...is death.
No, I'm serious.
Death is the ultimate consequence. The 'Game Over.' The point at which you understand that you have fundamentally failed in what you have set out to accomplish.
It can also be hilarious...
...or bitter...
...possibly frustrating...
...or infuriating...
...or nothing at all.
If Death in the game itself has no meaning, then defeat has no meaning and subsequently, the game loses meaning. Imagine space invaders without the penalty of death. There is no reward for doing well. No penalty for doing poorly. No incentive to improve. Pac-man without ghosts or infinite lives becomes a chore in dot-eating and maze following.
Death gives us those 'I can't believe I just did that' moments.
Death gives us the 'I can't believe they made a boss that ridiculous' moments.
Death gives us the momentary break away from monotony where we step back and evaluate our performance.
The design of death in games then.. should be taken seriously. Let's look at one extreme.
Nothing happened. It was all a dream. Continue play as normal.
Most recent offender: Bioshock
Bioshock is a descendant of System Shock, a game in which you wake up alone, in a hellish nightmare scenario, where roughly 17,000 things are trying to bash your brains in while apologizing for doing so. You might imagine that this makes playing System Shock, in the dark, at night, alone, with full environmental audio, the easiest way to be found dead the following morning from terror-induced panic attacks.
Bioshock is roughly fifteen thousand times less scary than that. Pretend that you were alone. In an abandoned city. Filled with ghoulish minions of what used to be human beings. Dark. Terrifying. The only other human contact is through remote radio. And everywhere you can observe what used to be scraps of humanity and the decay of it all.
With only your wits and your guns to survive.
Terrifying, no? Except for the tiny fact that you're immortal.
IMMORTAL.
Every time you die, you pop-out of the neat little 'Ressurect-o-matic' locating conveniently every 15 feet. Free of charge. Slightly dis-oriented perhaps, but all in all, well jolly good and well rested.
...and not that scary at all. When death becomes a minor inconvenience, things fail to be scary. Things fail to be relevant.
You're Dead. Game Over. Restart?
Biggest Offender: Almost every game on the NES? Raiden / Ikaruga / Tohou 'Perfect Shooter' games.
To a lesser extent: 'Punish me' games, a la, Ninja Gaiden. Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, MMORPG's that penalize your exp when you die.
Then there's the flip side of the equation. If Death means you essentially restart from ground zero, or the first level, or perhaps at the beginning of the level you were on several hours ago because you kept dying to that ONE boss.
Death, in the first case, cost you nothing, and was essentially made gameplay irrelevant because there was no penalty or incentive for how well you did.
Death, in this case, costs you everything, and thus makes every single move relevant. Almost frustratingly relevant. We play games to have fun. While some of us do enjoy the Zen like qualities of playing the perfect game of space invaders, I would wager that most Timmy players out there are not out play the perfect game, or have every move carefully scrutinized for errors.
The removal of all progress, forcing the player to restart entirely from scratch, also doesn't work because the time commitment required for playing the game is magnified to an enormous amount. No one but Spikes have the time involved to actually restart the game over from that far back. What's the point?
Making death cost you progress is essentially demanding that the player perform to a certain level. Games simply don't have the right to do that unless the player himself requests it. Some hardcore gamers do desire to be challenged into performing at high levels. However, Timmy players just want to play and Johnny players just want to experiment. There's no need to force them to perform 'perfect games.'
No, I'm serious.
Death is the ultimate consequence. The 'Game Over.' The point at which you understand that you have fundamentally failed in what you have set out to accomplish.
It can also be hilarious...
...or bitter...
...possibly frustrating...
...or infuriating...
...or nothing at all.
If Death in the game itself has no meaning, then defeat has no meaning and subsequently, the game loses meaning. Imagine space invaders without the penalty of death. There is no reward for doing well. No penalty for doing poorly. No incentive to improve. Pac-man without ghosts or infinite lives becomes a chore in dot-eating and maze following.
Death gives us those 'I can't believe I just did that' moments.
Death gives us the 'I can't believe they made a boss that ridiculous' moments.
Death gives us the momentary break away from monotony where we step back and evaluate our performance.
The design of death in games then.. should be taken seriously. Let's look at one extreme.
Nothing happened. It was all a dream. Continue play as normal.
Most recent offender: Bioshock
Bioshock is a descendant of System Shock, a game in which you wake up alone, in a hellish nightmare scenario, where roughly 17,000 things are trying to bash your brains in while apologizing for doing so. You might imagine that this makes playing System Shock, in the dark, at night, alone, with full environmental audio, the easiest way to be found dead the following morning from terror-induced panic attacks.
Bioshock is roughly fifteen thousand times less scary than that. Pretend that you were alone. In an abandoned city. Filled with ghoulish minions of what used to be human beings. Dark. Terrifying. The only other human contact is through remote radio. And everywhere you can observe what used to be scraps of humanity and the decay of it all.
With only your wits and your guns to survive.
Terrifying, no? Except for the tiny fact that you're immortal.
IMMORTAL.
Every time you die, you pop-out of the neat little 'Ressurect-o-matic' locating conveniently every 15 feet. Free of charge. Slightly dis-oriented perhaps, but all in all, well jolly good and well rested.
...and not that scary at all. When death becomes a minor inconvenience, things fail to be scary. Things fail to be relevant.
You're Dead. Game Over. Restart?
Biggest Offender: Almost every game on the NES? Raiden / Ikaruga / Tohou 'Perfect Shooter' games.
To a lesser extent: 'Punish me' games, a la, Ninja Gaiden. Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, MMORPG's that penalize your exp when you die.
Then there's the flip side of the equation. If Death means you essentially restart from ground zero, or the first level, or perhaps at the beginning of the level you were on several hours ago because you kept dying to that ONE boss.
Death, in the first case, cost you nothing, and was essentially made gameplay irrelevant because there was no penalty or incentive for how well you did.
Death, in this case, costs you everything, and thus makes every single move relevant. Almost frustratingly relevant. We play games to have fun. While some of us do enjoy the Zen like qualities of playing the perfect game of space invaders, I would wager that most Timmy players out there are not out play the perfect game, or have every move carefully scrutinized for errors.
The removal of all progress, forcing the player to restart entirely from scratch, also doesn't work because the time commitment required for playing the game is magnified to an enormous amount. No one but Spikes have the time involved to actually restart the game over from that far back. What's the point?
Making death cost you progress is essentially demanding that the player perform to a certain level. Games simply don't have the right to do that unless the player himself requests it. Some hardcore gamers do desire to be challenged into performing at high levels. However, Timmy players just want to play and Johnny players just want to experiment. There's no need to force them to perform 'perfect games.'
But what other kinds of death could there possibly be?
Better known as the 'sliding scale.' It would appear that most games nowadays go from 'Death is a minor inconvenience' to 'Death sets you back for a few hours' to 'Death drives you completely insane and makes you snap your controller in rage.'
How exactly does one make death relevant but not set you back for a few hours or penalize you for game-play time? It seems to be impossible, when you first look at it. It's a sliding scale, no? How could you not penalize the player at all and still have death be relevant?
One only has to look at team based FPS games to realize that this is simply untrue.
When Death does not equal Defeat
Suppose you are in a game where death has no penalty. You come back to life somewhere else. You lose nothing. You didn't get shunted an hour away from where you were. You can get back to where you died in seconds.
What did you lose? Seconds of time. A minor inconvenience.
And ridiculously important when those seconds are precious. In a team-based multi-player game, where the coordinated actions of a team are magnified by the efforts of individual players, not having a key player in place might cost the players the entire match. And having a player who constantly takes stupid risks and gets himself killed 90% of the time is simply not an effective teammate.
And it might even cost your team the win. The key in this case, is that your individual death does not affect you directly, but it does affect your chance of success. Your individual death might not cost you anything at all or it might cost you the entire game.
Death is still a set-back and a penalty in this case. However, it is almost entirely virtual. If your team was doing well, your death might cost you nothing. If your team was doing poorly, your death still costs you nothing.
But what if... what if your team needed you at that crucial moment? Or what if your teams were evenly matched?
Death, in this case, doesn't really feel horrible and yet still has tremendous importance on the game.
Death in the online world...
In the world of massively multi-player online role playing games, the only 'fair' negative impetus that one can deliver players is death. If they mess up, death. If they are in an improper area, death. If they do something incredibly stupid, death. (Or to a lesser degree, damage, which is essentially, the threat of death.)
If you don't want the players to do something, the kindest (and possibly only) way to do it is to kill them, or threaten to kill them by harming them a lot. (One can do other things, such as taking away experience or items and such but in an online rpg, this essentially means setting them back potentially hundreds of hours of progress... and possibly sending the player into abject depression or keyboard-snapping frustration.)
However, in these games, death is a negative impetus strictly because it costs you time (either travel time), experience (which is time spent playing the game), or penalizes you with some sort of penalty that says you can't play the game for a while. These penalties are designed to make deaths relevant. Death is always a bad thing.
How could we possibly make almost certain death something that the player would want to do?
Without it being horribly abused...
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment