattered health packs at determined intervals, popular in games such as HL2, requires the player to survive a specifically determined amount of combat before getting the opportunity to heal. It’s an informal checkpoint system, in contrast to NGS2’s formal health system that heals the player after every fight but retains permanent damage that is only healed at save points.
A Life or Death Tempo
In practice the different systems create similar pacing, with differences shaped to the unique nature of each particular experience. In HL2, medkits are there to give players a reason to explore and investigate their environment. HL2 makes physically picking up the health items part of the gameplay. This makes the world more interactive, a natural progression for game that had so much care placed in its physics engine. Tangible health helps bring the world around the player to life.
NGS2, on the other hand, is almost exclusively action based, even more so than the Xbox 360 original. There is so little exploration in the game that it would be a pointless task for the player to pick up health after combat. NGS2 does have some health items hidden in nooks and crannies, but they aren’t really required and of course are not the only way of restoring health. NGS2 is less a living world and more an action movie. It comes to life through cinematic camera angles and fast paced action, both of which play poorly with exploration.
Tension
HL2, or any other game based around a static health system, is really only regeneration by a different name. It’s simply that regeneration only occurs when the designers want the player to. In HL2 it creates a tension of endurance. You know that as long as you press forward, there will be more health, but you don’t know when or where it will be. You don’t have to stop and wait, but you do have to be careful. HL2 wants players to constantly move forward, but it doesn’t let them get overconfident.
NGS2 has a combination of permanent and temporary damage that allows the player some leeway in damage taken but still penalizing sloppy behavior on an individual fight. Each encounter with enemies is treated as a discrete fight, at the end of which the character is healed. However, each attack does a small amount of permanent damage that you have to live with until the next save point.
Without this system, it would be possible for a player to do very well or very poorly against a wave of enemies and still end with the same result. In NGS2 you can’t do anything but move forward (because of the way health is designed) but you still must be proficient at blocking and dodging.
The Psychology of Danger
The point of showing the health bar to the player is to provide information about how much danger you are in. It’s an important tool for making judgments and weighing risks. A single, massive health bar would make the first fights boring and the last ones exhausting. The system as it stands provides a more varied experience of ups and downs, reliving tension while still keeping the player on their toes.
Forcing the players to deal with low amounts of health is part of the beauty of the system. Players act differently when they’re close to death. It forces more careful behavior. For example, in HL2 low health might force you to explore new areas looking for health because you messed up and took too much damage. In NGS2, low health will encourage defensive play and might force the player to use items to get out of trouble.
Encouraging critical thinking out of players is part of the reason to have health in the first place. With the combination of permanent and temporary damage, you experience it nearly every fight, and as your permanent health decreases, you experience it more often. It also forces the player to be able to perform well against sustained challenges. Screw up too much on the first fight, and you won’t be able to survive the next.
Who Wants to Live Forever, Anyway?
There’s a lot of leeway here, but also a fair amount of strictness. It’s not enough to just survive. This pacing, these demands made on the player, the minimum requirement of performance, all of this is a direct consequence of the health bar. A huge amount of gameplay is defined by a deceptively simple system. In fact, I often found from my own personal experience that I took drastically less damage at low health than at full. At full health, it’s easy to get lazy, but when it’s life or death you simply play better.
Enemy design, and the damage of their attacks, the number of waves between an end of combat heal, and the number of encounters that lie between one save point and the next all have to be carefully paced to make this system worth anything at all. So in this sense, the bar itself is rather simple, and works effectively because of the design around it.
However, this design is not really any different from a health pack model. It’s simply an automatic restoration rather than a manual one.
This design is based on emotional feedback. The serenity of landing a constant stream of hits. The satisfaction of eliminating an enemy. Wariness over surrounding foes. Frustration over being hit and having a combo interrupted, which a block could have avoided. Confidence at high health, fear at low health. Tension during battle, relief afterwards. All this, through a little blue bar.
[Andrew Vanden Bossche is a freelance writer and student. He has a blog called Mammon Machine, which discusses videogames and how he couldn’t eat for a week after playing Saya no Uta, and can be reached at AndrewVandenB@gmail.com]
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Your personal experience related to the "lazy" play when health is high and cautious play when health is low, hints at an old design challenge in equating the game's health system to a player's RealLife(tm) well being. In recognizing that players will generally be more reckless with their avatar than their actual body, designers have explored ways to make this relation more immediate, to the end that the player will be wary of taking any damage. Lionhead's ideas of using our propensity for vanity, in making damage that you do not attend to translate to visible scars on your character, is one example of an attempt to overcome this challenge. Another tactic would be to offer far too little or no opportunity to regenerate ("You Only Live Once" is a prime example), although this obviously has the potential to cause problems with player frustration. And I think someone else would point out if I did not, the infamous scene from "Never Say Never Again", where James Bond plays a fictional game called "Domination" against Maximillian Largo, and the damage is literally translated to electric shock.
It's fun to think about the ways in which an analysis like this, one that keeps the player experience in sharp focus, could inform further exploration to address the concern of "lazy" play, or rather, a deficit in cautious play. Thanks, Andrew.
To run with the idea a little more, it seems to me that "health" can be thought of as a special case of a consumable resource.
Running out of other consumable resources (e.g., mana or ammunition) simply prevents the character from taking certain gameplay actions. It otherwise leaves the character free to perform any other available actions within the game universe. Allowing (or forcing) the character to run out of some non-health consumable resource may in fact be a desirable state, in that this can heighten the tension in a set-piece or subtly guide the player to learning and using alternative tools or tactics.
Running out of health, on the other hand, traditionally results in a failure state that forces the player to reset the game universe back to some previous moment in time. That's a considerably more severe consequence, and as such requires more careful design attention to maintain the flow of fun. But this also makes it a much more potent motivational tool.
So I find it interesting to see the different ways in which developers use the strong player motivation to maintain health to achieve different gameplay goals.
Regenerative health may actually be an odd choice for an action-oriented game. Because time is considered to be "free" compared to using a precious consumable resource such as a medkit, the typical play experience in a regenerative-health game is likely to be move, fight, stand around; move, fight, stand around; repeat until the game ends. If this isn't the desired play experience, a developer in a game using regenerative healing may need to provide other incentives to persuade players to risk movement while their character's health is still low.
On the other hand, distributing health resources as tangible items (as in the Half-Life series noted by the author) encourages physical exploration. Another possibility is suggested by Cryostasis, in which health is represented as "heat." In this game, heat sources not only regenerate health but also provide light (which keeps enemies away, allowing players a breathing space) and even melt ice (which in some cases is required to enable progression to a new location).
So what are some other ways in which health management has been made a more interesting aspect of gameplay?
One example I'm thinking of is a "Vampire" mechanic (there's a mutator for the Unreal Tournament series called "Vampire") where hits drain target's health and simultaneously transfer that health to the player. I was also going to mention in my original comment implementing the loss of agency/affordance/ability as a result of being hit (which I'll admit is not the same, technically, as being a result of losing health), as in Mario's power up state reverting to the normal player state once hit. Perhaps a better example might be more realistic shooter simulations where low health translates to poorer aim, decreased mobility, etc.
There are 2 cases associated to your main types here that I'd like to get your take (and other readers' takes) on.
Item based health games often have (sometimes far too many) "Health traps." Where the exploration to get health is actually not a good idea. Trying to pick up that health pack in the middle of the room is actually a bad idea.
1.) mildest case - locked health (requires a certain skill, or item to get to). These may be a bit taunting and frustrating, but in most games are "extra helth" outside of the general design pacing of health items (I hope).
2.) tricky case - Health pack is unguarded, but in a dangerous location (clifftop, on a platform in lava that must be jumped to from a series of other platforms.
3.) risky case - health pack is guarded, so you have to risk health to get health (although you may play safer with low health, many times the trade-ff may actually leave you with less health.
4.) outright sucker bet - As Admiral Akbar says "It's a trap!" spawning bad guys, trapped room, no air, fire, big hammer, copies of David Hasselhoff movies rain down, whatever... You are going to die. That health was meant to be used in _the middle_ of the beating you are about to take... if you aren't at full health you will most likely die because you need 1.5 of your health bar to live (on normal difficulty).
When one of these shows up it usually destroys the pacing of the game for me. 1 and 2 make me stop my story and jump through hoops to be able to move ahead. 3 I can live with if it doesn't break fiction too much (why are those guys guarding a box of bandaids?... If they are guarding a medical station or hospital room.. I'll go with it. 4. I hate 4. 4 happens all the time. Too may cage fighing matches on TV or something.
Health items should also be logical and well placed. Wow there are a ton of these first-aid kits ll over the office... Why is there one in the safe? Is this guy afraid his workers are going to steal it? Why would they, apparently this is a health kit warehouse? Every crate I break seems to have a few in it. Even that crate... in the CEO's office...
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Free-regen games (like Call of Duty etc.) often suffer from "unlimited spawn syndrome." Some parts of these games have places where you must hit checkpoints etc. to stop baddies from spawning. We've got to kill the same 40 bad guys over and over (while running out of ammo) while we figure out where the checkpoints are so we can move on.
The regenerating health may (or may not) be used as an excuse to make games like this). You can't hang back and just clean the guys out and move on. A level becomes a spawn gap puzzle not a combat game. (one, two, three, dance... left, two, three, and right, two, three, grenades, fife, six, (up down up down, left right left right A B A B.. agh), two three, jump, jump, do the hokey-pokey.. oops shoulda done the timewarp... back to checkpoint)
You can usually spot these games because they are the ones, it is always wise to grab an enemy gun instead of whatever you have, because you will need to scavenge ammo on every single map within 5 mins.
Even if the baddies aren't unlimited, many regen games resort to swarms of baddies... way too often. This can destroy pacing as well. When every other room is a ton of guys coming in the windows or jumping over every fence... how many minions does this guy have? Every fight doesn't need to be the climatic season finale ...
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Health items games also tend to be item games in general. Tension is not just created by the lack of health, but the lack of ammo /armor etc. as well. the 2 tend to go well together. The most memorable game moments I have had are from games like System Shock 1, where, I had 3 pistol rounds and half health. I can hear a cyborg... and it is coming this way.
Now that I think about it, most of my memorable moments come from item based games. Not that I don't enjoy regen games, I play a lot of them, but my watercooler stories seem to all be item based.
Death would teleport player into spiritual world, which was quite the contrast to material world, health continuously repelled with bonus soul available most of time, here player was not rewarded for enemy kill, instead he has to evade and find room to teleport back to material world. A very interesting combination of 2 health sytem.