Hit me one more time: Death and Punishment in Games

Dying is a big part of life, both in reality and in videogames. Since the first games, there has been a need for some kind of failure state. After all, what’s the fun in playing a game you can’t lose? Some games, like Atari’s Pong had “loss” as a failure state, but most games went with “death” of some kind. In any game, there needs to be some kind of factor that makes death unappealing (besides the fact that it’s an uncomfortable reminder of our own fragile mortality) so you avoid it. Different kinds of games have tried different things to make death unappealing, though some work better than others.

When arcades died, the continue screen died with them. IT's a real shame, considering how awesome some of them are.

What are some interesting methods of de-incentivizing death? Which of them are well designed?

In the Pokémon series “death” is not much of a hurdle, and that’s a good thing. You “lose” in Pokémon by making all of your Pokémon “faint.” You wake up at the last Pokémon center you visited after blacking out. Nurse Joy heals your Pokémon and tells you three or four lines about how the center is always here to help you.

No, I think I'd like my poor electric rat to just stay terribly poisoned, thanks. Is this free? Is there Pokémon healthcare? Do we have an HMO? Hold on, I need to call my mom.

If you just mash the A button to get through it quickly she’ll heal your Pokémon and you’ll have to listen to the whole spiel again. It might not seem like punishment, but having to read the same lines over and over again is just annoying enough to make “dying” a pain. This whole process incentives good item use and keeping an eye on your Pokémon’s health as you travel. If you let your Pokémon faint too often they start to dislike you which leads to your Pokémon disobeying you in the middle of battle.

I guess this is what I get for putting Caterpie first against that level 75 Charizard.

This system is well designed because it doesn’t interfere with your gameplay in a large way while also ensuring that you want to avoid dying, just so that you don’t have to hear Nurse Joy lecturing you again.

Death is such a part of the Souls series that the first DLC-included version of Dark Souls is called Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition. You’d think that because death is so common in that game that there’s no way to de-incentivize it, right? When you die in Dark Souls, all the souls you’ve collected (used to level up, upgrade weapons, etc) are left where you died.

Welcome to the Souls series, where the enemies are relentless and the souls don't matter.

After death you respawn at the last bonfire (the game’s checkpoints) that you used. To get them back, you have to make it back to the spot where you bit the dust. What’s so clever about this method is how it changes based on how many souls you were carrying and where you died. If you only had a couple of thousand souls, you might not even care about them but if you had several hundred thousand, you would probably want to head back super carefully because losing all those souls means losing hours of game progress.

All your souls are right there in that little green light. You will die many times trying to get back to that light. You will resent that light.

If you just rolled off a cliff by accident, then picking up your souls is a simple as going back to the spot and grabbing them. If you died in the middle of a boss fight, you might have to dodge around a giant dragon while maneuvering towards your souls. It’s a multilayer form of punishment that really fits the tone of the game and incorporates directly into the gameplay nicely.

In Bethseda RPGs, death always results in the same thing: reloading your most recent save. Most modern games have an autosave system that will save your game every x minutes, but some older games require to manually save your progress. Bethesda RPGS are famous for their massive amounts of content, and each game just keeps adding to the pile.

This bear is actually a metaphor for how badly the massive amount of content (the bear) is going to crush you (you).

Every time you die, you can lose hours of progress depending on when the game saved, or when you did. This is unfair because it feels like saving should be a system that the game handles, rather than the player. It’s almost like you’re being punished for enjoying the game so much that you forgot to take yourself out of gameplay and go through a bunch of menus to save. This is a case where the game goes too far towards dis-incentivizing death, to the point where death results in you putting the controller/mouse down, maybe for the day. This can be mitigated, based on how often the game autosaves, but that’s more of a band aid than a cure.

Dying in The Legend of Zelda is a slap in the face that you see coming a mile away. You know that you shouldn’t have gone into that high leveled temple with one and a half hearts, but you did anyway.

This is not going to end well for me. What's that, Giant Dino-corn? You agree? Nice to have consensus.

Before you know it, you hear that sad little sound effect and you wind up back where you started the game. Every time you die you respawn with three hearts, no matter the maximum amount of hearts you have. In the beginning of the game you only have three maximum hearts so you can shoot (maybe throw? It’s unclear) your sword no problem. However as you progress though the game you get more hearts, so death means that you start out hobbled. Now you have to start out every new life by either grinding for hearts, grinding for money to buy medicine to restore hearts, or you need to find a fairy pool to heal yourself. This feels poorly designed because the game is putting an artificial time sink between you and more progress. The only difference between starting like this or starting will full hearts is about ten to fifteen minutes of wasted time.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!” Videogames have to make sure that death is aggravating because they’re the only place where you can die every five minutes and still be doing what you’re doing. Exactly how to go about making death aggravating must be a hard concept to wrestle with, given how final it is in reality. Clever developers come up with systems that play into the game mechanics, but others go for the low hanging fruit of time based frustration and quicksaving. Next time you die in a videogame, think about what you have to do to progress again. Is the mechanic well designed? Is it annoying? Why so?

Thanks for reading, everybody. Please share and send feedback, if you’re so inclined. 

Judging Books by Their Covers: Graphics and Themes

People might spend more time arguing about graphics than they do arguing about anything else in video games. Every time anything comes out, approximately 5000% of all forum posts are about the graphics being the best ever, or the worst thing since E.T. for the Atari 2600. Graphics have definitely become more complex over the years, but now that designers can make pretty much whatever they’d like, your style of graphics a more a choice than a limitation.

it's like I'm really there. E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the games that lead to the great video game crash of 1983 and the  graphics certainly didn't help.

But what do the different styles of graphics tell about a game, or theming? Why do designers go with certain styles over others?

Cell shaded graphics are definitely a modern style of graphics that’s come about. Cell shading was made famous by Jet Set Radio for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. The style allows you to create graphics that resemble a cartoon in 3-dimensions. This is a really cool style which ages well due to how stylized they are. This style is really cool for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because it looks like a damn cartoon. I think lots of kids dreamed about being able to interact with their cartoons, and cell shaded games let you do that. Cell shaded games also have certain air of fun about them. They’re usually colorful, fast paced, and cheerful. The Borderlands series does a great job using its cell shaded graphics to bring some irreverence and fun to the depressing-when-you-think-about-it setting.

So colorful and so depressing to actually think about.

There are certain downsides to the style though. I think it’d be very difficult to make a “serious” cell-shaded game. The style looks best with bright pastel colors, and those generally don’t translate very well to serious subject matter. The contrast between the brightness of the colors and the black outlines doesn’t work nearly as well when the colors are dull. I think you could design a good introspective game, but I don’t know about serious. It’s hard to deal with intensive subject matter when you look like you should be on at Saturday at 9AM.

Seriously, this could be a cartoon. I'd watch it. Who doesn't love awesome tunes and roller-skates? 

When people think about improved graphics, they usually think about “modern” graphics. I use quotation marks because technology advances and “modern” changes. After all, Deus Ex looked pretty great in 2000, but nowadays it looks pretty ugly and unrefined. The upside to these graphics is that they’re the height of graphics at the time when they came out. They show how much work designers put into their concepts because you can more accurately recreate the drawings in the game. Older games were basically just pixels on top of each other, so some of the nuances of the original ideas might get lost, but the better the graphics, the more accurate the recreation. Better graphics also allow designers to make more detailed worlds

The Crysis series is renowned for it's realistic and demanding graphics. The games look incredible, but in 10 years, maybe they'll look like mud.

The disadvantage to this kind of graphical style is that it ages very poorly. There might be some charm in looking at what was considered the height of graphics in 2004, but Doom 3 looks pretty gnarly these days. Using a modern style of graphics basically ties your game down to a specific era, and can really limit its life, though there are ways around that. People are still making graphical updates for games like Deus Ex or System Shock 2 to help improve their dated looks, but short of a total redesign, the majority of players will pass these games up.

Doom 3

Deus Ex

Lastly, we should talk about pixels. The art style, not that terrible movie that came out last year. I’m not actually sure if you can make a good video game movie, to be fair. Seems like most of them are pretty terrible. Well, Silent Hill was actually okay. But man, Pixels was awful.

Where were we? Oh right.

 Pixel graphics are what defined classic games, for the most part. There were some other interesting directions that came out at the same time, like vector graphics, but pixels definitely prevailed as the style of the time. Pixel graphics may have started blocky, like in Pong, or most Atari 2600 games, but by the time of Metal Slug pixels became an art form all their own. Detailed pixel art is impressive, not just because it takes forever to make and animate, but because it looks really good. Since pixels dominated for the first 4 generations of gaming consoles, pretty much every kind of game is represented, which means they can be used for any style. Pixels can also be as colorful or as monotone as you’d like them, so they can fit most tones that a game can have. Modern games that use pixel art are usually trying to callback to this classic era of games, and games like Shovel Knight, Axiom Verge, and Titan Souls use their style to great effect this way.

The Metal Slug series is fun, addictive, and beautifully made. The amount of detail in these games is pretty nuts, considering how long it takes to make the art.

There are limitations though. Pixel art is not great for 3D games, with a few exceptions. 3D animation requires sprites to be drawn from a huge number of angles, which is obviously very time consuming and difficult. Pixel art is also not the best for very detailed character faces, without falling on the old JRPG trope of having the characters faces be next to the textbox. It seems like it would be very hard to use pixels as an art style and not bring older games to mind, so if you’re looking for something newer, there are definitely better options.

These sorts of screen really break up the flow of a game and are best left in the past. Star Ocean: Second Evolution has a lot of old fashioned design.

So, we’ve seen how an art style can affect the tone of a game, and the advantages and limitations of a few. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are some standouts for sure. When making a game, every piece of it is there for a reason, and trying to figure out why makes the experience so much better. So, next time you’re playing a game, ask yourself why the designers chose the style that they did. What does it add to the game? Was it the best choice?