The Death Penalty (in video games)

Meeting your avatar’s death is inevitable in a video game. A simple mistake in judgement, a mistimed jump, a poor weapon selection are some scenarios a player can face and ultimately meet their doom. The problem with death is not that it happens, it’s the way that the game mechanics deal with death. Death in real life is a big deal, human emotions are spilt and tears are shed, a recent example is Michael Jackson’s death, and the pay people reacted to this around the world. In a video game however, it’s an acceptable fate and a player can deal with and there is no sense of game immersion or human emotion in the real world, and most of the time it doesn’t make sense that a player can die many times, but a core character in the storyline can only die once.

The first time I felt ‘death’ in a video game was in Final Fantasy VII. It was a long time ago and a very nostalgic place in my heart. This was one of the finest RPG’s ever made, and the characterisation of the protagonists made the player have an emotional connection with each of them. Spoiler; in one of the cutscenes, Aeris (Aerith) gets cut down and dies just under halfway through the game. She is not resurrect-able. Instead, this forms as a literary technique of tragedy and places more anger towards the villain Sephiroth. Aeris keeps having a role in the story though, she pushes the storyline ahead and acts of a guide of the world through visions, and you can revisit places and see ethereal images of her. Some might argue that this is unfair, that the time put into leveling up the character and equipping it with items is then wasted, but rather I see it as a compulsory emotional connection to this character and only through investment of time can we really feel a ‘loss’ of the character.

Another game with a different style of death was Planescape Torment. Since you were already dead, dying didn’t mean a loss of anything, but rather a ‘rebirth’, and pushing the storyline and new locations through the dying process. Obviously this only worked because the protagonist was undead, but this is a game that thought ‘outside the box’ and introduced death to drive the story.

The traditional way of handling death in most videogames is GAMEOVER. The game you were playing is over, and you have to either restart, or load a saved game to a previous location in which you were alive. The variations of this is a ‘lives’ based system where you essentially get ‘chances’ before the GAMEOVER, but ultimately death in these sort of games just involves a whole restart or save game reload, and quite frankly, unimaginative.

One game tried to be creative with the way it dealt with death. In the underwater world of Rapture, Bioshock coined a system where you could activate a vat or some sort and it would respawn you (cloning or some sci-fi trick), so when you die you would spawn to an already activated/discovered area. This devalued death severely, you could run around, kill as much things, then just respawn and run back up. In a way, it rewards players who are risk takers, and allows the freedom to have that style of play. How is this respawn point system different to excessive save and then loading once you have run in and scouted the area and where the enemies are?

Save/exit is another system where a user has a freedom to save whenever they want, but it would exit the game. Essentially this gives the feel of a single play-through, in that you would only load a save game if you quit before hand. I’m not a huge fan of this one, sometimes you want to keep a save game from the past for a moment in the storyline you want to relive, or to reload later if there was a decision to be made or fork in the storyline.

MMO’s also have different ways of dealing with death. Nick Yee has a paper here, which I recently read. I love his work and his papers and hope to someday have some input into the industry and get involved with designing an MMO. It’s worth a read if you’re interested in the history of death in MMOs, and the difference between early MMO design in UO/EQ and modern MMO design in WOW.

Recently (E3 period possibly), I had read that there’s a new dungeon/platformer game, which is a solo experience. But it has online capability. It records players movements during their play time and records how they die. Then the game uploads their death sequence, and gives other players a heads-up on how other people died through seamless incorporation. Ghosts will animation through the dungeon showing some other player’s death, there will be blood splutters on the wall, and whispers. I think this is a great move and innovation in death, however I still think that there needs to be more, so that the players can emotionally get attached to their avatar, not enough so to cause distress, but enough to invoke some emotions.