Extra Punctuation: Death in Videogames

[Beautiful End]

I've always wondered the same thing myself. The way I see it, the player will always control a perfect character that never failed, never died, was extremely lucky and, even if he was the rookie, he acts like a pro. he might even manage to outlive the rough veterans he hangs out with. The game will never focus on the sidekick who died a while back, no. You will ALWAYS be perfect. It bothers me, but at the same time I've realized that controlling a lame, weak character is not exactly appealing. And sadly, most people will prefer to play as Mr./Mrs. Perfect than the realistic kid who, in reality, is just as lame as the player itself. See, we don't need to be reminded of our reality. So we just roll with this unrealistic universe. I know I do. So dying, respawning at the beginning of the level or whatever and doing that all over again is unrealistic but needed.

Yeah, I praise games who have managed to find a way around this. Heck, Mario 64 did this beautifully: If you receive enough blows, Mario gets weak and is eventually pushed out of the painting (I forget exactly why, though) and then he starts all over again. This way, we don't play as the "perfect" Mario. We see him fail and try again and again, all within the same timeline. Prince of Persia is, obviously, another example, though I gotta say that I don't like it as much. Like Yahtzee mentioned, it happens within the same universe/timeline and since there's not a pivotal moment between "dying" and going back to where you were before you died, it almost feels as if I didn't do something wrong. For all I know, I could have pressed the rewind button by mistake.

But the bottom line is this, I think. An overly complicated mechanic that could replace death will only scare players away. We're ALL lazy when we play games, in one way or another. When you die, you don't want to go through a small bonus level that will require you to work your way back to the living (I'm reading some past comments and this is also based off one of Yahtzee's comments). You don't wanna wait; you just want to go back to the main level and kill whoever killed you. You don't want the game to remind you that you failed, you just wanna pretend it never happened. And I think this is why the die/pop back in/ play again mechanic is still so popular. But that's just me.

 

[Beautiful End]

I like how in the game Sacrifice the story was being 'told' by your character. Whenever you died he would say, "But that's not what REALLY happened, let me start again..." as if he'd gotten off on a story-telling tangent.

Well, this is exactly the same thing you'd see in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Whenever the Prince dies, he just goes "Wait, wait. That's not what happened" or something like that. However, Sacrifice came out 2 or 3 years before Sands of Time.

So...Sands of Time copied Sacrifice? I would have thought it'd be the other way around since Sands of Time is more popular and (In my opinion) more fun and original. Well, that sure shows me not to judge a book by its cover.

 

[Streetfighter]

Goddamn Yahtzee gets deep on this

 

[Smooth Operator]

It's an interesting question for sure.

- Some feel piss easy when you just go back without penalty and fucking up isn't even something you try to avoid, suddenly you just do trial and error grinding instead of actually playing strategically (Prince of Persia where the girl saves you every time).
- And other feel too punishing by sending you back to a checkpoint miles from where you were, and then you haveto do it all over again(Demon's Souls).
- With quick save/load it sort of falls on the player to decide what system he wants, save every time you smell trouble and you never loose anything, leave it to the auto-save and you will probably burst out in tears once you noticed last save was hours ago.

I say as always developers need to remember this is an interactive medium, so let people f*cking choose.
Why is it so damn hard to include extra options, there was a time when games were sold on new features now it seems they sell on lack there of.
I understand grandma needs a 20 hour tutorial and a no-penalty system, but I'm still under 70 and like to be challenged by games not arthritis.

 

[mikeyallen]

I always thought the Pokemon handling of death was pretty good, handled within story, within the one universe, and with more setbacks than just time or progress (loss of money).

What if you added the chance that letting a pokemon faint too many times would cause it to literally die? It would add a genuine emotional burden to the player as his prize fighter or favourite pikachu is let down by him and breathes no more. Plus the loss of a hard trained asset makes the progress loss all the more tangible and reinforces the idea of training a balanced team, that way you never lose your only good member.

 

[iDoom46]

I like Yahtzee's idea for getting around the whole death idea, only replace "astral projection" with "mind control". You control a NPC, and every time your character dies, you have to switch over to a nearby non-enemy NPC.

If you give the NPCs enough character, it'll still feel like a loss to the player if they let the NPC die. The guilt on the player's conscience is their punishment. And if they die too many times (run out of NPCs) then they get the traditional 'game over' screen and have to start the mission over.

 

[SeventhChild]

Remind me of this Peter Hamilton book where some ex Mindstar op looks into the future for the main character during his missions.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

Awesome, I would so play it.

And Next was a pretty good movie for what it was.

 

[beema]

I've never thought about game deaths in that quantum mechanics sort of way before. It's actually a pretty funny/cool way to think about it.

ok really, WTF is this captcha character? It's like an R with an apostrophe adjoined to its upper-right corner. wtf these are so obnoxious.
oh good, a legible one: England ngelers

 

[NuSix3]

I'm a little disappointed here Yahtzee, your article is about death in video games but that's only an symptom of the greater issue. This article is really about when it's right and wrong to stretch the boundaries of reality in a video game. It's a dead topic for books, plays and movies with the rules only slightly different for each medium; and the same goes for video games.

Take your call of duty reference for example - any result other than dying or becoming permanently disabled from a critical gun shot wound would seem ridiculous in a game about war. Kirby, on the other hand, is a friendly, kids adventure game where the enemies are about as menacing as Oscar the grouch, in that grumpy but still lovable way. If Kirby were to suffer a gruesome and miserable death it would be just as ridiculous as your pixie-dust resurrection in Call of Duty (though, I would be lying if I said I wouldn't enjoy seeing Kirby fall to a permanently limp and bloody lump of yarn or puff or whatever the hell he's made of on the ground).

The point is that fiction, in all its forms, is only allowed to stretch the imagination as far as the story environment deems reasonable. Video games have the unique problem of dealing with a player's failure to complete a task or aim straight and just like any movie can succeed or fail at convincing you to accept the unreal, video games have their own flops and successes when dealing with death and game over screens.

 

[nicebuffalo]

i'm not completely sure what his objective was. was he trying to make deaths in videogames more challenging or more realistic? when you died in prince of persia: the sands of time, the narrarator would say, "no, that's not how the story goes. let me go back." those aren't exact quotes, but the point is that explains both death and checkpoints. as far as realism goes, I wouldn't pay 60 dollars for a game where you can die once then never play it again. the system of quickload- quicksave is decent for the time being. after all, if the idea of dying is to punish you, i would say arcade games nailed it. in modern video games, though, you never have anything to lose. also, next sucked.

 

[Enai Siaion]

Death mechanics are just a problem if 'not dying' is the entire point of the game. This is almost never what the story is about. The story is about killing Dr. Apocalypski before he launches his atomic robots. The actual game is about running the gauntlet to his base and then surviving until he's dead.

Racing game GRID had a very good rewind system to undo crashes. Rewinding didn't give you a free win. You still had to actually race to win. All it did was remove the instant game over condition of crashing. The justification was that the driver isn't an idiot and wouldn't make such a dumb mistake, so the game lets you do the part over where you made a dumb mistake. This enabled them to crank up the difficulty on the actual racing part because they didn't have to account for the fact that most players can't complete 2 laps of anything without wrecking.

If more games had objectives that actually require you to achieve something instead of merely stay alive, the whole death problem would go away.

 

[Skaven252]

"Many worlds interpretation"? "Quantum immortality"? Sounds just like that Night Springs episode in Alan Wake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-wAaBoW408

 

[Ewoc]

How weird of you to discuss this topic before the movie "Source Code" came out. I'm sure that's exactly what your thinking on how death should be treated. Also, Hitman style would be the best with that sort of game.

 

[hecticpicnic]

There's something terrifically unfortunate about game stories. Let's go over a couple facts, and you'll see what I mean.

In most games, you are your main character. In fact, that's in almost every game. Now, when you die in a game, you go back to where you last saved and you get another try. Trial and error, as old as gaming itself, and the one trope that every game has. But somehow, the Prince of Persia titles are the only ones that actually acknowledge it.

This is a problem to me. Every game puts you in a position where you have no choice but to become Nicolas Cage from Next. Kind of alters up the story a bit when the protagonist is clairvoyant and can relive every five seconds of his life over and over again until he gets it right, but gaming has made it so mundane that we don't even talk about it. Every single protagonist in gaming has this super power. I think that particular weirdness needs attention. Thoughts?

Your talking about one type of game what about games such as heavy rain.Fallout 3 to ding isn't really important its your choices.Whats about fighting games and gos sims or strateyg games.
I think they should bring back the life system 3 lives(that would work great for games like mass effect and checkpoint shooters) and back to the beginning of the lvl and now with games like fallout,deus ex and bioshock you really are dying but your reloading before then because if you didn't save you would have to start the game all over again.
I really think with PC shooters like the ones i mentioned above people really aren't willing to change them the want games to stay the same and not go out side there comfort zone and there will always be a place for games like this but there needs to be change.

 

[Cenryk]

I've always liked the Pokemon method.

Take my money!

I keep the EXP gained in the battle. I have to travel back to where I lost, but with less money. And I still have to beat the challenge previously presented to me.

I think it'd actually fit rather well in some other RPG series, since money takes time to get.

Although, this does fail miserably from a narrative standpoint. And only really works in the happy-go-lucky, all-for-fun world of Pokemon battles.

Actually this method was used in a recent popular RGP. Borderlands used it very effectively and even made it fit in well with the main atmosphere of the game. Although I haven't read the rest of the comments, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned sooner, or even by Yahtzee himself.

To clarify what I mean by the "main atmosphere" of Borderlands, everyone in the whole of Pandora is just out to make money, right? Thats the main reason you're there, for the Vault. You can also see this for every ad for the guns and shit you purchase. The whole game is a show of how businesses try to make money in real life, by any means necessary, including propaganda. Finally, this brings me to my point.

Borderlands effectively made a system where dying takes you back to a checkpoint, uses your money, and gives you back everything you had; you even keep your experience. And by telling you all this information in the beginning of the game, you can conclude that some company has basically privatized the revival system. They're making money off of your deaths. See, fits perfectly.

In all, Borderlands makes effective use of checkpoints, and actually assigns a reason as to why you end up perfectly fine with all your gadgets and shit, meanwhile, someone else is getting rich off all of your deaths. Mission Accomplished.

 

[SemiHumanTarget]

I think the death mechanic is, as other readers imply, to prevent you from just literally inching through a tough scene by forcing you to replay a portion, however small, rather than just letting you pick up exactly where you left off. It also encourages you to make a choice: assume the death was your mistake, and retry the same way you did before, or try to find an easier path/method. In moderation, I think that can be an exciting mechanic.

I think it's also obviously the natural "you lost" indicator for games involving combat. It seems like an invalid point when the end result is exactly the same, but I think people would have a lot of complaints if you "fainted" instead of died in a gritty gun combat game. There are games where you are transported to a hospital, like GTA and InFamous, and (maybe I'm the only one) it destroyed my sense of immersion because I just thought there is no way this guy gets lucky that often AND there happens to be an ambulance around every time. Better to just kill the character off and treat it like flipping back a couple pages in a book.

 

[Cold Blue]

i'm surprised he didn't mention minecraft deaths. there's no real amount of time wasted, just a large distance put between you and your goodies, a game mechanic that never ceases to jolt one's experience into a battle against the clock

 

[TH3_D15HWA5H3R]

great now im going to feel bad when i die in a game, because i systematically ruined an entire parallel universe (or several)

 

[Laggings]

The clairvoyance thing is an interesting idea for a game. Of course it couldn't be in every single game or it'd get silly, but if it made sense in the story, it could seriously be used.