Several months ago, I picked up the Space Quest Collection on Steam. I’ve always been a fan of the old-school adventure games, but I had no recollection of playing these classics. Granted, after I started playing, I remembered many of the introductions to these games, but not much more.
The reason I remember the beginning is because these games are fucking hard. Not in a “oh, maybe I should get the walkthrough” kind of hard, but in a “how in the hell did anyone have the patience to put up with this bullshit” kind of hard. I died. I died a lot. I mean, many, many, many deaths. There are probably planets littered with space janitor corpses now due to my ineptitude.
Playing these games revealed to me something about myself that I didn’t really know. You see, when I was a kid I kind of spouted into my geekdom all at once. I got my copy of the Basic Set of Dungeons & Dragons when I was eight, started playing computer games on the Atari 2600 when I was nine, and had my first story published when I was ten. Since my experience with roleplaying came at about the same time as my experience with computer games, I was wired to think that dying was bad. I mean, dying is bad regardless, but for me it was a meaningful loss, and more specifically it is a failure on my part if my character died.
I didn’t realize how much this was engrained into me until I started playing Space Quest. I was getting more and more frustrated, and at some point I realized that my repeated deaths weren’t a failure on my part. Since I could die as many times as I wanted, it wasn’t a limited resource that indicated failure, but in reality it was a learning tool – each death taught me a little more about the game. My brain switched from “each death is a failure on the part of the player” to “each death is a resource to teach you more about the game.”
Granted, not every game is designed this way, but once I made this connection, I started seeing it everywhere. Adventure games, obviously, but also more action-oriented games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. World of Warcraft is a notorious example of allowing people to come back after death. Certain board games like Talisman allow players whose characters die start right up with a new one. Even role-playing games like Paranoia offer an opportunity for faster replay after a character dies. But interestingly, not all of the games are particularly hard or impart information on the player of the recently deceased. More and more, it seems that an infinite supply of lives is just a design that people expect, instead of for a particular design reason.
There are a few different things you can lose when you die:
- Loss of progress. Death can cause anything from a complete loss of progress (most roleplaying games, Fester’s Quest) to almost no loss at all (Braid and Sands of Time). Note that by “progress,” I mean narrative progress.
- Loss of ability. Many computer and paper-and-dice roleplaying games cause the loss of all or much capability on death. This usually takes the form of starting over with a new character, but also losing weapon upgrades when you lose a life (1943: The Battle of Midway, as well as many other shmups). Also, many roleplaying games use a house rule where a new character can have a similar amount of ability as the deceased character did (making them as the same level, with a certain number of experience points, etc.) which minimized this loss.
- Loss of resources. Some games charge a resource cost for resurrection. This can be in money (Torchlight), items (most Final Fantasy games) or a mechanics-specific resource like spell slots (Dungeons & Dragons) or a finite resource of “lives” (most coin-operated video games, as well as Paranoia).
Also, how often and easily a character dies has an impact on the feel of the game. A character who dies from a single touch (Pac-Man) offers a very different experience than a character who can take a barrage of abuse before dying (God of War). Also, games with a “half-death” state where the character doesn’t actually die but feels the impact of death (torpor in Vampire: The Masquerade, the loss of Super Mario’s abilities in many of the Super Mario games, and rewinding of time in games like Braid).
Finally, some games actually provide a radically different experience upon death. Echo Bazaar is a good example of this, where death unlocks different content. One could make the case that roleplaying games like Wraith are similar, but in reality the game doesn’t even begin until death, so the “first death” is really just as setup for the game – there is no content without that death in the first place.
So, death doesn’t mean the end of your game, but many times it does mean something. What does it mean in your game?
Maybe the best game I’ve played in terms of dealing with death creatively was Planescape: Torment. Each death contributes to the story , and is handled well with in-character dialogue instead of being ignored as something that didn’t “really happen”.
Man, that’s ANOTHER reason I have to play that game.
Still the best computer RPG ever made in my opinion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve played through it.
Now I need to try and find some way to get the decade old PC game to work on a 2010 Mac!
Robin, the versions of the games at GOG.com are pretty good for Win 7. You can probably use a Win 7 virtual machine on your Mac, and then install them as normal…
Oh sweet. I have Win 7 and Parallels, so this should work.
In a solo gaming experience, death as a “less than severe consequence” isn’t such a problem; it’s a learning experience and it’s entirely your own game. You can treat death in the game as a minor inconvenience and reload, or you can look at the certain community challenges such as things like the common ‘no reload’ challenges for games from Baldur’s Gate to Mass Effect, where death *is* final (…for that game, anyway).
I think there’s a more serious issue when the consequences of death are lessened in a communal gaming experience. Whether that be the limited impact of XP debt in MMOs, or new character creation being conducted on the basis of similar power levels as the previous character in a tabletop or LARP, it creates irresponsible play.
Of course, it’s finding a balance between genuine consequences of character death in such an experience, and putting off players. I’d love, for example, to see an MMORPG where if your character dies, it dies. You start again, from level 1, complete beginner. I’d be fascinated at the potential impact on the roleplay and overall gaming experience. Unfortunately, I also can’t see how that would be economically viable.
Maybe there isn’t a happy medium. In larger communal experiences (i.e. larger than a regular tabletop group) you often have one of two outcomes. Either overly limited impacts of death, which creates childish and reckless play that can ruin the enjoyment of others (see many MMOs), or over-emphasis on survival (either by style of play or through rules lawyering) because the perceived consequences of death are too negative. And in all too few situations, outside of well run tabletop games, is death in itself considered a worthy roleplaying experience.
EVE has an interesting balance of this — the more you spend on your clone, the less you will lose if you die. In essence, you are exchanging loss of progress for the loss of resources (skill points for ISK).
I think this is where some of the disgruntlement around MC comes from in the Camarilla. High MC players have less to lose from character death. They clearly lose something, but the amount of XP they get is more of an offsetting factor, which means that (theoretically) they have less to lose and thus less incentive to play conservatively. Obviously there are a lot of other factors to that particular argument, but purely from a progress level, the impact is lessened.
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I hate dying in any game, especially RPGs. Back when I played Diablo 2 online, I thought it was cool that they had a “hardcore” mode where if you died, that was it. That could turn into some serious mourning if you were a Level 50+ and got caught in a situation you couldn’t get out of. That’s a lot of hours getting permanently deleted.
Yeah. I’ve been tempted to try hardcore with Torchlight, but I’m afraid of losing all of that time because I clicked on the wrong thing…
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Have you played Baroque? You can find it cheap on Wii these days.Anyway the point is that the process of dying was needed to complete the story. You can not finish the game if you do not die occasionally. In fact choosing when to die can shape the way you can play the game. Granted that may only work with some games, I know there is an Xbox live game whose name escapes me that when you enter a dangerous area you get to see glimpses of other people’s games (and there deaths) as sort of psychic premonition.
I haven’t played Baroque — I’ll look into it.
Are you by chance thinking of Demons’ Souls?
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