As gamers, we have done our share of dying. We’ve died at the hands of monsters, aliens, demons, soldiers, terrorists, flowers, bats, and anything else that could conceivably damage our frail little bodies. Dying is so ingrained in our gaming sub-culture that sometimes we find ourselves using it as a synonym for lost – I’ve certainly died while playing Tetris! As gaming as advanced, there has been a wider awareness of essential gameplay mechanics and this has caused developers to think about how a player can lose. This has resulted in several different ways with incorporating a player’s death into the game. So, how have various games incorporated our deaths into the gameplay throughout the ages?
The “Cinematic Platformer” Death
The original Prince of Persia was rather kind about death. You weren’t heavily penalized for your death and you didn’t lose until the in-game time limit had reached it’s end. This set the bar for the “cinematic platformer,” where death wasn’t the end of the world. For example, the classic Playstation and PC platformer Heart of Darkness never penalized you for death, it just sent you back to the last checkpoint. Since this sub-genre of platformers is known for giving the player little or no health and trying to simulate realistic animations, this is a fair compromise to an otherwise unforgiving genre.
Somehow, he comes back from this (click image for a video cataloging the deaths of Heart of Darkness)
Pay No Heed, Reload!
This is the preferred method for computer games, since the ability to save anywhere is generally assumed. It makes it almost impossible to enforce death penalties onto the player if they can go back a few minutes and try again. Half-Life, for example, would just reload the most recent save (whether it be an auto-save, quick save, or plain old-fashioned save). Since Halo on the original Xbox, this has been the preferred method for console shooters. Since console shooters generally don’t give you the ability to go about saving whenever you want, the checkpoint system fills the same need (except the developers chose the checkpoint instead of you).
Well, I Hope You Learned Your Lesson
This is a common approach. The consequence of dying was to either choose to try the same level again or, if the game had a level select, try a different level. Different gameplay decisions affect how meaningful this is. In the Mega Man games, for example, the only way to choose a new level was to die. This makes dying an essential part of the gameplay as you’ll need to die in order to learn which boss is weak to that new weapon you just acquired (as some weaknesses are pretty bizarre). In Super Mario World this meant that if one path through the game was too annoying for you, you could try to find a secret in a previous level to try to avoid the levels you don’t like. Doom would reload the level you were on, but taking all the equipment you had acquired (often making it more favourable to reload). Quake would reload the level with all the weapons and ammo you had when you started the level initially (making a reload unnecessary).
Sometimes the easiest way to get back to this screen was just admit defeat and die... maybe it's a commentary on life and reincarnation?
If This Were An Arcade Game, This Is Where You’d Pay To Continue
We all know this one, when you die and/or run out of continues, you need to restart the game from the start. This is a carry-over from arcade games. Many arcade ports try to find ways to cope with this in a home situation. Some games reward the player with continues as they progress (for example: for every 100,000 points a player acquires, they get another continue). Some games just embrace it. Super Mario Bros. on the NES did this – while it was not originally an arcade game, there are signs that it wasn’t out of the arcade mindset (such as having points that do nothing). If you died too often you had to restart the game. Games sometimes use this to increase the difficulty and seem to favour trial-and-error and pattern recognition (such as enemies having a recognizable attack pattern) in their game design. This often means that the game needs to be completed in one-sitting and without running out of lives and/or continues.
Did That Happen? I Didn’t See Anything!
RPGs are a bit notorious for just ignoring deaths that occur in battle. They provide items to heal your team from death, but will sometimes kill your teammates off in ways that (mysteriously) render them immune to a phoenix down. This means the fan base that assumes some sort of coherency in these story-driven games will need to come up with explanations as to why a character can survive gun shot wounds, but not one stab wound. Perhaps when one’s HP is reduced to 0, it simply means they’re unconscious; perhaps they’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons where some rule sets state that death only occurs when one’s HP reaches -10, while 0 to -9 just means that the player is knocked out (apparently this is only true for 2nd edition rules, but I swear 3rd edition had this rule too!). The deaths that occur in battle only became an issue when there’s a disconnect between gameplay and story, as with Aries’ death in Final Fantasy VII.
Don't bring a machine gun to a sword fight
There’s No Need For That, Is There?
Lucas Arts’ adventure games became very popular because they consciously decided to make it impossible to die or enter a no-win situation. This, combined with the trademark humour, helped make their games stand apart from the Sierra adventure titles they were competing against. The penalty of death or not collecting a specific item (or using it too early) in an adventure game was to make the game unwinnable. The Lucas Arts philosophy became the norm for adventure games, especially as Sierra’s adventure titles became known for having increasingly outlandish
unwinnable situations – especially
King’s Quest V (my brother once said that
King’s Quest V “was hard,” he’s known for understating stuff like this). This philosophy of game design makes it impossible to die and tries to make it impossible to not win the game.
Incorporate Your Death into the Story
This is one that isn’t done too often. Bioshock is well-known for a somewhat half-assed effort to do this with the Vita-Chambers. Planescape: Torment, an RPG from 1999 is quite noteworthy for doing this. Death carries no penalty, aside from respawning in a different location. While this isn’t unusual, what did make the game unusual was that death was made a necessity! Death can be used to advance the plot when nothing else will. All of this was explained away with the character being immortal, thus never truly capable of dying in the first place. Sometimes death was used to advance the story. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time has another way of incorporating death into the story; the game itself is just the Prince telling a story. When you’re about to die, the sands can save you, but if you’re out of sand the Prince will say “no, wait, that’s not how it happened,” and go back to tell the story from the last save point. Death is an assumed part of the game and, thus, the story. How does the Prince get confused and think he died? Well, he has gone through those events many times and the save points, at times, show him falling and dying and such. In reality, he had seen his death many times over the course of the game. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon took this in a more realistic direction – members of your team can die and their deaths carry over. This means the character you have improved over the course of the game is forever lost and you’ll need to start building up the stats of a new recruit. If your entire team dies you’ll need to reload, but provided you can complete a mission, the death of characters will affect gameplay.
You waking up at the start of the game, after one of your deaths. When a floating skull is a teammate, don't expect death to be a major hindrance (click for full image).
Make Death a Gameplay Gimmick
This seems a lot like the previous point. However, incorporating death into the story is more about explaining away than embracing death. Death can be swept aside with the story, but somehow developers try to make death a gameplay experience that fits into the game. Prey, for example, will transport your soul to the afterlife where you have about 30 seconds to shoot down spirit wraiths to give you more life and spirit when you do come back. The upcoming NeverDead will never have the player die, just get dismembered until you’re just a head. While, normally, this would seem like worthy of a game over screen, but the gimmick is you can reassemble your character. This means you can roll your head around and attach an arm to your head and just roll around shooting a monster. Dead Rising never incorporated the player’s death into the story, but made death essential to completing the game. Each time you die, your character’s level (and appearance) carried over to the next game. Good luck beating the game on your first playthrough, but by your tenth, you’ll be doing pretty good.
Conclusion
What are some other inventive ways you’ve seen death incorporated into a game and do you have a favourite design decision to incorporate death into a game? Do you have any ideas on how death should be incorporated into games or is the idea of “losing” outdated in single-player games?
August 28, 2010
#1
I thought it was a cool idea they had with World of Warcraft where when you die, you have control over your spirit where you have to make it back to your body to regenerate.
August 28, 2010
#2
Demon’s Souls uses something like that, I believe. It’s interesting how games have been fooling around with stuff like that.
That being said, the WoW solution is basically what Blizzard did with Diablo 2, where you had to walk back to your body, except it makes it impossible to die until you retrieve your corpse. Knowing the people one comes across online, probably a good idea.
September 1, 2010
#3
There many ways to die but my favorites always been getting your head chopped off by the chainsaw guy in Resident Evil 4
September 1, 2010
#4
That’s one of the few times a game made me say “oh shit” when I died. I wasn’t expecting a one-hit kill.
September 5, 2010
#5
I still remeber all the times I tried to slay the chickens in Zelda, only to be humiliated and pecked to death