Extra Punctuation: Death in Videogames

[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.

 

[awesomehawk]

Yes, and you can always shoot people again, what's your point?

Very very nicely written.

In gran turismo there is an equivalent to death though. It is called "losing a race".

Not entirely sure that's the same as death; you can always race again at a later point.
Yes, and you can always shoot people again, what's your point?






I beat the rush.

 

[Anthony Eremondi]

I know how much some people might hate Sonic, but since Adventure 2 they've been penalizing death somewhat effectively. In order to gt achievements or unlock bonus features, you need to get top ranking on levels, which is based on your performance (score, rings, time, and other things usually based on the game). Dieing resets your score, and eats up a few precious seconds that are needed to get that rank, even just getting hurt resets your ring count and that will automatically drop your rank. As a perfectionist I find myself restarting the level (even though I'm probably 99% of the way through.) If you increase rewards for doing levels perfectly, and use this style of enforcement then maybe it'll be meaningful again, at least for platformer games.

 

[shukumei]

You forgot to mention World of Warcraft where death happens in one timeline and the penalties from this is loss of time / progress, money when fighting monsters, or opportunities when fighting players. I thought that the ghost run was sort of a "realistic" way to treat death rather than simply respawning you back to your last city. In other MMORPG, there are experience point penalties but I think WoW deemed the loss of time to run back was enough penalty.

For single player games, especially for RPG, I sometimes wonder how tedious it would be to make a game that shifts the story as the player dies. Sure, maybe we can let the player respawn or wake up in a hospital or something, but it would be on the same timeline where the opportunities presented to them in the past mission have passed. But there is no worse penalty that missing out on a good ending and ending up on one of the alternate endings, but at least an ending nonetheless.

 

[blainemono]

Speaking of different ways of handling dying, there was this awesome IF game called "Spider and Web" (http://www.wurb.com/if/game/207)

Your goal was to infiltrate a military installation and steal classified documents or something, but every time you died (or did something wrong) you woke up strapped to the interrogation table with electrodes all over your body and your interrogator saying, "No, that's not what happened, we have security CCTV footage, remember? Please don't try to lie again".

So you had to manipulate your memories in the way that would help you escape the interrogation but won't alert the interrogator, who is watching closely.

To me, that was the awesomest way to handle failure in a videogame ever devised. Highly situational of course, but aren't they all?

 

[108Stitches]

There was a rather poorly-received movie a few years back called Next ...

Next took a mechanic out of The Golden Man by Phillip K Dick -- who also wrote the stories that became Minority Report, Total Recall and A Scanner Darkly.

OT: Nothing. Good article.

Ummm...how could you forget Blade Runner?

That's an interesting interpretation of the standard die-reload method. I don't mind losing those few minutes, but what I hate are death sequences that are obnoxious and/or unskippable. For example? MASS EFFECT.

Or Batman: Arkham Asylum.

While I don't mind having to go back and redo a mission, I don't need the same cut scenes mocking me for my failure...and eating up precious time to get back into the game.

 

[psivamp]

Ummm...how could you forget Blade Runner?

Because I must be completely retarded. I love Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner.

 

[Grond Strong]

Extra Punctuation: Death in Videogames

Yahtzee ponders the death mechanic in videogames.

Read Full Article

This has been on my mind as of late but has not caused me the same trauma that it apparently has been dealing you for some time. I was thinking of a way to solve the problem and thought that instead of having ONE protagonist die over and over, why not have the gameplay switch to a different soldier in your squad and continue fighting from his perspective. This would keep the gameplay flowing and would immerse one in their surroundings even more and might even give the player a sense of remorse as they can see the soldier that was them just moments before slumped over due to their carelessness. The squad would loose people as the game went on depending on how much one died and the ending would be consistent with how many people one has left in their squad. If one has below the needed number of people before the next level, then they are replaced by reinforcements to stock up the number of "lives" one has to finish the rest of the missions and so on. I don't know how this would affect the story as it would be very hard to be specific with names, plots, and character development. But isn't that what war is? One day you're here, the next you're gone? I don't know, but I'd play it!

Another idea I had was this. When one "dies" they are in actuality only "captured" by the enemy and wake up in a sticky situation surrounded by the local hostiles who wish to interrogate/torture him. After breaking out of this unfortunate mishap, one discovers that he has indeed only been out about five minutes and that the fighting is resuming almost exactly where he left it a block away. He quickly gathers his confiscated possessions from the deceased captors and runs back into the fight where he left off. These opportunities would be much like auto-saves and would be available often near a firefight. They might get monotonous, but if one could make enough of them and different/creative/dynamic enough then it might be a legitimate way to avoid the die-load-die-load-win formula that has been in use for so long.

Thanks for posting. I agree.

 

[Sabinfrost]

I believe perma-death and lives need to make a return. While they were a relic of arcade games and a replacement for inserting coins, they added an element of suspense and challenge to a game where you would have to think about what you were doing and not just charge blindly in over and over until you get lucky.

Being on your last life added a level of suspense and excitement that even games like Demon's Souls do not truly capture. Sure, they punish dying more, but there are MMOs where you lose half a level of experience for dying, that kind of punishment is all well and good as a disincentive not to die, but the end result is just a whole heap more griding.

I think there is a difference to being able to lose a game, and being punished for playing it poorly. Games do not need to be unbeatable, but the possibility of losing adds a challenge gaming has slowly forgotten about over the generations.

If developers could combine old school perma-death with modern emotional attachment, I'd have a field day.