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Opinion: Is Death In Games Cheap?
by Richard Clark [PC, Console/PC]
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July 21, 2010
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Of those who consider video games a regular hobby, there is an experience that can be considered universal: dying, over and over again. Whether we find ourselves in an evil dungeon, space, or a desert, the primary gaming experience can be summed up by death.
At least, it can be summed up by a kind of death. Video game death stands apart from real death, not only because it's an artificial concept within the artificial construct of a video game world, but because it represents a fresh start rather than the end of the road. Within the video game, death is an opportunity for the player and an automatic reset button for the game world.
Because of this discrepancy, it's only natural to raise the question of whether death can ever be conveyed meaningfully within a game world. If so, how we might go about changing the typical death mechanic to reflect the horror and finality of death, as well as the dread that often leads up to it?
Throughout gaming's history, there have been attempts to make death seem appropriately final. Some games limit the number of deaths you are allowed, making death truly consequential but nonetheless more trivial than actual human death. Other games are even more lenient, giving the player unlimited death but imposing penalties for the failure, such as losing money or having a certain amount of in-game progress lost.
Nonetheless, these penalties don't come close to addressing a problem that becomes more prominent as games become more realistic and serious. Perhaps no genre draws more attention to this dilemma as the military shooter. In games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, death is a non-issue for the player. It comes suddenly, but is usually the result of a lack of strategic and skillful maneuvering. In other words, it makes perfect sense. The player gets a maximum of five seconds to consider an alternate way around the problem, and tries again.
More often than not, the player makes it further than they previously have before, dying again later on. They expect this death, and they expect it soon. They are not afraid of it, because they know it is par for the course, and they know that they will always come out of it unscathed, with full health and plenty of ammo.
Far Cry 2, on the other hand, makes a diligent attempt to resolve this issue by thoughtfully altering the mechanics to make death often seem sudden, chaotic, and often meaningless. There are countless times when the player feels that they have the perfect plan in place, only to be cut down before their time because of a random malaria attack, gun jam, or unpredictable enemy reaction. In addition to this, Far Cry 2’s save points are relegated to safe houses, often a good 15 to 20 minutes away from where the death occurred, making death assume a much more tragic nature than in other video games.
Recognizing that even this fell short of driving home the finality of death, Ben Abraham started a “Permanent Death” project, in which he allows himself only one life, after which the game truly is over. The experience turned out to be an insightful one, particularly because Abraham took the important step of analyzing and writing about every key moment.
Nonetheless, this is not the normative experience for the average gamer. Typically, the gamer chooses to use every life available (normally an infinite amount) and often attempts to do whatever it takes to lose as little progress as possible. The truth is this: the more finality that the gamer experiences with death, the less fun they have and the more frustrated they get.
Coming To Terms With The Inevitable Problem Of Death
It may be more helpful, then, to come to terms with player “death” as an inevitable part of the game medium itself: a tool in service of the narrative or experience rather than a part of the narrative or experience itself. When a player “dies,” he is merely not living up to the pre-ordained story in which his character is the lead. He fails to carry it out in the way it happened.
This is illustrated more literally in a game like Assassin’s Creed. A player must start over because the person being controlled never died that way. In other words, the game is saying to the player, “No, you’re messing it up, try again,” rather than, “You have died and that’s where the story ends.” This is not an ideal solution, and it won’t apply to some games, but it’s serviceable and it works with most.
So, the question becomes, yet again, in a video game, does death have meaning at all? Is death cheap? Are video games unable to convey the true weight of death if player death is not actually death at all? These questions can be answered if one considers the known experience of first person death as opposed to the known experience of having someone we know or care about die.
While our own death, as far as we can know, has no real effect on our experience beyond the act of arriving at that state, the death of others is what really affects us. After all, it’s often said that the suicide victim isn’t the one who has to live with his decision. It’s his loved ones, those that were a part of his life that are wracked with grief and guilt and faced with the finality of his decision that are truly impacted.
The Most Powerful Death Is Not Our Own
What if, as a player, we were forced to come to terms with these implications when those characters around us were to die? What if we had to wonder to ourselves if the death of a character was our fault? What if we were given the time to meditate on that death, rather than being forced by the game itself to forget the whole thing and just have fun fighting more monsters? What if we were encouraged to notice the particular absence of the recently deceased? What if we had gotten to know and love the character so much that we actually missed them after they were gone?
Games are getting there, slowly but surely. For instance, in Mass Effect 2, I lost about three people in the final act, but wasn’t sure why or whether it was my fault or a scripted result. Should I have been guilty? Was it my fault or was it just their time to die? In Left 4 Dead, the experience of arriving in the safe room without every member of your group, with the dead player berating you for leaving them to die has the potential to be both memorable and affecting, driving home both the feeling of someone's inescapable absence as well as feeling responsible for a person's death.
These in-game experiences obviously pale in comparison to real-life experiences with death, but so do films, books, television shows, and paintings. What video games can do, though, is give us a safe place to tackle the experiences head on and learn from our own reactions to those experiences. They can affect our character and ability to demonstrate empathy in very real ways. They can, most striking of all, make us into slightly different people.
Do games inherently trivialize death, with their meaningless death mechanic and their tendency to encourage gameplay that's violent in nature? No. But the danger is more prevalent in this medium, where death has the tendency to become commonplace at best and trivial at worst. It makes sense that violence be so prevalent in the medium, but it also makes sense to try and balance that tendency.
Games can short-circuit the trigger-happy nature of their game in a thoughtful way by questioning the nature of video game death, giving the player time to acknowledge it, and refusing to make death the end, in and of itself.
[Richard Clark is the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, where he often writes about video games. He and his wife live in Louisville, KY. He can be reached at deadyetliving at gmail dot com or followed on twitter (@christandpc).]
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The Assassin's Creed games show a step in this direction, although as you point out they're basically camouflaging a traditional (nonnarrative) death management system. I haven't played through Heavy Rain yet, but I've heard that game has a system in which multiple protagonists can be killed without forcing the player to return to an earlier point in the story. Of course, Heavy Rain is not really a typical game, but I think the creators of more standard styles of games can learn a few lessons from it nonetheless.
Anyway, other than that I think this article has some good insight. :)
The closest thing to that experience (for me) is the Burnout series. The game stops/resets when you crash but it's in the way one crashes does the player feel truly rewarded. The way I died made death meaningful. The resurrection after the crash doesn't cheapen the experience because the player ends up pushing the envelope in terms of crashing, literally, the player is excited about death and how they plan to achieve a glorious one.
Death as the objective...brilliant!
The same point could be made regarding the death of the supporting buddies in Far Cry 2.
An odd example is one that doesn't handle death directly, but makes most characters a non-replenishable resource. I'm referring to Knights in the Nightmare.
The whole system works as such: you basically have two resources: the life force of each character, and weapons. Weapons are inherently replenishable, but life force aren't, at least not directly. The only way to replenish the life force is by sacrifice of another character. Given that all the characters also have relationships to each other, this means the you have to carefully manage said sacrifices.
To make things worse, characters also have level caps, which can only be raised via sacrifice, and all attacks eat up life force: more powerful attacks uses more life force, with very high powered ones taking out sizable chunks.
Though the main character itself (which you don't receive immediately) don't use life force, there is a third factor: you only have a certain amount of 'turn-based' time to accomplish your objectives. In addition, to recruit more people, you have to spend life force to obtain the necessary trinkets as well. Finally, certain attacks can wipe out characters entirely, regardless of how much life force they had. If it's your main character, it's game over, if it's one of your other characters, they are gone for good, similarly with any of the situations where they are sacrificed or have their life force reduced to 0.
That aside, I absolutely agree with you. Our own death can at most be frustrating. Often the player doesn't really form an emotional connection towards his/her avatar. So death doesn't touch us emotionally as the death of a protagonist in a movie or book could, for example.
I really would like to try Heavy Rain, I hear only good things about it...
I have never cared about my 'video game body' in any other game where death is basically a time sink. Your body is something precious there, and death is not the end of the game but a gateway to your spirit form. Since death comes so fast (and almost always due to mistakes or lack of skill) I would literally be relieved when my body died; like I no longer was playing for such extreme stakes. Of course I wanted my body back so I could invite spirit players to help (and fend off invading players). Death is such an elegant mechanic in DS, every designer should learn from the emotional impact of it.
t_Game.php) is the notion that you don't have a character/body of your own. Instead, the gameworld is filled with NPCs going about their lives, and you "inhabit" one of them to play the game... and most NPCs belong to social networks, and have some baked-in understanding that death is permanent.
Which creates (for example) the possibility of you choosing to inhabit an NPC who is a wife and mother, and whose husband and children beg you to be careful with her body while you're controlling her. Because if you get her killed, she's permanently dead and lost to them forever.
When the NPCs in a gameworld exhort you to be careful not to die, would that make a difference in how people play that character? Should it? Or should it still be "just a game" in which you feel free to do anything with no real-world regrets?
This is why I feel it's futile to design a wonderful death because we still lack the ability to create a meaningful life.
However, when it comes to the own players death, there is no point in making it meaningful unless it is something that drives the narrative. Even than it usually dosen't add to much as that death is either temproary or it empowers you.
Death is cheap for a reason. It's a punishment tool, designed to keep you focused on making sure you don't die for various reasons. In some ways this does become meaningful. For 1C (one credit) players, losing even one life is failure to them and thus their death has become meaningful because to them, their skills aren't quite there yet.
But overall trying to make it meaningful will just be seen as a drag by the gamer.
Games like Alter Ego make you think about death but they are very niche games.
On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of ways games can increase our emotional response to the death of other in-game characters, and even (as seen in Left 4 Dead) the death of other human players. This is primarily what I'm interested in seeing more of.
Otherwise, I'm on board with what Carlo Delallana said. It's tiring when games attempt to force emotional attachment onto you as opposed to allowing those bonds to come about naturally. I'm certainly more willing to support a game that gives me the choice.
On the way to work I was dreaming up a simple game premise for a meaningful death. If I had 24 hours to live what would I do with the life I have left? What kind of game would this be? A rewarding death could come from the moment after you/your character dies and a procession of NPCs comes in and recalls their encounter with you. When you restart the game your goal is to try and get as many people to show up at your funeral. Some NPCs can only appear after the player has made meaning choices in the sequence that they encounter these characters in the game.
But the payoff/reward isn't in the number of NPCs you bring but the memory of their encounter with you. You may have done something mundane with that NPC but when you view their recollection you suddenly see things you weren't able to see or notice when you were alive.
Naturally a limited amount of time will never allow you to get all the NPCs to come to your funeral but life is about the choices we make and death is when we turn our papers in.
But not every game really needs to have an immersive experience in which you feel like your character's life matters. Megaman games almost expect the player to die, not dying in a Source match means you probably spent most of the round hiding somewhere, and without the artificial death the player is expected to make all the right choices in a situation in which anything can be thrown at them.
The revolving door of death is a hallmark of all games from Chainmail/Dungeons and Dragons all the way to the most modern. You die but you can simply start over. It gives the player the desire for infinite play since each try they can improve and make the right choice.
I think that's the kind of empowerment that games deliver and something that most players look for. Living with your mistakes sucks.
Even Alan Wake, which i enjoyed, had one part where you were running over a train track with a hidden hole that you couldn't see until you walked over it. you run through, you fall, but there were some items nearby to help with that. Still, I wouldn't have placed that gap where it was.
The points-based penalties are less usual in most realistic games.
After all those comments, I'm surprised no one thinking "Fire Emblem" when if one of your partners dies it means he/she is really gone. It becomes a priority to make sure all of them are safe, especially our favorite one's, and gets strategy to another level of complexity (in-between game difficulty limitations, of course)
I think it's hard to really catch the essence of death in a virtual environment without leading to annoying mid-game micro levels of "paths of revival" or something weird... keep death at it is now
Edit:
Or was it that you had to fight to re-spawn otherwise you would end up "game-over" dead?
It's sort of like the destruction of the Weighted Companion Cube in Portal: it performed a vital gameplay mechanic, and going without it left some players sentimental. If an NPC could fulfill a vital role, like actually providing cover fire in an FPS, or automatically organizing and selling items in an RPG/action game, the player would naturally become more attached to the NPC as a key force in the game. Then, halfway through, if the antagonist kills that character and you lose that key force, it should create resentment for the enemy.
Of course, it means that the player has to be much more difficult to kill. Maybe it could be explained as a "narrow escape" or a "good thing that those fishermen were in the area," but if you're going to equate an NPC death with the player death there has to be a lot at stake in the player's death. I would say that automatically erasing a game save upon death would be a strong incentive, but perhaps a mode like this should be in the difficulty menu!
http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/viewArticle/43/81
Personally, I do not think that player character death (and the repetition that follows) represents an inevitable element of game design, and I think games like Heavy Rain and Fable 2 offer some decent alternatives — maybe not "the answer," but at least enough to get us thinking about this as a problem with multiple possible solutions. NPC deaths, as have been discussed here, offer another really powerful alternative, and I think recent years have featured this even more commonly and prominently (perhaps too much, as it feels like every western RPG now needs a scene where you decide whether some ally lives or dies). I fear, though, that concluding that games NEED to have a "die and retry" approach will just discourage designers from coming up with new mechanics that help move things forward.