Link to original post: [drupal=4404]Death in video games[/drupal]
A few days back I had a conversation with someone online, a Kirby fan like myself, wherein he said he greatly disliked the game Kirby's Epic Yarn for his inability to die in it. This confused me honestly as I greatly enjoyed Kirby's Epic Yarn because, well, it was an aesthetic masterpiece. I had fun just interacting with the stages and seeing the ridiculously adorable visuals come to life. But his point was that if you couldn't die, then what's the point? You cant feel like you've accomplished anything if you can't die.
A few days back I purchased inFamous 2. I've always loved inFamous, it was the reason I bought my ps3, and without going into full fanboy mode, lets just say i fully enjoyed inFamous 2. Now, in inFamous 2 and it's predecessor it is fully possible to die. There's no real health meter, the screen just starts fading to black and white and the sound becomes muted as you approach death. You heal by absorbing electricity or by waiting out the damage but it is not like an FPS where it takes but a moment behind a wall. It takes quite a while to heal by waiting it out and enemies are far more forward in this game, they don't sit back and let you heal, they come after you. There are also a few larger enemies who put you into a miniature quick time event whereupon if you fail, you die. So yes, it is entirely possible to die. However in inFamous 2, as well as inFamous 1, as well as many other games, death is literally meaningless. If I die mid mission, i dont fail the mission, and in fact many times it doesn't even restart the mission at all, im just at the nearest respawn point with x amount of enemies still dead or x amount of items collected. There is literally 0 penalty for dying and in fact a few times it helped me as it put me closer to my objective than i was when i started.
It's not the first time I've played a game like this either. Games like God of War or Resident Evil 4/5 had a rather meaningless death system as well. Death in both games meant little more than a reset into the start of whichever room you had just entered or sometimes just a reset to the beginning of whichever battle you had just started. It could be a moderate annoyance in a game like GoW where some rooms can be rather large, but rarely much more than a momentary hindrance. Resident Evil's only real consequence to dying was the counter that said "you've died this many times" that showed up at the end of chapters.
Not all games are built like this obviously, there's still quite a few games where death puts you back quite a ways. But even then, unless you're playing something like Mega Man 10, built for the purpose of reminding you that the 8 bit generation has and always will hate you, just coming about death is difficult, and in more recent titles, auto save is frequent and quite forgiving. Going back to Kirby's Epic Yarn, one of the key elements of the game is collecting beads. Scattered throughout the level, you collect them and then are given a rank in the form of medals depending on how many you collected. Getting hit causes these beads to explode out of you, though they can still be recollected if you're quick. Doing something that would normally cause death in a game just results in a huge loss of beads. Fall into a bottomless pit and you're lifted back up to land by an angel made of yarn but your beads stay down there. In many of the later stages it is basically impossible to secure the gold medal if you take a hit late into the stage as there just isnt enough collectible beads after certain points. Now by no means is it hugely difficult to get a gold medal in every stage, however any time I failed to do so, and especially if I failed more than once, I felt as though I was being taunted. Unlike death nowadays which takes you back to a midpoint or a last save or a last room, failing to get that Gold Medal meant I had to completely re-do the stage I just did, only without messing up. I could almost hear the game saying "Try not to screw it up this time, it's not like this game is hard, it's made for KIDS "
I just can't seem to fully understand how the ability to die somehow makes completing a game more of an accomplishment. As we've moved past the generation where too much death either sent you all the way back to world 1-1 or made you put more quarters in the machine if you wanted to keep playing it has become mostly pointless to be able to die in a game. Even the aforementioned Mega Man 10 that recreates that "screw even a little and you die" feeling from games of old has a mid stage check point and a save system. The feeling of accomplishment in that game doesn't come for the fact that you can die but rather that knowing that finishing a stage means you didn't screw up. The only difference is that screwing up in Mega Man 10 means that you die and may have to re-do the whole level. In Kirby it's that you don't get a good rank and may have to re-do the level if you're an adamant about getting 100%(or just cant stand the fact that you got beaten by a game made of yarn)
A few days back I had a conversation with someone online, a Kirby fan like myself, wherein he said he greatly disliked the game Kirby's Epic Yarn for his inability to die in it. This confused me honestly as I greatly enjoyed Kirby's Epic Yarn because, well, it was an aesthetic masterpiece. I had fun just interacting with the stages and seeing the ridiculously adorable visuals come to life. But his point was that if you couldn't die, then what's the point? You cant feel like you've accomplished anything if you can't die.
A few days back I purchased inFamous 2. I've always loved inFamous, it was the reason I bought my ps3, and without going into full fanboy mode, lets just say i fully enjoyed inFamous 2. Now, in inFamous 2 and it's predecessor it is fully possible to die. There's no real health meter, the screen just starts fading to black and white and the sound becomes muted as you approach death. You heal by absorbing electricity or by waiting out the damage but it is not like an FPS where it takes but a moment behind a wall. It takes quite a while to heal by waiting it out and enemies are far more forward in this game, they don't sit back and let you heal, they come after you. There are also a few larger enemies who put you into a miniature quick time event whereupon if you fail, you die. So yes, it is entirely possible to die. However in inFamous 2, as well as inFamous 1, as well as many other games, death is literally meaningless. If I die mid mission, i dont fail the mission, and in fact many times it doesn't even restart the mission at all, im just at the nearest respawn point with x amount of enemies still dead or x amount of items collected. There is literally 0 penalty for dying and in fact a few times it helped me as it put me closer to my objective than i was when i started.
It's not the first time I've played a game like this either. Games like God of War or Resident Evil 4/5 had a rather meaningless death system as well. Death in both games meant little more than a reset into the start of whichever room you had just entered or sometimes just a reset to the beginning of whichever battle you had just started. It could be a moderate annoyance in a game like GoW where some rooms can be rather large, but rarely much more than a momentary hindrance. Resident Evil's only real consequence to dying was the counter that said "you've died this many times" that showed up at the end of chapters.
Not all games are built like this obviously, there's still quite a few games where death puts you back quite a ways. But even then, unless you're playing something like Mega Man 10, built for the purpose of reminding you that the 8 bit generation has and always will hate you, just coming about death is difficult, and in more recent titles, auto save is frequent and quite forgiving. Going back to Kirby's Epic Yarn, one of the key elements of the game is collecting beads. Scattered throughout the level, you collect them and then are given a rank in the form of medals depending on how many you collected. Getting hit causes these beads to explode out of you, though they can still be recollected if you're quick. Doing something that would normally cause death in a game just results in a huge loss of beads. Fall into a bottomless pit and you're lifted back up to land by an angel made of yarn but your beads stay down there. In many of the later stages it is basically impossible to secure the gold medal if you take a hit late into the stage as there just isnt enough collectible beads after certain points. Now by no means is it hugely difficult to get a gold medal in every stage, however any time I failed to do so, and especially if I failed more than once, I felt as though I was being taunted. Unlike death nowadays which takes you back to a midpoint or a last save or a last room, failing to get that Gold Medal meant I had to completely re-do the stage I just did, only without messing up. I could almost hear the game saying "Try not to screw it up this time, it's not like this game is hard, it's made for KIDS "
I just can't seem to fully understand how the ability to die somehow makes completing a game more of an accomplishment. As we've moved past the generation where too much death either sent you all the way back to world 1-1 or made you put more quarters in the machine if you wanted to keep playing it has become mostly pointless to be able to die in a game. Even the aforementioned Mega Man 10 that recreates that "screw even a little and you die" feeling from games of old has a mid stage check point and a save system. The feeling of accomplishment in that game doesn't come for the fact that you can die but rather that knowing that finishing a stage means you didn't screw up. The only difference is that screwing up in Mega Man 10 means that you die and may have to re-do the whole level. In Kirby it's that you don't get a good rank and may have to re-do the level if you're an adamant about getting 100%(or just cant stand the fact that you got beaten by a game made of yarn)
