I live in a house with two older people who don’t play video games. People who don’t play video games often wonder why people who do play video games get so wound up by them. In part, it’s because the engine is inconsistent in achieving what it’s supposed to, compared to real life; think what it would be like if for some reason you go to climb a wall, and you somehow accidentally spring-board off of it straight into the adjacent lake. It should be funny, but you’re having a hard time seeing the joke because, for no reason, you didn’t achieve what you wanted and you got wet.
Doesn’t that sound pointless and annoying? Well, that’s what happens when you die in video games. Non-gaming peoples usually suggest not playing games at all “if they make you so upset”. My response is to say that they’re not likely to become the utopia of fantastical hysteria they’ve been long promising to be if no one plays them and takes to the internet in fury over insensitive game design. When you’re scuba diving in your living room and it feels for all the world like you’re on a real life coral reef, you’ll thank us. And so will the environment.
Until that moment, I’m going to pick a fight with death. It used to be that games were so short, the only way to build any sense of length or achievement into them was to require the player to undertake several difficult tasks in sequence. Failure resulted in death, thus the player would have to start again. In a platforming game, it is possible to build up a sense of flow; to learn how all the pieces fit together, how to use momentum to make the game easier and more satisfying to complete. You would pick up skills as you repeated them, allowing the levels to get progressively harder. You could call it a puzzle for developers, attempting to design a level that is technically possible but very difficult.
Popular contemporary games are increasingly less like that. Their scope is gigantic. They involve travelling laboriously from one area of a map to another. It ought not be be laborious, but it is made so by the dull but nonetheless gripping fear of video game death. What if I have to walk across this stretch of land again? It was OK this time, I suppose, but I don’t want to have to do it again.
It makes you wonder about death. Most people don’t want to die right now, much less be suddenly and violently killed by a giant scorpion while drinking from a fire hydrant. In most games “do X or you’ll die” is the name of the game, but development over the years has proved that this isn’t a required formula. Even in so-called life simulations, you can go thirty years without ever eating and you’ll be fresh as a daisy for the whole way through. There are games with no enemies and no risk; scenic games, photography games, building games, logic puzzle games, mystery games. With all that choice, there’s no need for all this guns and violence.
Even if you do like shooting at people, it doesn’t mean you necessarily want them to shoot back. Heavens! That’s hardly fair. I’m the player, you’re a computer. You don’t get to shoot me. And yet, sandbox games – a genre designed for wanton destruction, a game that makes your character into a one-man army with more firepower than all the gun stores in town – don’t understand the concept of people not wanting to die, nor feel vulnerable or restricted in anyway.
They seem to think they are also survival games. Just because both take place on an open world, that doesn’t mean they are the same. In survival games, dying is planned for and avoidable. It is easier to set up camps, harder to get yourself in big trouble, and easier to get out of trouble when you do. There are more safe spaces and quick fixes for escaping certain death. The reason is that where a sandbox hopes to be chaotic, a survival game has large swathes of relative peace to allow the player to scavenge for scraps.
In theory, this problem can be solved with a decent array of useful cheats, when the developers condescend to program them in *cough cough* but there isn’t any particular reason for dying. When you die in Grand Theft Auto games, all that happens is that you respawn outside a hospital. There is no reason for you ever to want to be outside a hospital. So, what are you doing there? Mostly, when you’re riding around and having fun, you want to continue doing so. It’s not easy to go on a crazed rampage when it means you go to A&E more often than all the paramedics in the city.
Moreover, way too many things hurt you. I see no reason why crashing a car, getting involved in fisticuffs or falling headfirst down a hundred foot drop ought to damage you at all. Too many times I have looked forward to a long, treacherous cycle ride down a mountain, only to hit a rock a quarter of the way down and slam to my death. Sometimes, you’re taking a leisurely walk and are attacked by a cougar and die instantly. It’s difficult to get a sense of freedom and exploration when everything from hikers to dust mites can kill you.
An alternative option to invincibility is to make it so only playing some parts of the open world can lead to death. The all-out chaotic gun battle could reasonably be left for people who want the survival challenge. This could be optional – it could be made so that the police only fire at you if you fire at them first, or shoot an innocent bystander. As it is, police in GTA games generally give you the death sentence for littering sooner or later, because apparently when someone runs away from the police, that makes them a TURRR-ist, to be brought down with the full force of the law.
However, whatever way you look at it, there is no reason why dramatic scenes like falling down a mountain can’t exist without death; the less sudden, impotent death, the better. Fights with gangs should be scheduled rather than random and regenerating, and quick-saved just before. Otherwise, players can too easily wander unawares into deep trouble. Dying too easily makes you aggravated by the inventiveness of the game; that cougar attack isn’t so funny when it wrenches you away from your exhibition and forces you back to the hospital. As a result, dying isn’t especially fun, and so the game is a lot less fun than it could be, as you become more risk averse than a Woody Allen hero.
Even in a gunfight and police chase, you still don’t absolutely need death. If you decide to get in trouble with the law and see how long you can ride out the storm, it’s enough to simply have a “trouble points” counter.
Such a thing existed in Rockstar’s older game Bully, but it only counted how much trouble was accumulated in total since game start. It didn’t keep track of the most amount of trouble generated in one sitting before getting caught or knocked out. This record would allow players to go on a rampage for the fun of seeing how long they can get away with it, and would not have necessitated death – or at least, not in its usual incarnation. You can conceivably die and respawn exactly where you died; or not respawn at all but simply be pronounced “dead” and have all your pursuers slink away as though you were all merely playing a jolly game. Which, it might be pointed out, you were.
That way, if you ended your chase up a mountain and wanted to stay there, or got bored and no longer wanted to try and stay alive, you could just mosey up to the next shiny thing that catches your eye and fanny about with that instead. The police would “kill” you, and then go away again, leaving you free to investigate. Everyone’s happy. Since the whole concept of realism was abandoned the moment they programmed in you waking up in the hospital after dying, they might as well stretch the truth a little further and allow players to properly explore the whole, huge map, as opposed to the three square metres surrounding the nearest hospital. If Rockstar reckoned that players should just stay out of trouble while travelling to whatever particular place they are headed, they cannot have play-tested their game very thoroughly. C’est impossible! There’s a priest over there. A priest. How often do you get to flick the nose of a priest and run away?
On missions, obviously the concept of death is more important because otherwise you’ll just storm the level like Shiva the destructor. You can still have the standard checkpoint respawn here. Since the system works differently during open world play and mission play anyway, there’s no reason to apply the same strict rules to parts of the game that aren’t able to be “won”.
Sometimes, there’s a shiny thing is on the ground and you’re in a helicopter on a mission. If I jumped out and died, I shouldn’t be forced to go back to the mission, or to hospital. It can’t be helped. You’ve got to jump. Or, maybe jumping is just hilarious. But its fun is ruined somewhat by the fact that you know you’ll pay for it. Literally. On top of being party poopers, Rockstar charge you in-game monies for pooping your party…
In a sandbox, which pulls you in multiple directions at once, I think it’s important to be able to rewind a section – to go back to the bit just before you took a left, just before you crashed the quadbike, just before you smacked the police officer. Then, given any fork in the road, you can see the consequences of both sets of actions. To borrow the cold cake methaphor, you should be able to have your quadbike and total it. That’s the value of sandboxes in the first place; ultimate choice and freedom.
Now that video games are so advanced and so different, I think it’s time we question the assumption of old that death, and some kind of sanction for it, is a necessary part of video games. The challenge, and more importantly the level of entertainment of a game is not in the propensity to die. It’s how well the game performs in its function. In sandboxes, just like in puzzles or life sims, the point is not to stay alive, thus there is no reason to die.
You Must Insult The Ones You Love 