I think it's fair to say that games need risk in order to be compelling.
Death as a risk doesn't seem to be that much of an issue, however how it is presented is.
In PoP, you still 'die' but the process to get back into the back has been sped up significantly and the amount of repetition has been significantly reduced.
So really, the difficulty lies in what feels 'fair' when it comes to dealing punishment in a game, and what is presented as a risk.
Design Roundtable 1: The Death of Death
Quote:Original post by OrangyTang
It's not unreasonable to remove the possibility of dying in a game, but if you're removing death (or trivialising it to the point of being a minor annoyance) then you've got to add in other ways in which the player can fail to compensate (such as running out of time and having to repeat a section, or having resources removed). Otherwise you're just making a glorified "press X to win" game.
Great point. Games are meant to engage the player and hopefully have a meaningful experience in the process. Make a game too 'easy' and it subtracts from this experience.
Here's my own thoughts on the subject as opposed to my earlier 'response' post.
Every time I'm faced with a new concept, I like to start from the ground up. A lot of times this makes for what some people might consider needless rehashing, but I find value in the process of reasoning this way in that it avoids the 'band aid' syndrome so common to problem solving in complex systems. I believe it is beneficial to know and acknowledge where the root causes lie in order to correct the 'symptoms' at the correct level.
With that said, I'll try to address this subject(Our usage of death in games) through what I see as being the intent of the Roundtable Discussion (To form a definitive understanding on the subject at hand in order to clarify its use as a tool in our games)
The inclusion of death in a game has been broken down into different elements. It has been the embodiment of the worst thing that can happen to you in the game. At least it was in the old days, as things have changed a great deal. Now we range from starting over, to being sent to a spawn point, to just stealing a couple seconds of the players time as they watch their avatar resurrect on the spot, to...
Whats the natural continuation of that pattern? We already have hardly inconvenienced the player at all for death...how about getting rid of death? OK!
"In my platform game you can't die, you just run around solving stuff, getting to new heights, and getting loot!"
"OK, so what happens when you fall off a cliff?"
"Nothing! You just climb back up!"
"OK so what happens if you stay under water too long?"
"Nothing, you are immortal!"
"OK so...whats the challenge?"
"You need to collect all these tubes of hair gel in the world so that you can make the best hairdo! It's Awesome!"
"OK, but...like what makes that task difficult or challenging to do, you know...to offer the player a sense of satisfaction, like they actually "Did good"?
"Well the tubes are only on the highest peaks so they are tric-KAY to get!"
"OK so...let me get this straight, you don't die when you fall, but the tubes are hard to get, right?"
"Yupper!"
"And if you fall you have to climb all the way back up?"
"Yup! See! challenging but no DEATH!"
"I'm sorry but you are retarded. In order to avoid death, you just made falling the new death."
"What?"
"Yah that's what I thought..."
Do we need 'bad' things to happen to the player? Well sure, if nothing ever went wrong then we could just keep mashing buttons, clicking, whatever and never need active involvement within the game. So we invent aspects within our games to offer an obstacle to the player(The challenge). Which naturally leads to the question, what if this obstacle bests the player? and we arrive at Game over, death, go back 3 spaces, lose your mats, get a scar, and a million and one other specific ways invented for the purpose of punishing the player for meeting the fate of your own design element.
Game design is really just another class in human psychology as was already mentioned by gxaxhx(i see your point Trent).
So I would conclude with this on the specifics of death. Since the idea of death mostly comes into play when you are controlling an avatar of some sort(ie not playing a puzzle), it is only natural to have death be the price of ultimate failure. It is NOT needed however, and I believe that in actuality it has been removed from most games today.
Getting to the last level in a game 20 years ago and then losing was dying. It was what we now call permadeath in RPG's. "Dying" today is an impotent term used to refer to the fact that you were 'inconvenienced' by a specific punishment. Either get on with the permadeath, or resign to the fact that the death in your game is purely cosmetic.
Devon
Every time I'm faced with a new concept, I like to start from the ground up. A lot of times this makes for what some people might consider needless rehashing, but I find value in the process of reasoning this way in that it avoids the 'band aid' syndrome so common to problem solving in complex systems. I believe it is beneficial to know and acknowledge where the root causes lie in order to correct the 'symptoms' at the correct level.
With that said, I'll try to address this subject(Our usage of death in games) through what I see as being the intent of the Roundtable Discussion (To form a definitive understanding on the subject at hand in order to clarify its use as a tool in our games)
The inclusion of death in a game has been broken down into different elements. It has been the embodiment of the worst thing that can happen to you in the game. At least it was in the old days, as things have changed a great deal. Now we range from starting over, to being sent to a spawn point, to just stealing a couple seconds of the players time as they watch their avatar resurrect on the spot, to...
Whats the natural continuation of that pattern? We already have hardly inconvenienced the player at all for death...how about getting rid of death? OK!
"In my platform game you can't die, you just run around solving stuff, getting to new heights, and getting loot!"
"OK, so what happens when you fall off a cliff?"
"Nothing! You just climb back up!"
"OK so what happens if you stay under water too long?"
"Nothing, you are immortal!"
"OK so...whats the challenge?"
"You need to collect all these tubes of hair gel in the world so that you can make the best hairdo! It's Awesome!"
"OK, but...like what makes that task difficult or challenging to do, you know...to offer the player a sense of satisfaction, like they actually "Did good"?
"Well the tubes are only on the highest peaks so they are tric-KAY to get!"
"OK so...let me get this straight, you don't die when you fall, but the tubes are hard to get, right?"
"Yupper!"
"And if you fall you have to climb all the way back up?"
"Yup! See! challenging but no DEATH!"
"I'm sorry but you are retarded. In order to avoid death, you just made falling the new death."
"What?"
"Yah that's what I thought..."
Do we need 'bad' things to happen to the player? Well sure, if nothing ever went wrong then we could just keep mashing buttons, clicking, whatever and never need active involvement within the game. So we invent aspects within our games to offer an obstacle to the player(The challenge). Which naturally leads to the question, what if this obstacle bests the player? and we arrive at Game over, death, go back 3 spaces, lose your mats, get a scar, and a million and one other specific ways invented for the purpose of punishing the player for meeting the fate of your own design element.
Game design is really just another class in human psychology as was already mentioned by gxaxhx(i see your point Trent).
So I would conclude with this on the specifics of death. Since the idea of death mostly comes into play when you are controlling an avatar of some sort(ie not playing a puzzle), it is only natural to have death be the price of ultimate failure. It is NOT needed however, and I believe that in actuality it has been removed from most games today.
Getting to the last level in a game 20 years ago and then losing was dying. It was what we now call permadeath in RPG's. "Dying" today is an impotent term used to refer to the fact that you were 'inconvenienced' by a specific punishment. Either get on with the permadeath, or resign to the fact that the death in your game is purely cosmetic.
Devon
Quote:Original post by gxaxhxQuote:Original post by Azenrain
# And finally, the basics of death have usually been the forcing to REDO content. (PoP had you REDO in small increments, Super Mario Bros. where if it was your last life it was the title screen and quitting for a week because you were on the last stage...again) Is it the fact that content is so static that is the root cause of not wanting to REDO/Die, making it not the death mechanic at fault, but instead the actual gameplay?
I think that's *part* of it but there's also the aspect that when this happens the player is no longer progressing (instead, it's quite the opposite) which can have a negative impact on the player's motivation to continue playing.
Think about if your save game became corrupt (Sort of a death by game bug instead of game mechanic). Even if the game is dynamic and starting a new game won't be the exact same experience, the loss of all of that progress may be such a blow that the player will just shelve the game and move on.
You are quite right, the possibility that it could be the dynamics came from being able to replay simple physics based games forever. Then I realized it wasn't that it was dynamic, it was because it was simple and short.
Time investment of the player is a (The?) MAJOR facet to the penalties of death.
Quote:Original post by OrangyTang
Personally I'm not a fan of having death have minimal or zero side effects - not only does it make a mockery of people who actually play the game skillfully, but because it can mean a player can force their way through a game without really understanding it. I've witnessed this first hand when a friend was trying to play Bioshock like they'd play Quake 3 - run around frantically while shooting everything that moves. The result is that they miss the subtler stuff (like listening out for enemies or security cameras), and fail to learn how to use the weapons or environment properly. They end up dying repeatedly (and frequently) but because they're making slow (but painful) progress they never stop and realise that they're missing the point of the entire game, and end up dismissing it as too frustrating to be fun.
Games need to have consequences for wrong or bad decisions, otherwise there's no satisfaction in making the right decisions. Unfortunately big budget games have been sliding towards the politically correct "everyone's a winner" approach because the more "casual" end of the audience only want to win and will go and play something else if they loose even once.
It's not unreasonable to remove the possibility of dying in a game, but if you're removing death (or trivialising it to the point of being a minor annoyance) then you've got to add in other ways in which the player can fail to compensate (such as running out of time and having to repeat a section, or having resources removed). Otherwise you're just making a glorified "press X to win" game.
Interesting points, and Bioshock is a good example. My counter argument is this; in Bioshock the point of the game, for lack of a better phrase, is to explore and discover the cool under-water world. If the game was continuously challenging, the player would end up focusing on the combat and ignore the story. In a game like Halo, I focus on the combat, so I haven't collected any of the skulls, I don't explore the world, because I don't find that to be the focus of the game. By making death so irrelevant, they allow the player to explore the world fully without constantly worrying about dying and having to repeat an entire section. Without this mentality, many players wouldn't explore, as dying miles away from where you are supposed to be is worth than dying a few feet away.
In summary, I don't think that a game does need a way to fail. Instead, I think it needs a motivation to proceed. For many games, death is a convenient motivation. However, it is not the fear of failure that drives me on in, say Bioshock or Fable, it is the lure of what is round the next corner.
(Sorry mitttens, will include name, read the first bullet point, was the same, so skipped them, you should have highlighted the one that changed :P)
Thomas Kiley (=thk123, if you want to use any other post)
Death in games is generally such a pointless affair; a short trip to the Load Save Game screen, followed by a small bit of frustration at having to redo part of the game, and then you're back to where you were. Personally, I'm of the opinion that you should either have permadeath, or no death at all. Even if in practice it just means skipping that load screen and restarting the character at some checkpoint ("you wake up in hospital" kind of thing, e.g GTA)
In my experience of P&P RPGs, it's not all that uncommon for characters to die - usually, the DM does not force you to do the whole campaign from the start. Instead, you roll a new character and pick up from (roughly) where you left off.
I've never seen this implemented in a CRPG though. Often, the story line doesn't help - if you're The Chosen One, it seems a bit odd that you can die and some other random bod comes along and Saves The World for you. But it would be interesting to see how it worked - it's probably the only way to incorporate permadeath into a story based game without making your players hate you.
In my experience of P&P RPGs, it's not all that uncommon for characters to die - usually, the DM does not force you to do the whole campaign from the start. Instead, you roll a new character and pick up from (roughly) where you left off.
I've never seen this implemented in a CRPG though. Often, the story line doesn't help - if you're The Chosen One, it seems a bit odd that you can die and some other random bod comes along and Saves The World for you. But it would be interesting to see how it worked - it's probably the only way to incorporate permadeath into a story based game without making your players hate you.
Quote:Original post by thk123
I don't think that a game does need a way to fail. Instead, I think it needs a motivation to proceed. For many games, death is a convenient motivation. However, it is not the fear of failure that drives me on in, say Bioshock or Fable, it is the lure of what is round the next corner.
The motivation of wanting to proceed forward comes from the player's engagement in the game they are playing.
If the player is not engaged, the desire to look around the next corner drops.
A major component in increasing player engagement is how a game presents its challenges.
The most common of these challenges being 'death'.
I would say even though Bioshock and Fable reduced the death to a momentary pause, the game still would have felt much different had if the player took no damage at all.
If the player took no damage at all, the desire to proceed to the next area would be significantly reduced.
The problem how I see it is that death [of the player character] is usually not an interesting gameplay event, mostly because it's usually is paired with a save system which makes it meaningless.
Take an example. Assume a game, any game really, with the added game mechanic that periodically forces you to press some specific button, failure to do so within some resonable time would lead to a reset of the game with the associated loss of progress. I think it's not far fetched to consider that particular game mechanic to be deterimental to pretty much any game. It's similar to functions such as eating or sleeping that get left out of other games because they add nothing valuable to game experience, and are instead implied to be performed automaticly behind the scenes.
This is analogous, although admittedly farfetchedly so, to the save mechanic of modern games. "Death" means that the player is forced to resume from the last saved game. So as in previous example, why should you get punished for not pressing the quicksave button every 10 minutes instead of saving being done automatically behind the scenes? And if it is done automatically, popping the player back to the last safe position upon "death", why bother to model it is as death at all since it's quite clearly not the permanent end it implies?
Then on the other hand, there are scenarios where death is a fundamental gameplay mechanic. Any multiplayer deathmatch game is a good example. There your death means the success of the opposing player, which is in itself interesting. It's not hard to come up with other scenarios either. Tetris for example, here the "death" mechanic is interesting because it marks an end of the game. The challenge, a meta-game in a sense, is to see wheter you are able to play better next time.<br><br>What the examples above have in common is of course that there death is permanent. If it would be possible to undo placing pieces in tetris or saving a multiplayer game, the enjoyment of the game would be destroyed.<br><br>Of course, while removing save-mechanics would give death meaning, it would not automaticly make death <i>interesting</i>. The death of the main character marks an "end" to the game, but unlike the intended end of story based game, it's not an interesting one. Any story-based game that included permanent death with restart as the only option would likely tank, rightfully so too.<br><br>In conclusion, unless death is meaningful <i>and</i> interesting, then I would rather see more games that implements failure using an actually <i>interesting</i> mechanic rather than resorting to the death-and-reset approach. That said, the presence of "death" in a common death-and-restore scenario isn't really deterimental to a game either, as long as there's a working autosave functionality anyway.<br><br>-Johannes<br>
Take an example. Assume a game, any game really, with the added game mechanic that periodically forces you to press some specific button, failure to do so within some resonable time would lead to a reset of the game with the associated loss of progress. I think it's not far fetched to consider that particular game mechanic to be deterimental to pretty much any game. It's similar to functions such as eating or sleeping that get left out of other games because they add nothing valuable to game experience, and are instead implied to be performed automaticly behind the scenes.
This is analogous, although admittedly farfetchedly so, to the save mechanic of modern games. "Death" means that the player is forced to resume from the last saved game. So as in previous example, why should you get punished for not pressing the quicksave button every 10 minutes instead of saving being done automatically behind the scenes? And if it is done automatically, popping the player back to the last safe position upon "death", why bother to model it is as death at all since it's quite clearly not the permanent end it implies?
Then on the other hand, there are scenarios where death is a fundamental gameplay mechanic. Any multiplayer deathmatch game is a good example. There your death means the success of the opposing player, which is in itself interesting. It's not hard to come up with other scenarios either. Tetris for example, here the "death" mechanic is interesting because it marks an end of the game. The challenge, a meta-game in a sense, is to see wheter you are able to play better next time.<br><br>What the examples above have in common is of course that there death is permanent. If it would be possible to undo placing pieces in tetris or saving a multiplayer game, the enjoyment of the game would be destroyed.<br><br>Of course, while removing save-mechanics would give death meaning, it would not automaticly make death <i>interesting</i>. The death of the main character marks an "end" to the game, but unlike the intended end of story based game, it's not an interesting one. Any story-based game that included permanent death with restart as the only option would likely tank, rightfully so too.<br><br>In conclusion, unless death is meaningful <i>and</i> interesting, then I would rather see more games that implements failure using an actually <i>interesting</i> mechanic rather than resorting to the death-and-reset approach. That said, the presence of "death" in a common death-and-restore scenario isn't really deterimental to a game either, as long as there's a working autosave functionality anyway.<br><br>-Johannes<br>
The best way to force skill is to force the player to train and exhibit said skill. If they fail to progress in their in-game skill then either the player goes no further or even goes back further. Think of it as rigid kung-fu training. If the student does not show he has mastered a particular technique then he goes no further and practices until the master is satisfied. If the technique is sorely lacking or sloppy, then that student will go back to the basics and work his way back up.
Death, as a mechanic, can be used as pretty much whatever the developer wants it to be. Some games, mostly RPGs, use it as a punishment, which forces the player to either reload a game or resume from a previous checkpoint. This is entirely valid. The question becomes, for these games at least, how can you successfully instill fear in your player if not by death. Note that death isn't literal reduction to 0 hit points. I could also be letting the princess die, running out of time to save your master, or any other goal which is essential and failed.
Ideas:
Ridiculously large procedurally generated content. We're talking huge, here. Death would cause you to branch out in the story. Maybe your master is dead, but now you have a quest to avenge him. Or the wandering monk found your corpse three years later, and everyone thinks you are dead now, and your girlfriend has married another man. That type of thing.
Specific branches only unlock-able by death. Like, if you die, the baddies capture you and you have to escape in a little mini-arc. Kind of annoying, only happens once (the mini-arc skips the area you last died at, so you could hypothetically play the entire game by dying at every option)
Ideas:
Ridiculously large procedurally generated content. We're talking huge, here. Death would cause you to branch out in the story. Maybe your master is dead, but now you have a quest to avenge him. Or the wandering monk found your corpse three years later, and everyone thinks you are dead now, and your girlfriend has married another man. That type of thing.
Specific branches only unlock-able by death. Like, if you die, the baddies capture you and you have to escape in a little mini-arc. Kind of annoying, only happens once (the mini-arc skips the area you last died at, so you could hypothetically play the entire game by dying at every option)
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
