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I've read a couple of articles recently on this, and it was never something I'd given much thought to recently, but given that if you're anything like me you spend an awful lot of your gaming time actually dying, I thought it might be interesting to look at the different ways games deal with death.
FPSs that claim to be all about the realism yet give you as many saves as you want? MMOs where as a mighty hero all you've got to do is float about for a bit before rejoining the fray?
Obviously a realistic treatment of death would be to end the game right there and never let you play again, so for many reasons that one's not even on the table. How about games like Uplink, where you can restart as many times as you want, but it has to be with a new "account" and there are no saves? (OK, that's not strictly "death", but that whole system neatly sidesteps the problem).
Another way of sidestepping the problem is to work it into the story- to an extent, the corpse runs and especially the Spirit Healers in WoW are a way of doing this, a way of allowing a player to come back from death without breaking the game's internal continuity. Or Prince Of Persia- The Sands Of Time, where the Sands will allow time to be rewound to a limited extent, making a pretty nifty alternative to just activating another life. Or Bioshock's vitachambers.
Or did anyone used to play the pen & paper RPG Paranoia, where the player was a series of clones, each ready to be activated when the last one inevitably died doing something really stupid?
The thing that makes it all tricky, I guess, is what kind of penalty death should actually be. If it's TOO MUCH of a hardship, the player's not going to risk doing any of those really cool things they actually bought the game for. If it's not enough, then there's no sense that any of your actions actually mean anything. In WoW, I guess this kind of balances out for the most part; if you die of something fairly inconsequential and unheroic (being attacked by a bear you hadn't noticed while your eyes are off the screen and you're rolling a cigarette or something, say) then a corpse run should be a minor annoyance at worst. If you die fighting off a shitload of bad guys to get some treasure, and you know damn well half of them (probably the ones blocking your escape) will have respawned by the time you get back to your corpse, it is, fittingly, a much harsher penalty.
It's noticeable how the initially-really-fucking-annoying "ONE SAVE" system in Dead Rising really ramps up the tension. You don't have to lose your whole game due to one stupid mistake, but you have to be pretty damn careful nonetheless.
Probably the best treatment of death was in Amiga classic Cannon Fodder. You had a bunch of cute and tiny cartoon guys, each with names. They died at an alarming rate, and at the end of each game or level you would see a hill filling up with crosses; their graves. Paradoxically this semed to give the deaths greater gravity while at the same time allowing you to just send them into the fray wily-nilly and enjoy the mayhem of it all. I think it was for this reason that until the first Call of Duty came along there had never been another game that made war (as a game) quite so much fun while simultaneously making quite a powerful statement against the real thing.
And of course, when people bang on about the four endings of Deus Ex, they forget all the really bleak and almost infinitely varied alternate endings in which JC Denton dies and the world is doomed.
There's an interesting take on the subject here, but I'm far more interested in hearing Barbelith's ideas on the subject. |
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