Stupid, Pointless, Annoying, Frustrating, No Good, Lazy Deaths and Why They Don’t Need to be in Video Games

             Hello, everyone.  For those who enjoy these, sorry for the near constant delays.  I've started a new job that seriously eats up my time.  Working on keeping these posted at least once every week or two, but who knows how long that'll last.  Anyway, not here to complain.  Now, onto the discussion:

            In video games, death is an eventuality.  No matter how good a player is, he will eventually end up losing.  They may have to get the phone and be unable to pause a game, get distracted by family, or just lose their concentration.  There is no shame in dying or in losing a game.  Death can be an instrumental part of what makes a game fun.  It can offer challenge, replayability, or it can be a way for a player to learn and better themselves.  However, in recent years, this has too often become the exception, not the rule.

           Video games are meant to be fun.  And constantly dying for no good reason only to lose all your progress and start out at an arbitrary point several minutes, or hours, back is seriously not fun.  It can be made fun, but it usually isn’t.  Many game designers see death as a way to arbitrarily lengthen their game or be a hurdle that players need to get through.  Or worse, a way to lock them onto the plot rail road.  These kinds of choices smack of bad game design and will more often than not infuriate players rather than make them have a good time, hurting their game’s image and limiting their potential for customers to become repeat buyers down the line.

Dragon's Lair is the worst offender in this regard.  Plot railroad deaths, deaths to lengthen the game, unavoidable deaths...it's got it all.

            A perfect example of this is the game Silent Hill 3, a game I recently finished for the second time.  I applaud Silent Hill 3, because it wanted to do something special with deaths in it.  At certain points in the game, when the main character dies, usually to enemies, a strange figure emerges and drags her body away.  This is creepy, unsettling, and hints that there is more going on than we understand just from a surface examination.  It adds to the main character and the overall plot in a subtle, nuanced way.  However, there’s a problem.  I never saw these scenes my first time through, because all my deaths were caused, not by the game’s enemies, but by the game’s poor design.  If you get too close to a hole, the game arbitrarily kills you.  Certain scenes in the game will also arbitrarily kill you unless you do a specific action that is not always clear.  They lack poetry or meaning, they are just hurdles to keep a player from advancing.  And this is hugely disappointing, since Silent Hill 3 became less about the horror and more about how damn frustrating it was to keep dying because a train, that I was supposed to summon, kept running me over because I couldn’t figure out how to avoid it.

Don't get used to seeing a creepy monster drag off your body in Silent Hill 3.  Deaths that actually lead to this are rarer than first aid kits.

            Another example is Battletoads or Silver Surfer for the NES.  These games are notoriously hard, sometimes called the hardest in existence.  However, rather than being hard because of challenging gameplay or mechanics, they were made intentionally hard so that players couldn’t rent them and had to buy them, thus giving money to the developers rather than Blockbuster.  In these games, players need to completely memorize every aspect of gameplay, from the level layout to how each and every enemy reacts to avoid dying.  In games like this, death can be so arbitrary, usually involving one hit deaths and then having to replay the whole level.  These games used the concept of death ingame in an attempt to arbitrarily lengthen themselves to prevent players from beating them in one sitting.  However, even if death is a part of video games as we know it, it must be balanced by good game design that is not conducive to frustration, because if a game is frustrating, then people won’t really want to play it.  LordKat, a gamer notorious for beating the hardest games ever, made thispoint perfectly during his playthrough of Silver Surfer.  After giving several tips for surviving in Silver Surfer, he had one final piece of advice.  “Don’t buy this game.  I don’t know who it was made for but it certainly wasn’t for the average human being.”

This is why people don't play Silver Surfer.  More time is spent at the game over screen than actually playing the game.

             So, I thought it might be good to lay out a few ways death in video games has been done properly and some incredibly stupid ways that developers have utilized death that really needs to stop in this industry.

            First, the bad stuff.  Death ingame can be incredibly discouraging to players.  While some may take the chance to learn, others may see it as a waste of their time if the game is so ludicrously hard that people cannot beat it.  Most gamers have limited time to play and if a game is not rewarding or beating it seems impossible, they won’t spend their time on it.  While challenge is good, cheap deaths, deaths that are either unavoidable or are so common that players become frustrated rather than being challenged, are the bane of gaming.  Cheap deaths need to be avoided at all costs.  Random death because of something uncontrollable is bad game design.  Creating instant death traps that do not respawn you close to where you died is frustrating.  And having enemies you can usually defeat pull out an instant kill move that you are not prepared for and cannot forsee is a terrible way to make a foe more powerful.  It says “We couldn’t be bothered to make the enemy smarter, so instead we gave him this move you have to look out for.”

That about sums it up.  No matter how bad ass you are, the game will still screw you over.

These kinds of deaths were common during the NES era of gaming, which is understandable since the architecture of the Nintendo game console was somewhat limited.  This is why some of the most difficult and frustrating games ever made were on the NES.  Ninja Gaiden had poor programming to blame for ludicrously powerful enemies and instant kill birds which could knock players into a pit mid jump.  Castlevania had a problem where players were helpless on stairs and would fall to their deaths if they took a single hit.  In other games, like Silver Surfer, it was easy to simply program one hit deaths rather than make a life bar.  These were all issues surrounding death that were based around the hardware.

Ninja Gaiden was full of cheap deaths...Ninja Gaiden was also made in 1988.

However, times have changed since the 1980s and the amount of processing power in games has increased immensely.  There should be no excuse for the kind of cheap deaths that were common in the NES.  Programming in respawns or just health loss after instant death pits is simple now.  Avoiding unnecessary frustration through better programming has made it possible.  Yet, even in modern games like Splatterhouse for the Xbox 360 and PS3 or New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, there are moments of archaic design, such as pre-scripted events where failure leads to death, quick time event deaths that are pointless at best and frustrating at worst, or a lives system, meant to justify the constant stream of instant death pits as a challenge.

However, death in gaming can be so much more than just cheap, frustrating and ultimately lazy way to lengthen a title.  While some people repeat the mistakes of the past, there are others who have learned from the mistakes of our forefathers and made death something special in games.  Here are just a few ways that death can and has been used to improve gameplay rather than frustrate gamers.

1.      Death can create a new experience for players.

2.      Death and rebirth can be an integral part of game design.

3.       Death doesn’t end a game, but does punish the players somewhat.

4.      Death can have true impact with the players.

Really innovative ways to handle death approach it not as a way of keeping a player from advancing, but as a way to instruct and help players to get stronger.  Examining these different takes on death shows that there are plenty of alternative to the frustrating, pointless, and stupid deaths we’re all familiar with.

First, death can create a new experience for players.  When a player dies, they are kicked back to a check point, but things change because of their death.  This can be something arbitrary, such as they are greeted upon waking up by a stranger who explains what they did wrong or elements of the stories changing or they can be more dynamic, with enemies changing or growing smarter.  Lots of games use pre-scripted deaths as a way to show how players have grown later, using death as a way to give them a new experience story wise.  This has been done in Xenogears, Final Fantasy, and countless other RPGs since the mid 90s.  However, death can also alter play for people.  Dungeons might be randomized after each death, similar to how Diablo 2 randomizes dungeons every time someone leaves a game, or enemies can alter their tactics, like in Demon’s Souls, where death makes enemies stronger and smarter.  This gives players new things to do after a death and keeps them coming back for more so they can see what has changed.

Death, especially story deaths, can drastically change a game's impact on players.

Next, death and rebirth can be an integral part of design.  If players are expected to die, they can play with the mechanics of death so that the next time through they are better prepared.  Roguelike games do this often, where death means going back to the first level and losing all your items and progress.  However, you can save certain items in store houses, so next time you have the leg up on the enemies.  This allows players to plan out how death will affect them and forces them to choose which items they want to save for the next death and which ones they want to keep with them to try and push forward with.  Shiren the wanderer and Azure Dreams do this very well, where death is annoying, but it is also a part of growing, as you can prepare better for each death the next time around.  It makes players think and plan for the future.

Death my be inevitable here, but that doesn't mean you can't prepare for it.

Moving on, Death doesn’t actually need to end a game.  This is fairly common in games like Dragon Quest or Dark Souls.  If a player dies, they return to a check point with no fewer items, no lost progress, and no less levels.  However, their money is decreased by half or they dropped something they have to go pick up again.  This kind of mechanic allows players to gradually get stronger, even if they die, and ensures that no one wants to reset, because then they’d lose their experience.  It’s a way to prevent players from feeling that death is cheap, because even in death you keep your progress and levels, meaning you can be stronger after dying than when you first loaded up the game.

Death doesn't have to be the end...it can be a new beginning

Finally, something that is taking on a more important role in gaming is the true impact of death.  That is, when a character dies, they can’t be saved or resurrected.  Players have to learn to live without them.  Or, if the player dies, the game wipes their saves.  These kinds of mechanics add tension and challenge to a game and, thankfully, are usually choices players can make.  They can be toggled on and off.  It gives weight to death, but also doesn’t make it frustrating, as very few games rely on permanent death as a regular mechanic.  Fire Emblem does, and it makes players really care about their characters and decide often about what is an acceptable loss as even if a character dies, the game itself will usually continue on without them.  Terraria also has a hardcore mode where one death means game over for good.  It offers a nice challenge that players can choose to indulge in rather than be forced to overcome.

Careful, guys.  Death here is permanent.

I wanted to bring up these ideas to show how cheap deaths in this day and age are pointless.  There are always better alternatives and death can actually be a really meaningful part of game design, if handled properly.  However, while I think I have shown that the kind of plot railroad deaths, where death is an invisible wall, or the cheap deaths meant to artificially lengthen games are pointless and out of place, there is one more issue that needs to be addressed.

Death and finality in games are important.  Taking away that finality can gravely hurt a game.  Bioshock, for all intents and purposes, is a great game, with a beautiful story and truly inspired game design.  However, when players die, they warp back to a respawn chamber, losing none of their weapons or ammo, and with no penalty.  This does not encourage them to be careful or plan, but rather to go full tilt into a battle because they know they will just respawn.  To remove death or cheapen it to the point where it doesn’t work with the game design is a huge misstep.  While some games can work fine without death, such as Harvest Moon, if a game is meant to have some degree of finality towards it, you cannot cheapen the idea of death.  Before it was patched, Terraria offered no penalty for death.  So, players would freely take on enemies they couldn’t beat, knowing that when they respawned they’d have all their life back and could just whittle enemies down.  This was fixed later, however it allowed players to abuse the death mechanic.  And really, while cheap deaths are frustrating, removing any finality from death makes games boring.  A careful balance must be made between challenge and frustration for a game to be truly enjoyable.

Congrats on finding your first Vita Chamber.  You are now immortal.

Death in video games needs to be examined with more finesse and detail in the modern games industry.  The concept of death continues being refined and changed in games to make them unique and more enjoyable to the player, which is how it should be, but every so often, there is a designer who is lazy or who doesn’t have time to program a game properly and we get cheap, annoying, pointless, unfair deaths.  And this really needs to stop.  With the advent of more powerful gaming machines, many of which can fit into a person’s phone, there is no excuse for lazy game design.  Not for games that make death cheap and frustrating and not for games that remove the threat of death entirely.  There needs to be balance.  Not every game has to be as unique as Dark Souls or Shiren in relation to how death is handled, but they need to at least make sure that it is treated with respect and programmed so as to make a game fun for players.  Games where even death can be fun are truly masterpieces of design.