More games should be honest about death

Some examples you should look into:

- Diablo 3's hardcore mode, where you have a single life and your gameplay and saves are on a cloud server

- Far Cry 2 permadeath journals

- Roguelike strategy games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld

- One chance, a browser game designed around a single playthrough (although the saves are hidden in a cookie that can be cleared)

one only needs to look at the team ico games to find examples of truly emotional games that don't handle player death in a realistic way. in each game you can die, fall off the level, etc. and you just come back after some ambiguous resurrection. but all three games have deep emotional content.

NetHack only has permadeath mode, or hardcore mode as it's called in most new games. Savefile is deleted once it's loaded to make it slightly less easy to cheat but ofcourse you can make a backup of it before loading.

This is one reason Final Fantasy Tactics was such a powerful game. You could basically lose any character other than the protagonist and it really hammered in the weight of your decisions on the battlefield.

Legacy board games have the same issue as you described in fire emblem though: players can ignore deaths by save scumming or not performing the instructed physical mutations of game pieces.

I've certainly been in a group that decided to ignore the outcome of a session where we had particularly bad luck on the dice rolls because of the expectation that it would've made subsequent sessions unwinnable/not fun.

There's arguably more incentive to do this in the board games because restarting from a 'ruined' game state in fire emblem requires pressing a few buttons, doing so in the board game requires spending $70 again.

The only game, that I have played, that made me cry is the first Bioshock. Somehow I managed to not kill any of the girls (probably because I didn't catch the benefits) and the ending was so rewarding. I don't think I can achieve that anymore, I tried many times

> I haven’t seen this model used anywhere, but I could imagine a video game where you buy the right to do one irreversible play through of a story mode, cloud saved on their systems so you can’t manage the data yourself.

Ooh. I'd love to see a Fire Emblem style game like this. No main character, so any of them can die and not end the story. If a main character dies, someone else can take up their path, or it can slightly diverge. Ending depends on who's left alive at the end. It'd be a mess to do I think, especially dealing with when characters die and adjusting the storyline, but it'd be super interesting and you could easily get multiple playthroughs. I'd even say that the game allows you to do multiple ones, with each death/recruit being an autosave, so you can't undo it.

Serious emotional anything, is hard to do i would argue. People react so differently to these things that you really have to distill a piece of the human experience, and present it in a novel way.

Buy even if they're short, they can be unforgettable. I would urge everyone interested in such a story to play "Brothers: a tale of two sons", which might have been some of my best 2-3 hours of gaming ever. Presenting it on this context might spoil some of it, but go in without any judgment or preconceptions and you'll have an experience that sticks.

The old Amiga game cannon fodder did this well - you had named soldiers that rose in rank as they survived missions, but if they died they were gone forever. The increased rank didn't improve them gameplay wise, so you wouldn't reload just to get them back (er, can't even remember if the game had saves in the first place), but you got pretty attached to them the same. Every dead soldier also added a grave to a hill in the mission select screen.

I've played hundreds of games, but Jason Rohrer's Passage is one that I keep coming back to in my mind. It's a 5-minute-long, linear indie game with blocky pixel graphics that was probably made over the course of a week. A game doesn't need to be a grand, million-dollar masterpiece to really and truly mean something to a player. In fact: I'd rather it wasn't, since empirically I remember almost nothing about the AAA games I've played, except for a vague sense of having had fun.

> Most players just restart each battle until deathless runs are achieved- either due to emotional or practical concerns. So, when someone dies, it’s not sad, it’s annoying.

How about balancing a handful of levels so that it's impossible to finish without losing someone? You could replay in hopes of saving a character...at the expense of losing a different character.

A way to design around the reload issue is to have long winded, chained, or cumulative consequences, meaning that the player would have to lose many hours of gameplay, and even then he may not be sure to achieve his goal. Thinking about Mass Effect or Heavy Rain.

Server-dependent games like Diablo hardcore are not interesting for me, because I can't control my Internet or my power. Single lag, my character is dead and hours of gameplay are lost, not because of my skill, but because of things I have no control over. Even if that does not happen often, I still don't want to even try.

This is not a new concept in video games, usually known as "hardcore" or "ironman" mode.

I think a core issue for games is that loss is fundamentally at odds with player agency. In pre-written stories it ends up feeling cheap even if it was influenced by player choice. It is much better suited to games with emergent narrative, such as Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Crusader Kings II, or X-COM, but still stings more as an annoyance than something deeply emotional.

I think the “hardcore” gameplay, in an attempt to give more empathy about death, would not work as expected. Based off my experience with Diablo Hardcore characters, you just stop caring about individual characters, since you know they’re expendable. The only hardcore character I remember from Diablo 3 is the first - of hundreds.

Part of the reason for poor sales of a "play once and done" game is people can just watch someone do a "Let's Play" on YouTube and experience the (in most cases) linear narrative without having to pay.

And yet, that one play through could offer a tremendous benefit in learning to cope with a heartbreaking loss. I wonder if there's room yet in society for prescribing video games like this, a la https://www.thestar.com/amp/opinion/star-columnists/2018/10/...

Trivial entertainment generally sells better than serious explorations of an important theme, regardless of the medium. Six of the ten top-grossing movies in 2018 were adaptations of superhero comics; several Oscar-nominated movies have barely recouped their costs.

Orwell is different though. It has multiple endings, you can possibly fail to come at the right conclusions at certain points which change the story dramatically, and you have to put in time and effort to actually find certain facts to get a good ending.

Ultimately it’s still not realistic because you can just go on playing another game after that.

I think most people spend their lives trying not to think about death in a realistic way.

Lots of military shooters will kill you with one or two bullets. I've thought that what would really make a shooter "realistic" would be if players who get shot are maimed (rather than being able to run and jump just as well at 1% health as 100%). But who knows whether that would actually be fun.

> I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you.

Real life simulators tend to be boring / tedious compared to mass market games. "Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3" is probably one of the least generous (as far as health goes) games I've tried to play, and it was tedious and boring. That's not to say one example means the idea is inherently as bad as that one game, but it does limit appeal significantly.

(Often the same FPS game will let you scale the difficulty from easy to something where being shot multiple times probably means death/restart/whatever.)

Ive wanted a FPS bullet sponge game where one of the random enemies getting killed starts a flashback to everything thats gone wrong in their life to become a private military contractor after their wife said “its time to be realistic”

And then watch the memories fade in real time

that happening to a nonsignficant character

Go play you some old school Counter Strike - with a handgun containing 7 bullets, you can frag 7 players. Also, 1 other player with 1 bullet can frag you just as easily(or not, headshots are tricky).

Arma, Counter-Strike and Insurgency all fit that model and have each been around for 10-20 years with continual updates. Rainbiw Six used to fill that niche as well.

> I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you.

first of all, there are plenty of games where the top tier of weapons can kill you instantaneously with a single headshot or even bodyshot.

the thing is, this concept is not particularly realistic. in real life, it is pretty rare for people to die instantaneously from a single shot. while there are a couple key points on the body where this can happen, usually people are going to bleed out over the course of minutes or hours. while this happens, the injured person can be anywhere between totally incapacitated and running around killing people, not even aware they've been hit. it's hard for me to see how this could be incorporated into a fun set of game mechanics. people like all kinds of different games, but in general I suspect they are looking for something a bit more deterministic than reality.

There was a game on Steam a while ago that was an FPS with a limited pool of lives for all players to share, and wine the lives ran out, the game was shuttered. I believe the same company is working on a game that gives you one life, and then the game refuses to run again (without cheating I’d guess).

The truth is that sounds a bit stressful to me, and the reality of how online PvP frequently evolves I’d be surprised if it worked out long-term. Part of the joy of games is being able to try again and again and perfect your gameplay. A game that punishes exploration and growth sounds dull, not daring.

Perhaps more profound are games like Combat Mission or Graviteam Tactics, which try to simulate battalion and smaller level engagements. Even with save scumming, it's not uncommon for over 30% or even over 50% of your forces die or get seriously injured. It puts the realities of symmetrical warfare in context.

Completely agree, it's surprising more games don't reward alternative outcomes to melees.

I've been fascinated by the consumption of violent content in general over the last few years, but I struggle to find good reading on the topic, and my usual internet hangouts haven't been super helpful (I suspect some redditors think I'm an anti-gamer by asking about research into violent content consumption).

There's plenty of games built around that these days though - look at the 0451 games which heavily reward gameplay that avoids killing (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 1, 2 + their DLCs and excellent masterpiece Prey (2017)).

But interactive mediums and games are different. It is hard to define a line, but in my experience you get the best of both world when proper games (those that are more natural to call games that interactive mediums) have deep messages.

For me the perfect example was (the particular run I had in) Undertale. Where if you never watched the trailer you only learn the truth at the very end.

For what I have tried of "interactive mediums" they are harder to build an emotional connection than books, movies, and games.

If I wanted to play binary pain I might as well as deploy openstack

Games are made to be entertainment, and like any other genre of entertainment (literature, movies, television, plays, etc.) they can encompass the entire range of emotion and experience, not just "fun."

I think it's a sign of the medium maturing - more adults are playing and demanding more complex experiences than just collision detection and pattern recognition can provide.

Video games can be a form of art. Art is not always "fun". But even so, why is being honest about death equivalent to being reminded about "the pain of living"? Death can also encompass experiences of heroism, mystery, even beauty, and much more. It doesn't have to be nihilistic or cynical.

Hey, Rakuen was plenty of fun, even if it is a little weird for an RPG to talk so much about the Kanto earthquake and tsunami. It actually makes sense that you can't access an area yet because of flood damage.

It's empathy I think, games are extremely capable of that.

A friend of mine who's a lifelong fan of MGS says he always gets phantom pain when someone brings Phantom Pain up. A tragedy to see the series wrap up like this.

I think Florence (mobile game) did the depiction of real life romance pretty well.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/florence/id1297430468?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mountains....

I wonder if there's any Buddhist metaphors to a game like Devil Daggers. You're caught in an infinite cycle of life, chaos, suffering and death, and the only way to end the cycle is to cease your "desire" to play.

Many games are like that, but some very popular games aren't.

You could say the same about any work of fiction, and you'd be equally wrong.

Almost nothing is pure escapism. Most games that have little plot or content have a deep social nature (fortnite, LoL, online Call of Duty).

Also being "honest" or "constructive" does not mean being "heavy". The best stories almost always leave lasting life lessons, in this regards games are not different from any other popular medium in the history of humanity.

Death is a large part of life.

Fun can be different things for different people. Games can provide different experiences that some people seek.

Games should also be challenging, and there can be many ways in which "challenging" can manifest.

The author is arguing that death is a fertile and mostly unexplored field to be explored by video game devs/writers, not that people should stop creating and playing fun fantasy games. His conclusion explicitly states this:

> I honestly believe that there’s room for everything within games. I’ve not hung up my assault rifle just yet. But I found genuine catharsis in making and playing videogames that deviate from safe themes to examine challenging subjects. Something as messy and complex as death has begun to make a least a little more sense.

I suspect the writer of this piece would be fine with that.

You play games for certain reasons. The writer builds games for certain reasons. They're not demanding you buy them.

This is exceptionally callous way of looking at things. Video games are certainly a medium for discussion: "Papers Please" is a discussion point on legal immigration for example. (Its not true across the board: "Prison Architect", is NOT a discussion point on prisons).

I'm not one to play "political" games, but IMO, they are no different than political or personal movies, poems, or letters. Video games are just one more medium of which society can use to connect and communicate with other people.

Have you played the "This is fine" flash game? Its actually a deeply personal + political discussion point as well.

https://namsang.itch.io/thisisfine

These games aren't necessarily designed for maximum enjoyment, they're optimized for maximum discussion and community connections.

I'm cynical enough to have gotten a similar vibe from the article. People tend to go through life never giving a second thought to others' misfortunes and suffering: disabilities, cancer, suicide, etc. Then someone they love is affected, and suddenly it becomes their lifelong "cause"; every waking moment is spent trying to make others pay attention to a topic they themselves turned a blind eye to for years because it never affected them directly. A new charity fundraising event every other week (and repeatedly harassing family/friends/coworkers for donations); or becoming a speaker who travels to "share their wisdom" - but nobody is listening because, just like the speaker's own past self, their audience won't care until they are themselves touched by the same tragic event.

tldr; Advocating to get others to give a damn about something that will be experienced by a minority of people falls on deaf ears, because people really don't - and won't - care about something until it affects them personally.