Death in Video Games: Part 1

by Si

Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 02:48 PM EDT

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the different treatments and functions of death in video games. This started because of a stark disparity I observed between Prey and Bioshock. I’m going to include Halo as well, as a sort of baseline as it uses the traditional and ubiquitous checkpoint death mechanic.

• Halo: When you die, time effectively snaps back to the last checkpoint, so everything in the game world including your ammo, health and enemies is exactly as it was when the game saved at that checkpoint.
• Bioshock: When you die time continues in the game without interruption. Your body respawns at the nearest Vita-Chamber with minimal health and plasmid energy but your ammo remains intact. Some enemies respawn.
• Prey: When you die time stands still while you’re transported to a place in the spirit world. Your aim is to shoot as many red and blue flying spirit piranhas with your spirit crossbow before a time limit expires. The more piranhas you shoot, the more health and spirit power you will have when you respawn. Respawn takes the form of your spirit returning to your body with all ammo and enemies as they were when you “died”.

On the surface, Bioshock’s death mechanic may seem similar to the traditional checkpoint mechanic but the continuous time aspect has consequences which aren’t obvious until you actually play the game. Below is a typical transcript of a Bioshock session which should illustrate.

1. Stockpile ammo and items that you find lying around.
2. Get to difficult part of level, such as a hard boss.
3. Try to defeat said boss, reducing your ammo and items.
4. Die and respawn.
5. Walk several hundred miles back to where the action is. Sometimes this takes over 30 seconds which is a long time in an action game.
6. Continue to stockpile ammo and items.
7. Fight boss again, using up your ammo and items.
8. Die and respawn.
9. Continue to stockp– Oh drat! There’s no ammo and items lying around anymore!
10. Try to fight boss with no ammo, no items, no health and no plasmid energy. Use your wrench to tickle boss with desperate futility.
11. Last about 5 seconds before you die.
12. Repeat from step 8 until you throw the controller across the room in epic frustration.

The problem with the continuous time mechanic is that the gameplay asymptotes to an unwinnable situation. It’s not “game over” but you’re trapped in an infinite loop like some kind of virtual Groudhog Day set in the sixties. What can you do? Enemies keep respawning but the ammo and items don’t. And God help you if your hard boss keeps running off to a healing station that’s beyond your reach. Your only hope is to pick off a couple of weak enemies whose corpse you can frisk for ammo.

The Halo and Prey gameplay mechanics are simply immune to the asymtotic death weakness by design. In Prey, ammo is plentiful, and Halo’s time reset means you’ll always have some resources at your disposal.

Prey has made an active effort to replace the tedium of trudging back to the action. So it may last 30 seconds but at least you’re given something to do. This avoids the dull action troughs that you experience in Bioshock while walking back to the fight.

In Halo and other checkpoint games, you may have to try over and over to beat a difficult part, but at least you’re given a chance. In fact your chance increases with every trial as you become more familiar with the layout and where enemies are going to respawn, etc. In Prey, your prowess at picking off piranhas is rewarded with an improved chance in the form of greater health and spirit energy.

Bioshock’s handling of death is not some kind of built-in puzzle. It’s not adding depth to the gameplay; it’s adding unbearably relentless tedium and frustration. To add insult to injury, Bioshock has one of the most spectacularly immersive, creative and suspenseful game environments I’ve ever seen. And the player is denied this unless they are some kind of masochist who enjoys wading through concrete. It’s like the player is being forced to earn their right to the Bioshock experience.

I want to love Bioshock. I want someone to tell me that I’m just impatient or I suck at the game. But I’ve never experienced this level of monotony in an FPS played on Medium or Normal difficulty. Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is close, but I’m playing that on Hard.

In Part 2 I’ll cover some of the more unique and groundbreaking death mechanics, starting of course with Braid.

This article originally appeared on Frost Nova.