[ö]

After playing Dead Rising a while -- in which, if you're not in the loop, dying is as important as in an old arcade game -- it occurs to me that the whole mechanism of death in a videogame is... kind of poorly understood, and less well used, particularly in the thread of evolution that games have gone down since memory cards came to town. And it further occurs to me that this ties in with a lot of common frustrations I keep hearing amongst players and designers alike.

Consider our old chums Igarashi and Kojima, who often whine about having to make their games easy enough that anyone can play through them without much difficulty. For MGS3, Kojima almost implemented the system that Dead Rising half-implements: you can save and quit, but you can't continue. He chickened out at the last minute, which is just as well; in this case, the system would have been obnoxious and wouldn't have fit the game's purpose. In a game like Metal Gear, the goal is to get to the end and see the whole story.

That just brings to light how contrary the concept of death -- of failure -- is, then, to that mission. This goes for any game where death would mean leaving the experience incomplete. Because what happens then? You load, and you're forced to replay a hunk that you were only really meant to play once. If you can save at any time, or the game auto-saves, all the bigger a "huh?". What on Earth is the point of letting the player die if there's no purpose to it? If all it does is get in the way everything everyone's trying to do?

Death is a pretty important, pretty big concept. Unless you've got something quirky and supernatural going on, death is finality. If a universe incorporates the ability to die, then that death should have at least some significance to a person's actions, goals, ambitions. In real life we're more or less defined by death: we've got this long on Earth, so what are we going to do with it?

So what's the point of death in Half-Life? The only function it seems to serve is as a force for the player to struggle against, to give a certain thrill at defying it. The threat of death puts a certain danger and tension into the experience. Then, the ability to save anywhere basically undercuts any threat to that death. You never have to worry about losing anything. So is this really the best mechanism to instill that sense of foreboding?

Thoguh I hadn't really made the connection until a paragraph or two ago, Jon Blow's game Braid was designed more or less to address this issue. Much of the time, games are simply fun because they're hard; because they require a certain degree of skill. The downside is that when you miss a jump or die, the game ceases being fun and instead becomes annoying. When you take away that basic physical challenge aspect... well, what's left?

Of course, I'm more fond of action games than pretty much any other flavor. I like the direct control; I like the feeling of satisfaction that comes from pulling off a tricky maneuver. In the context of an arcade game, death is perfectly natural. Games like this are generally a battle of attrition. Although in most cases (after the early '80s) you can in fact beat them, that's not your real goal. The point of playing is to survive as long as you can, and see and do all you can before you die. Then when your quarter's up, the quest is over. It's a clean, fair, comprehensible system. Death is in fact an acceptable end -- and a more likely end than not.

Once you start riding on Miyamoto's coat tails, though, and shift the focus from the player to the game -- when the game becomes more about seeing everything the game has to show you than about making your own experience -- then... well, maybe that mission just isn't compatible with classical design sensibilities.

RPGs often sort of get away with the idea by framing death as a strategic blunder from which the player must somehow recover. Depending on the design, that could work well. I guess that opens up a parallel question, which is: if a linear, story-based game does in fact allow the player to "die", then how might that failure be worked into the experience such that it's an acceptable event? Such that the player is not immediately inclined or expected to load and try again? How do you make the player accept responsibility?

Some games throw you into a dungeon or a pit when you fail, the expectation being that you should fight your way out. This is clearly a punishment, though, and therefore not desirable; the player will still load, if given the option.

Cutting that thread short and tying it off: game length. Since memory cards have come along, games have gotten longer and longer. People often judge a game's worth on its number of play hours. Other people express distress, as there just isn't enough time to play these games. They suck up so much of a person's life (both time and energy), and they're so often not as good as they might be, that this is probably one of the big factors leading to what Eiji Aonuma called "gamer drift". Old gamers are getting bored and starting to ignore videogames; new people are hard to attract. It's one more huge investment to make, once you get past the controls, the language, the price, and everything else.

This wasn't really a big problem before the PlayStation era. Even longer games, with battery backup or whatever, were meant to play until you died. Hell, it's the only way to save Zelda, and the only way to get passwords in a bunch of other games. Going by the classic framework, death was still an end -- just one you could recover from, next time you sat down. Every cycle you'd get a little stronger, a little more enlightened, until you were ready to transcend to the finale.

These days it's standard practice for a game to hang over the player the meaningless threat of a "GAME OVER" screen for forty hours or more. Just, what? How does any of this add up?

Though obviously there's not going to be any one true solution -- every idea demands its own design -- I'm kind of impressed with what Dead Rising has to say about the issue: make your game short enough to play through in one sitting. Make the goal merely to survive; anything else is bonus. Discourage or disallow people from continuing after they've died. Maybe, maybe, if the situation calls for it, sweeten death by building in a reward for the next cycle, Zelda style.

So. I don't know. What are some alternatives to death, that might actually be appropriate in some longer, more story intensive games? If a game idea absolutely demands that the player must be able to die, how can that be incorporated so that it's acceptable and that it means something within the framework of what the game is trying to get across to the player?

And are there any good examples of exceptions?

[Cycle]

Didn't we have a thread about this recently? I can't remember what it was called, though.
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Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

[ö]

Maybe! I bet it wasn't framed exactly the same way, though.

[rf]

This is relevant to me (almost said "to my interests") because one of the things keeping me away from playing games that are pure action-platformer stuff is the tedium of doing sections over again. I keep telling myself that Shadow of the Killer Solid is gonna be a totally deep interactive experience, man, and that's all well and good until I have to re-do something for the first time. I don't know whether it's different in principle in action-y games, or whether it's just much more tolerable.

Anyway, it'd be interesting if your death affected the game scenario somehow, to decrease the repetitive nature of replaying segments, or just to make the experience of dying more interesting. It shouldn't really be something bad, because that would just frustrate the player (sort of the No Child Left Behind philosophy of "succeed now or we'll make it harder"), and it probably shouldn't be good, because that would lead to strange metagaming. More like some fairly neutral but entertaining/thought-provoking effect on the game world. I'm imagining an atmospheric horror game where dying in an area causes something subtle and eerie to progressively happen to it.

You could also have a modern, long game that has no death at all, just some kind of scoring system or something. In other words, the player is never forced to re-do anything, but performing badly has an impact on things they care about--maybe an influence on the game world, too. This has the potential to be really boring, though, and also to encourage compulsive reloading from saved games to maximize one's performance (essentially, self-inflicted dying). You could avert this by moving away from a simple score-type system to a more nonlinear and complicated set of effects on the world, but this could degenerate into a (potentially interesting) kind of interactive fiction where you never feel you have any incentives because even the "bad" results for your character are worthwhile paths to follow.
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[ö]

[Mr. Toups]

This thread makes me think of Deus Ex, and, well, Dead Rising. I imagine Deus Ex would work rather well if you couldn't quick save at all, because every stage of the game is littered with different routes, strategies, and choices. The reason why death as a penalty doesn't work well in the Miyamoto mold is because the gameplay is so static and linear that replaying the same stages becomes repetitive. But if you have a multitude of ways to approach the same stage, like in Deus Ex, it can continue to be entertaining.

Another solution, which is one that Metal Gear exploits rather well, is by taking a step back and understanding that death is just a type of failure. So, Metal Gear Solid encourages you to play without any failure -- meaning, don't alert any guards -- and if you do fail, it's not game over. Instead things just get more complicated and it takes more skill to return things to a state of equilibrium. Screw up enough times, of course, and it's still game over.
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[dmauro]

You should link to your dead rising article for relevance and because it's a good read.

Dead Rising's death system is a lot like what you get with shmups. You can continue after game over, but you're probably not going to want to. It makes the concession of giving you all the experience and skills you'd earned up to that point when you start over, which was definitely a good idea since the amount of time invested is much more than most shmups and so it changes your sense of accomplishment quite a bit.

I don't really think of death as a problem so much. Usually death only highlights other problems (namely that a game is boring). Dead Rising took the bold step of making death meaningful, but at the cost of really driving home how annoying it is to fight that woman on the motorcycle over and over again.
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[ö]

I guess this overall question can also be related to the more or less blunt mechanism of most games. You hit buttons to digitally trigger actions. Primary action: attack. Attack bad things. Bad things die. Oh no! Bad thing killed you! Now you're dead! Now do it all over, until you reach the next cutscene. There's a bit of nuance lacking here, that I'm not sure the medium is absolutely ready to address yet -- just on a mechanical level.

[special blend]

Did anyone mention Planescape: Torment yet?
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| <swimmy> It's special blend so we let him do whatever the fuck he wants |

[ö]

Oh, right. Rudie sent me that, finally. I... wonder what I did with it?

[Intentionally Wrong]

Planescape: Torment structures the entire game around the main character's death; it isn't permanent. No matter how many times the protagonist dies, he'll get right back up again, no worse the wear except for the possibility of memory loss (which never happens in the game itself; the last time it happens to the character is just prior to the beginning of the game, unless you decide to quit playing before the end). If you fall in combat, you wake up a short ways back, in a relatively safe spot; sometimes this means you have to do a little backtracking through areas you've already cleared, and sometimes it means you're pushed ahead or to one side. Sometimes death is the only way forward--there are a couple deathtraps that the protagonist set up much earlier in his life, knowing that he'd be the only one capable of moving past them. Likewise, you can sometimes kill yourself for dramatic effect in the middle of a philosophical debate. It's an interesting approach, but not one that can really be repeated.

EDIT: special blend beat me to it.
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Obsequious pigs are not welcome in Mulravia.

[special blend]

I understand that Lost Odyssey uses a similar setup where the main dude can't die, but all of your party members perma-die, altering the story.
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| <swimmy> It's special blend so we let him do whatever the fuck he wants |

[zak]

[special blend]

that's fuckin' long man
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| <swimmy> It's special blend so we let him do whatever the fuck he wants |

[special blend]

Also, I liked how Killer 7 handled death!
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| <swimmy> It's special blend so we let him do whatever the fuck he wants |

[diplo]

[Capitan Smexy]

Games that should be brought into the discussion:

Wario Land II+III (Never Die)
Beyond Good and Evil (Insta-Reset)
Killer 7 (Too Late)
Killer 8 (Really annoying)

[Ashura]

In Prey, when you die, you're sent to the spirit realm, and you have to shoot spirits with your spiritual bow and arrow to bring yourself back to life. The entire game is built around puzzles where you go to the spirit realm and bypass doors and whatnot so your real self (situated hopefully in a safe place while you're projecting) can get through unscathed.

Crackdown essentially says that whenever you die and respawn, you're a clone. It's interesting how they worked that interesting bit into a game with a really small narrative.

Isn't Soul Reaver all about that, too?

These are just some games with your videogame death written into the narrative. I'm not saying they're unique or wild new takes or anything, but these are a few games which don't actively ignore death as just an expected video game mechanism, but try to incorporate it.

[haze]

I'm curious if there even was a Game Over screen in Killer 7, because I never even saw it. even when playing pretty badly. game design success? heh

obligatory mention of Dragon Quarter and Earthbound/Dragon Quest.


hey what if they made an Aeon Flux game
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[extrabastardformula]

[Broco]

In the game show Jeopardy you can't die: if you do well at the task your score goes up, and if you do poorly your score goes down (and it can go indefinitely into the negative). There is a similar system at work in the board game Go, where you cannot be destroyed but you can end up with less territory than your opponent when the game is completed. The game has an endpoint but it cannot be cut off prematurely, and success or failure is not binary. Curiously I can't think of any videogames that explicitly have this model (though some surely exist), even though it's an elementary and obvious type of game from the standpoint of mathematical game theory.
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[rf]

Hmm, that Wing Commander example . . . I'd say that's an example of how the failure needs to be less clear-cut as failure, but as I said earlier, if you take this road too far you end up with no clear player incentives.

For some reason I keep imagining this stuff being implemented in the MGS series, probably because the constant codec conversations would provide a good basis for running commentary on how the player's doing. It would also slightly discourage the save/reload impulse to know that your failure will lead to a unique and possibly worthwhile personal message, rather than just some predictably less glorious outcome.
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[boojiboy7]

I was actually thinking of Prey when i read this topic, but someone beat me to it.
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[B coma]

Wario Land II and III were refreshing in their time since they so closely resembled prior Mario platformer design turned on its head (take damage from an enemy -> advance through a previously unreachable area while on fire screaming).

Of course the risk you run in designing a game that way is making the game too easy, but in Wario Land II (the one I own) a nice compromise is reached by taking treasure away from the player when he is hit by the wrong enemies (getting flattened might be advantageous, but getting poked by a spear is not). This helps to eliminate the compulsion to run headlong into every enemy in a rush to figure out how to traverse the next unseen passage. The amount of money you amass is important because Wario wouldn't get out of bed otherwise.

One of the nice touches in Indigo Prophecy was the main character acknowledging out loud to the player at the game over screen (essentially what it was, I can't remember if the words were there) that he would never find out what happened that night in the diner's restroom. I imagine the intended effect of repeated failure is to get the player to agree with him and never pick up the game again.
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[another god]

You guys are being really silly. It's a simple answer.

When a developer cares about death they'll structure the save system around just that. Games like Diablo II have hardcore modes in which death is probably the most heinous thing ever. A lot of online games disallow the "reload" function, and they're much better for it.

When a developer cares more about plot than death they'll implement something like Metal Gear or Resident Evil's system. Die and be brought just a little ways back.

There are ways to balance it by punishing the player (ala Killer 7). And there are ways to break that balance by giving the players Quicksaves and whatnot (lots of computer games).

One of the reasons why competitive gaming is so fascinating to me is because the failure to care (because it's just a game) is mitigated. Death as a failure against a computer when you don't care is one thing, but death as a failure against another player is... another thing.

[Intentionally Wrong]

I have some issues with Zak's summary of Torment. Spoilers, of course:

Death only takes you back to the mortuary if you're in the one of the wards of Sigil. If you're in the undercity, the Dead Nations, the outlands, or one of the other planes of existence, you just reappear in a safe spot in that region. This can cause a little bit of backtracking, but the option to fast-travel using the map mostly makes up for this. What's more, there's a part of the game where you need to make your way back into the mortuary--in which case, getting yourself killed is pretty convenient.

"Death" in the traditional sense may no longer be an option, but it is entirely possible to lose in the traditional sense. Failing to overcome one of the final obstacles the game provides can result in your body being stolen by the mind of one of your previous incarnations.

Finally, while this may not be the mechanical death that we're talking about here, there are many opportunities for the protagonist to "die" because of player action in conversation with NPCs. I can think of at least three, even without considering circumstances that don't deal strictly with death so much as an unlivable condition--like finding out that the Nameless One had replaced several of his unnecessary internal organs with a handful of important items that he'd eventually need.
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Obsequious pigs are not welcome in Mulravia.

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

A few more games to consider: Alpha Centauri, Fallout Tactics, and the System Shock Series.

In System Shock, there were the reconstruction machines. In the first game, there was no currency system, so death was merely an annoyance in backtracking. However, before you managed to aquire immortality, you had to fight through one hell of a large number of cyborgs. I mean, when you got to the cyborg converter, you felt that you really fucking earned it. In the second game, the reconstructers were alot easier to get to.
Normally, it was only a half-minute run from the elevator or bulkhead where you arrived from. Alot of the fear and anxiety of the game was removed when you got to the machine and were able to progress further into the level without fear--with an occasional 10 nanite toll. On higher levels where death was far more abundant and nanites far more crucial, one would simply place the quick save/load buttons in convenient places and mash those until one would get through un-touched. Same problem persisted in games like Deus Ex, wherein the player would undertake a crusade of perfectionism and simply reload when he missed a shot.

But that tell us nothing that we haven't read before.

In Prey, death was actually pretty beneficial after a while. The death minigame became a sort of bonus when you got good enough at it. I often killed myself in anticipation of a boss fight, knowing that I'd be able to boost my health and spirit to full with the minor annoyance of loosing a bit of ammo. But, what the hell, I'd just die and refill my spirit bow.


Now, look at Alpha Centauri and Fallout Tactics. Both had a "iron man mode." From the looks of it, this is what alot of us want games to do. Let us play, let us save when we're done playing for the die, but never inbetween. Here, mortality is preserved. When things stop going your way you can't reload. When you die, the game takes you to the title screen and ends your adventure at that. Of course, you can opt not to take part in such a mode.

The key, perhaps, it choice in this matter. When we make all games iron man games, we alienate the kiddie casual gamer who merely plays the game to see the ending cinematic. If we do as we've done for the past few years, we alienate the gamers who always desire commitment in their games.
Of course, in all situations people are always wanting.

There are middle grounds--Halo, for example. Health regeneration is the same as immortality, so long as you don't fuckup totally. When the screen flashes, the games telling you that "really, you're dead, but I'll let you keep playing so that you don't toss the controller and refuse to buy the sequel." Other games intentionally overpower you. The notion of games where you are, as a matter of fact, a really badass dude with the most badass of equipment place a buffer between you and the computer. Most people, like all children, hate loosing. So, we let their health regenerate or give them ultracamo/ultradodging/ultrabombs/ultraballs so that they feel real goodlike.


The industry knows how to handle death in games, but they merely refuse to in order to appeal to the common demand. The least that they can do is provide an option.
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{V}_{^w^}_{V}

[Jeff Garneau]

for a long time i've wanted to make a hack of sonic that removes all the hazards.





also it would only have the cool levels.

[Broco]

[Jeff Garneau]

also (and i'm serious about this) player death is basically a problem because there is a level of abstraction between the player and the avatar. in the future, when film and videogames merge into perfect virtual reality experiences this won't be a problem as the player will fully embody the protagonist and therefore be unable to make any mistake that the protagonist wouldn't.

i mean is a videogame no longer interactive if you only have a perfect illusion of free will?

[Broco]

[Jeff Garneau]

well the idea behind the sonic hack is to basically just make a really cool version of flyguy.

[Felix]

from a pure playability perspective - ignoring entirely what death should be implying, and isn't - i just want to throw in that the concept of 'extra lives' is awful in any game that saves, and certainly plenty of games realize this by now (halflife and jaks two), although a good few still don't (how many lives does your mid-nineties nintendo game savefile have?) and it's just so VIOLENTLY extraneous that, urk.

again i know we're pretty much above discussion of simple mechanics itt (good lord does that ever sound obnoxious) and game design does by and large seem to "get it" nowadays; redundancy is still the key issue here and for as long as games are distinguished from film by actually having user input, we'd do well to remember that our entertainment (read: art) needs to be entertaining.

[Koji]

I'm confused, here. Are we talking about death in the literal sense (plot-wise, the death of the character,) or as a form of failure? I couldn't care less about the plot aspect of death; I don't play that many plot-driven games for all that to matter to me.

In arcade games, dying is simply 'too bad, you failed, try again,' and, eventually, 'oops, you're out of credits, it's time to go back to the beginning.' It's an overused form of punishment for failure, that's a fact; way too many avatars die way too many times. Favorite examples of mine, Wario Land 2 & 3: both these games have no way for Wario to die, he's only set back in different (more creative) ways. Obstacle courses as the stages are, if you fail to clear one of these obstacles, the game will force you to do it all over again. In the end it's like dying, except you don't restart the stage, you just restart a particular obstacle or set of them. Still, this way we're sidestepping the equally clichéd 'lives' system: a set of chances, that you can increment by achieving certain feats in the game (finding a 1-up item, collecting a number of coins...)

Regarding lives and mid-90s games, as Ethoscapade put it, I like it when games acknowledge that design idiocy, like DK: King of Swing (which I've been playing.) In the game there are no lives; if you die you just have to restart the stage, or maybe try a different one. Instead of lives, you have bananas, which you can spend to recover hit points, thus delaying death.

[L]

This been frontpaged yet?

[Tokyo Rude]

[kael]

God of War puts a somewhat interesting little twist on this, I think. If you die and then choose to continue at the Game Over screen, when you start again, you have more health than you did the last time you saved. If you die again and continue, you have even more health. If you keep dying, eventually your health bar refills all the way.

The newer Prince of Persia games are also interesting in this regard, in how they encourage you to 'rewind' after making a mistake instead of simply dying, and how when you die they treat it as an error in storytelling (the first PoP game, PoP:SoT, is treated as a 'story' told in the past tense by the main character; when you die, he quickly corrects himself, 'no, no, that's not how it happened, let me start again.') I always thought this was a clever way of dealing with the problems inherent in character death. Then again, maybe I was wrong, since the sequels throw this concept out.

[Intentionally Wrong]

[Deets]

A lot of arcade games have "rank" systems, which adjust game difficulty based on a variety of player actions, usually player death, use of bombs, that kind of thing. It's often not worth it to suicide intentionally, just because the loss of lives/power-ups/whatever is often not equivalent to the benefit of decreased difficulty. Raizing developed a series of arcade shooting games in the mid-90s, however, that serve as notable exceptions.

Battle Garegga, for example, took rank to the one of the most ridiculous extremes possible, requiring the player to suicide regularly, avoid power-ups and stop shooting whenever possible, all in order to prevent the invisible number controlling the game's difficulty from lowering itself too much. Even more interestingly, the rank doesn't reset when you quit playing. In fact, the starting difficulty of the game increases slightly with every successive play, and it only lowers itself with every cycle of the game's attract/demo sequence. You can also just reset the game to return the default rank to its original setting, but this is kind of a pain in the ass in the arcades. Apparently Raizing got complaints of some kind from operators, too, because their next game, Armed Police Batrider, starts the default rank upon startup at an incredibly high difficulty (it might even be the maximum possible, but I can't remember, specifically).

Shinobu Yagawa, Garegga's lead programmer, would go on to develop a lot of games with very similar rank mechanics (including the recent Ibara and its sequel), and they're always divisive. Some people really enjoy trying to figure out how these fucked up systems work in the context of scoring and survival. Not me, though. I think they're obnoxious.

I was going to mention this in the metagaming thread, actually. Should be fine here, though.

Edit: Oh, and I found the way that Wario Land III handled death to be extremely interesting until they put you in a situation meant for a game that actually had normal video-game death in it. Boss fights, for example. Instead of just killing you outright and letting you try again like in any other game, bosses would often turn you into a balloon upon contact, and you would float to the top of a large screen incredibly slowly, with almost no control whatsoever, until you reached the top of the screen and could exit. I guess you could view that as a sly jab at the way normal games handle death?

[zak]

[Capitan Smexy]