Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
hopesandfears.com
hopesandfears.com
One thing really irked me...the author states that initially "...death was a failure state because it required little explanation and was easy to quantify from a programming and visual standpoint."
Bullshit. Death is a failure state because it's a natural mode of failure for a hero on an adventure trying to fight off a horde of koopas/moblins/thugs/zombies/aliens/etc. Developers used death not as an easy way to signify failure, but as a sensible way to signify failure.
Sure, he can bring up games like Super Dodge Ball to illustrate his point that the mechanism of death was sometimes forced into the game to convey failure scenarios, but then what about games like Duck Hunt, Sim City, and Super Tecmo Bowl? In not one of those games did your avatar 'die' in any failure scenario. Failure was denoted in a multitude of other ways in those games.
> No, no, no… Death is… not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being.
Well, perhaps it works better in context, but it's just such a succinct summary. "Death isn't."
An even more pertinent part involves some actors talking about death on the stage. Acted death is nothing like actual death—it's far more believable. Death on the stage feels pretty similar to death in a game.
> GUIL (fear, derision): Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death!
(More quietly.) You scream and choke and sink to your knees, but it doesn't bring death home to anyone-it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says-"One day you are going to die."
(He straightens up.) You die so many times; how can you expect them to believe in your death?
PLAYER: On the contrary, it's the only kind they do believe. They're conditioned to it.
The whole play is worth reading about death, but that passage, and the part that follows, stand out specifically.
Realistic death doesn't tie into the general character animation model because they're skeletal-based animations and not physical ones (again, fake). When rag-doll physics is employed the skeletal-based animated body is simply swapped-out in-place. It's _really hard_ to physically simulate 'a bullet going through a human stomach', and honestly there are more important things in games to focus on financially.
> the most apparent conclusion is that games are using this fatalism as a crutch, because they don't know what else to do with it.
It's sentences like these that make me think the author has completely neglected the technical and financial difficulty of game development.
Morally, the author does a great job portraying the non-gamer (read: "normal person") ideology of what death should be: special, eventful, meaningful, a thought-provoking once in a lifetime experience and conclusion to your story.
As someone whose dealt with death more in his life than most probably will in their entire life -- it's not any of those things _to the person dying_.
Death for you _is_ a binary switch, and once you're gone, you are gone. Games do a good job portraying that.
I'll end this with just one of my favorite quotes.
"Nothing" isn't better or worse than anything. Nothing is just... Nothing..." - Aria Stark, GoT
I tend to disagree. If the creators (and/or the players) thought it was important to portray death more accurately, effort would go into it. Look at the effort that goes into boob physics. The fact that that's even a term shows that video game writers are more than willing to work on simulating things that are _really hard_ if they think it will sell games.
The fact that it wouldn't is the point.
Secondly, games were experimenting a lot with death. It used to be that your character just fell and disappeared. Then you could wound or chop off its limbs. It would die differently when shot than when falling, etc.
Heck, Dwarf Fortress actually does simulate arrows penetrating internal organs and its consequences in great detail.
The ultimate reason why games portray death in simplified, binary way is the same as reason why movies portray death in simplified, binary way - because if you went into gory details of last moments of a person with a lung punctured by a bullet, desperately trying to catch a breath while slowly bleeding out, calling out to his god or his family, your player would freak out and probably puke. That is assuming that you'd be allowed to sell the game in the first place.
Games and movies are meant to be enjoyable, not disturbing, so death is always simplified, unless there's a strong reason to go into details.
Yea, I think this culture is way too obsessed with the idea of binary opposites. It's just as hard to demonstrate that what seems like two distinct and opposing things are actually the same thing, and it's just that you've allowed yourself to grow into this mind that believes otherwise. You can see every life as something that is in a constant decay towards death, and you can see everything that has decayed to contribute to the creation of new life. Stars don't have life or death, yet we come from them. At some point our own complexity perplexes us, and is that where we draw the line?
As someone who has as well, dealt with more thinking about death than most people ever will in their life, I don't know if I'll ever see how I see things get expressed in a video game. I just don't think it's capable of being expressed.
Death acts as a convenient lose-state because it's at first approximation a loss of control---transitioning from life to death (for a player-controlled avatar) is transitioning from a state where you can control an aspect of the world directly via your will to a point where your will no longer has bearing on the simulation playing out. It's convenient to use that no-control state as an indication that the player has done something "incorrect," i.e. "You messed up, we're going to punish you by time-out in the corner" (even if the time-out is just the few moments it takes to respawn).
All of that having been said, I wouldn't agree with the author that death in games is a "crutch," per se, but I think there are other facets of death that are explorable that most games do not. Some games do; Wing Commander and the much-maligned Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor have the interesting aspect in that your decisions in play would cost you members of your team---and those costs were permanent (for a given session of the game's linear narrative). But in terms of what the player directly experiences, death is often just cutting of the strings between the controller and the on-screen avatar. Maybe there's room to grow there?
Death? That thing that happens to everybody and everything (except for that one weird jellyfish). That thing that's is random (oh look, a brick just fell off the truck in front on me and it went through a car window immediately snuffing out the passenger's life), capricious (childhood cancer?), and just plain everyday (most people eat other animals on a daily basis).
Additionally, if you look at history you'll see that attitudes towards death vary greatly. From celebrations of the dead, to fear of the dead, to just a shrug.
Meanwhile you have video games that play with the idea of death and destruction, just like much of Indo-European epics have for millennia.
God of War has you killing the gods and everything in your path, including innocents. All because you killed your family.
Super Meat Boy has a brilliant scene when you first get to the afterlife and you see thousands of copies of you raining down into a hellscape. I didn't count, but as the game keeps track of how many times you've died, I wouldn't be surprised if it's raining the dead versions of all your failures.
Then there's the really disturbing (in the good way) take of Binding of Isaac or Braid or Limbo. Even mainstream games like Final Fantasy will play with it.
Video games are great for exploring the ideas of death and life. Sometimes they treat it sadly, sometimes is relatively inconsequential, and sometimes it can even be humorous. Honestly, I find they treat death better than most other mediums.
If it's in one of the cutscenes I have no idea, as those always get skipped in a TAS.
"Sometimes I think maybe I want to join the army. I mean, it's basically like FPS, except better graphics. But, what happens if I get lag out there? I'm dead! I mean, I even heard there aren't any respawn points in RL." [0]
While in terms of playing a video game that's all nonsense - you have a character, it runs around doing things until it 'dies', so we talk of being defeated as "I died" - in Dark Souls you don't "die", and that's a fundamental part of the story. It's why you are where you are, why the things you fight are where they are. Why some things you fight disappear in a puff of magic smoke, and other things leave corpses. You can temporarily 'become human' in Dark Souls, but that's really just an improved link to the human essence - you don't actually 'return to life'. It really is a beautifully subtle and complex game with it's underlying backstory.
The ultimate reason why games portray death in simplified, binary way is the same as reason why movies portray death in simplified, binary way - because if you went into gory details of last moments of a person with a lung punctured by a bullet, desperately trying to catch a breath while slowly bleeding out, calling out to his god or his family, your player would freak out and probably puke. That is assuming that you'd be allowed to sell the game in the first place.
Games and movies are meant to be enjoyable, not disturbing, so death is always simplified, unless there's a strong reason to go into details.
Seems like 100 years ago, people were dying a lot, all the time. Brothers, sisters, parents, friends...people died a lot more often. Now that medical science has advanced so much, we don't have to deal with it nearly as often. I wouldn't say we are desensitized to death. On the contrary, I think we are actually hypersensitized to it.
I think our media representations of death are a product of our own crippling fear of death trying to convince ourselves that it's not that big of a deal.
You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal.
We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it. The implication being that the drive to achieve immortality and/or extend lifespans is some recent phenomenon that emerged in the last century, which is patently false, and that trying to reason about ending a phenomenon means we are oblivious of its true nature, which is again false, and odd.
In addition, I'm skeptical of your implication that the rate of emotional sensitivity to death increases with more exposure to it. It should be the opposite.
You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal.
We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it.
In addition, I'm skeptical of your implication that the rate of emotional sensitivity to death increases with more exposure to it. It should be the opposite.
The GP's argument is that because we as a society are less connected to death that we are therefore more afraid of it than ever, that the commonality of death in the 1800s made it something less fearful, more banal, to them than to us.
We are disconnected from death, and in doing so we are trying to solve its disputed problem? Doesn't seem to be the case, as human desire for immortality is quite ancient, precisely because of how visible death was.
As for the last statement, the GP contradicted themselves w.r.t. whether we are desensitized or hypersensitized in the beginning and end of their post, respectively.
This could probably have been written better. I was saying that we are desensitized to the idea of death but not to death itself. The two are logically relatable but not the same.
I disagree. We wanted solve death since time immemorial, and it's strongly reflected in our culture. What's different this time is that some of us look at our level of technology and understanding of life and realize that it's about time to finally do it. To kill Death.
Concern trolling makes for a good read I guess. People are wired to always be on the lookout for the next good thing to be concerned about.
Also, if media can't change people's philosophies, what does according to science?
However, the trend always disappears once you've accounted for shoddy research and disregarded short-term effects (i.e. hormone responses). I could cherry-pick you some recent results; the most popular lately seem to be video games and violence or video games and sexism. It wouldn't be very convincing since you can ostensibly find a variety of papers that say exactly the opposite. I urge you to browse through the google scholar results and draw your own conclusions.
Please do note: I'm arguing a subtle distinction here between subconscious subversion and conscious consideration. After seeing a horrifying documentary about war, I might consciously change my philosophy on death because the source is reliable and the information is believable/consistent. However, seeing silly deaths in a video game can't influence me in the opposite way because the source is dismissible and the conclusion is fantastical.
So, to answer your second question in an unsatisfying way: I think it's clear that people change their own philosophies.
Where do these bodies come from? Well one form of punishment is where they back up your mind and sell off your body (why waste it?)... When you get out of prison, you end up with a different body. Bodies are expensive, so getting out is only viable if you are rich.
The one that sticks in my mind is in Modern Warfare (I think) when the nuke goes off while you're fleeing the city. You assume you're going to survive. Then the nuke goes off, your helicopter crashes, everyone around you is dead, you stagger out, look around a little bit (still assuming you'll be saved), fall over, and die.
I must admit, I loved the movie. Went to see it twice, actually. (Watch. Contemplate. Repeat.)
In real life, we prefer to avoid things that can kill us, for obvious reasons. In video games, the effect of death is to keep people playing, not just in an abstract "making things interesting" sense, but in a measurable Skinnerian sort of way.
Also, one of the reasons why 1980s arcade and NES games were so brutally, unforgivingly difficult (with "no continues" the norm rather than exception) was to keep people playing. The oldest games weren't actually very big: the original Dragon Quest 1 was under 64 kB. Constantly killing the player (with no continues) allowed a game that might take 30 minutes for a skilled player to take 20-40 hours for a beginner. By the time someone could actually win one of these games, they had a deep expertise and that shared knowledge was enough to create cultures around these games, which made them both "viral" in their time and lasting into ours.
It's odd to think that something we aggressively avoid in real life was, in no uncertain terms, a killer (pun not intended) feature for video games.
With games being more complex and having higher budgets for things like special effects and voice acting, killing people isn't just making some pixels disappear. Take for example using a corrosive gun against a human in Borderlands, or shooting a bad guy with a fire arrow in Tomb Raider (the most recent one): Killing enemies this way usually involve them dying slowly as they are corroded away or burned alive. There are voice actors who act out horrible agonizing death rattles for that (in both instances, there is an initial painful scream, a second of panicked realization, then horrible screaming for seconds afterwards). Animators had to make people writhe around in agony as they slowly die. Game designers made a conscious choice about how they would proceed with the deaths of people - these things have costs and I would imagine they aren't small.
More obviously with Tomb Raider: there are some horribly gruesome death sequences for Lara if you mess up. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen her get impaled, or crushed, or shot and all of the deaths are horrible and disturbing. Every time, I've felt it, and thought about how horrible it must be to die that way. I don't think I can really ask for more from a video game when it comes to expressing death, while still making a game enjoyable to play.