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[Biggerfish]

Sounds like Warioland 2. You can't die, but when you get hit you bounce back, usually down to the pit you climbed from.

This, to me, is the same as dying. If not worse, because of the whole "GOD DAMN NOT AGAIN!" frustration aspect.

I've been playing Persona 3 lately, and when I die I stop playing. Like it has been said in this thread, the conflict between the story story and the gameplay story is pretty jarring. That, coupled with the prospect of me having to repeat stuff I just did (usually only 5 minutes or so) makes it pretty much impossible for me to gather up enough willpower to play again.

The only punishment death has in that game, though, is my self-imposed one; I'll stop playing. I don't lose anything I can get again, I don't have to repeat masses of stuff (if I've been good with saves), it's just a minor inconvenience that breaks the flow of the game. So I try to avoid dying because of that minor inconvenience.

Dealing with death in games, rather than punishing the player for dying, perhaps rewarding them for not could be a way of doing it? If they manage to complete a level / section / the game (depending on the game) without dying, they could get a better ending, or something of the sort. On a smaller scale, the amount of deaths you have could make the boss battle easier/harder (depending on the game and target audience). So if people wanted the game easier, they'd die less, if they wanted a challenge, they could die several times at the start and have to face a boss with minimal equipment.

Something similar to this is playing old bullet-hell shmups through MAME. I have unlimited credits, and therefore unlimited lives, and yet dying is still a setback. Even though I don't lose any progress, I lose power-ups, and that can make the game that much harder. I can easily see people restarting, trying to get through with minimal deaths even though they have unlimited lives, just so they can beat a boss faster.

[Problem Machine]

So if people wanted the game easier, they'd die less, if they wanted a challenge, they could die several times at the start and have to face a boss with minimal equipment.

WARNING POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED

[wourme]

I can think of two recent cases that I've intentionally died at the end of an area so that I could play it again. One was a stage in the fourth Ratchet and Clank game (which I thought was a pretty weak game, overall, compared to the previous three) and the other was the aircraft carrier area in Sin and Punishment.

I played the Wii Fire Emblem game recently, and I thought it was interesting how, at the end, you read the stories of each character following the events of the game. For those who died, it instead just tells you that they died in the battle of [whatever]. It's as if they're trying to make you feel as bad as possible about losing someone, and I found it effective.

In a game where the game itself and the mastery of it are their own rewards, the ability to lose simply increases the challenge and makes the game all the more rewarding.

Basically, if you're going to have setbacks they shouldn't be a real 'punishment' in the sense of inflicting boredom on the player. Losing at chess doesn't mean you have to keep playing the same chess game until you win.

I guess a well-designed challenge-based game would be like going up against the same person in chess multiple times, but playing a different game each time rather than the same game with a trial-and-error memorization of a specific set of moves.

I sometimes think that games whose primary appeal is not challenge should not include a way to lose and have to repeat segments. An example that comes to mind is the Silent Hill games. I certainly don't play those games to be challenged the way I play something like Tetris to be challenged. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the experience would be quite the same if I couldn't lose. But I don't know what the perfect balance might be.

[ElTipejoLoco]

Wourme, your post just game the oddest idea of a game where, instead of a game over screen fade-out-of-gameplay-type-deal, upon loss you are subjected to watching your character suffer agonizing tortures at the hands of hellish beasts (Pyramid Head rape, for example), instead of simply, you know, falling down and having blood sprawl out of you to spell out "YOU BE DED, SON", or some equivalent.

You wiggle the joystick and press every button available, watching your every press make your character struggle and squirm as he is dissected alive. Your vision distorts when one of your eyes suddenly goes missing, and eventually the game will fade out- but even then it's not over. The game will patiently wait for you to hit start and choose "Retry", or "Load", and until then subject you to the far-away noises of your character's flesh being eaten.

Geez, why hasn't anybody done that yet?

[Loren Schmidt]

There are a lot of good ideas here. I like how different everyone's opinions are.

Personally I'm very drawn toward the idea of experimenting with new ways of approaching player death. I also believe that some of the old 'broken' systems aren't nearly as worthless as they seem at first glance. Permadeath (as seen in roguelikes) and limited extra lives are probably the two most controversial systems. I will be the first to admit that these are both dangerous ways of handling death. Many players will simply throw their controller at the dog and storm off.

The degree to which these types of games succeed depends more on the gameplay itself than the death system. If gameplay is visceral and engaging and the player feels responsible for most deaths, the experience takes on a very different flavor. Instead of throwing the controller in frustration, the player acknowledges the error and tries again, vowing to do better this time. When difficult games succeed, they take on a whole new depth. Perseverence is not enough in these games. To proceed, the player actually needs to become more skillful. When this works correctly, inaccessible areas and abilities become much more mysterious and tantalizing.

I absolutely hate how the average Roguelike handles death, especially when things like story and plot are involved.  Nothing quite like playing for a few hours, getting pretty far in to the game, and a manticore randomly pops out and eviscerates your vital organs and you're dead.  Good thing you saved a little while back right?  Wrong!  Upon death, the game took it upon itself to delete your save files!  Boy, isn't this fun?

I love how roguelikes handle death. It put a kind of pressure upon you that no other game has. That pressure of needing to think beforehand, to never act without measuring consequences. The feeling that your character has just died and all your effort went to nothing. Of course, all this means that the game must be fair, specially in the more advance parts.

This exchange is a great example of how differently two people can experience the same mechanic. Both experiences are valid- though the first is much more common than the second. It can be difficult to guide people toward experiencing a game this way. Even the most well crafted games of this type of player death seem to alienate a fair number of people.

[Chris Whitman]

Yeah, the whole "I totally know I can do better next time" thing is a good one to point out. However, then you need a framework where this makes sense, where you actually learn something about the game from losing.

[Lucaz]

I never got that whole differentiation between gameplay/player and plot/characters. I've heard that before, about the discrepance between what happens to the player and what actually happens in the game. Like if, just because the game ends when you defeat the bad guy, it's like if you just falling in a pit didn't happen. I always took it like the plot of a game was a lot of possibilities, with an ideal ending. And everytime you die it's a plausible ending.

But there are games that work against that feeling with ridiculous anti-climatic deaths. The game that I feel managed this the best is Another World. No death feels unadequate or unlikely. Thay are plausible endings for the game.

[Chris Whitman]

Well, what Jon Blow talks about in his lectures is the discrepancy between what game play "tells you" versus what the tacked on story "tells you."

(air quotes).

He uses Bioshock as an example, where you can either kill the little sisters or save them, and it's made out to be this big thing, but the actual gameplay provides only a cosmetic difference between the approaches, so the storyline and the game rewards are in conflict, and the whole thing seems confusing. On one hand you have someone telling you this is important and on the other hand it doesn't seem to matter what you do.

But yeah, that is confusing, whereas I don't find restarting after you die to be confusing. It's never like I have no idea what's going on after restarting or don't understand why I'm playing the game again after dying. It's sort of accepted convention. I mean, Captain_404 is right, I think, that it certainly disrupts the flow of the game to have to replay portions, but I don't think it's really confusing in the same sense.

[Xion]

I just think of every video game that incorporates death as if it were Black Shades, where the first, failed attempt was merely a glimpse into a possible future that you can now avoid.

And I still think a game where death put you into the body of your emotionally (and physically) nearest companion would be rad. A hero sets out to slay a dragon, fails. Dies. His lover, concerned about her boo's well being, sets off after him and finds the dragon he was hunting gravely injured from the fight with the player's first life. She finishes the job and takes on the original hero's quest, now heading off to vanquish some source of evil or something, a quest given to her by some old hag. She fails. Dies. The hag now must find a new hero. She goes in search, finds one, trains him/her. Evil finds the hag, ends her. Dies. The new apprentice hero vows to avenge his/her mentor and goes on a quest to slay the beasts that killed the hag, but not before stopping in the nearest town and making a friend. Fails. Dies. Fails. Dies. Fails. Dies. See the cycle?

Or maybe a game where medical-death (when you die and reappear at the nearest hospital/inn/populated place/safehouse) has some bearing on the game-world. If you fail a section, rather than being able to just try it again, change the world so that you lose that territory, or make it easier but with significantly fewer rewards as well as a more desolate atmosphere to symbolize such loss. Remove the challenges so that, while the player may be essentially going through an easier, faster route, by failing, they are missing out on the actual fun of the game. Make it very atmospheric, though, so that the player doesn't feel too cheated, or the area too boring.

I liked how Prey had an afterlife type section, but I hated that it was a shitty, easy minigame. Make the afterlife a procedurally generated section that's neither too hard nor too easy to escape. The faster you get out the more health/cash/whatever you revive with.

I dunno.

[William Broom]

And I still think a game where death put you into the body of your emotionally (and physically) nearest companion would be rad.
(cool game idea)

I had a similar idea which was a game where you get reincarnated when you die. Depending on what good or bad deeds you did, you can get reincarnated in different realms and different bodies.

[Synnah]

I just think of every video game that incorporates death as if it were Black Shades, where the first, failed attempt was merely a glimpse into a possible future that you can now avoid.

That kind of reminds me of this (Warning: It's kind of lengthy, but the video's interesting). Not completely relevant, but I couldn't talk about death in games without bringing it up somewhere.

And I still think a game where death put you into the body of your emotionally (and physically) nearest companion would be rad.

And this was explored in Psychosomnium. The scenario you go on to describe would be kind of annoying, though, unless the player's deaths were actually part of the gameplay/story. Otherwise, having to retrain a new hero every time you die would be time consuming and frustrating. However, a game where your deaths are scripted, and cause the story to shift to a different character, would be interesting.

[letsap]

I remember playing a game like that, I can't quite remember the name, but it was interesting in how it handled death. Whenever the character died, you were transported literally to the underworld, which was an upside down purple world. It was really cool, and I can see the idea of dying and shifting focus being cool. Chrono Trigger sorta did it, but not many games after that touched on it.

[Egoraptor]

Man, I think about this a lot, too.

I think death needs to be looked at in its purest form... as a gameplay element instead of a literal "death." Rather, it's not death, it's replaying the game from the start, or being transported to another world, whatever.

Universally, it's an obstacle, just like a wall in front of you is an obstacle that you need to jump over. Why avoiding death needs to be this investment in purely either time (such as in games where leveling is important, you can spend hours leveling and your obstacle of death becomes nearly obsolete) or skill (not being able to beat a part, die, repeat, die in the same spot, repeat, etc) has baffled me recently, and I know there have to be better ways around it.

The constant conflict I've always had with myself is whether or not the ability to have better control over a situation in the meta is a good reward. For example, beating a boss gives you a better ability. It makes it easier for you, but then doesn't it make all of your future situations LESS satisfying to experience? Wouldn't you want to sometimes BE limited in order to give yourself a more satisfying resolve?

That being said, what if your character didn't die, but instead progressively lost abilities. Let's say for example you're playing Mega Man X. You have all the armor pieces, you can dash, hit bricks with your head and break them, etc. You know for a fact there are areas in the level you can go to and do something special, whatever that may be, that require these abilities to reach. Wouldn't that then urge you to keep your health up high? That is, avoid damage, challenge yourself to be a better player. You would be put in situations where you would simply NEED to be at a certain health level at a certain point, or else areas would be inaccessible, and you'd never be able to access them again.

And even as you lose those abilities, it gets harder to do all of that evading. Instead of being really nimble and awesome, you lose your speed and your power gradually, and you're challenged more by the enemies around you. You never die, persay, but once you're at around no health, you're nearly helpless, and you wouldn't want to drag your ass super slow across the entire game. That'd be ridiculously boring, and completely unsatisfying! So, you don't want to reach that point, or necessarily any point where your ability is hindered, because you find it fun to be all quick, shooting shit all over the place, being really powerful. You're faced with a constant struggle, and unique struggles for every player. You don't just fly through the stage and get weary when you're low on health, you're weary constantly, fighting to stay awesome, because being awesome is fun, but maybe the challenge to regain your awesomeness is fun, too.

So in a sense, you're not battling for a storyline, or 1000 coins or something, you're battling for your own enjoyment. You're battling because it's fun, it's a constant struggle. The battle itself is fun. It inherently has conflict. There's no point where you fail, that's up for you to decide.

Just a thought!

[William Broom]

I remember playing a game like that, I can't quite remember the name, but it was interesting in how it handled death. Whenever the character died, you were transported literally to the underworld, which was an upside down purple world.

Uh... you mean Verge?

[letsap]

Yeah! That's the one. I found it on some third party site, so I've never been able to play it since the first time. Thanks, it's a super cool game and now I know what to look for. :D

Also, @Egoraptor:

I think by the time you're powerful enough to clear the obstacle of death completely, the player has the sense that they "earned" it, and go around thinking "look at how big I am this rocks!" instead of "oh man I wish I was still helpless and frustrated." In MegaMan X, the concept of losing armor is definitely interesting, and for some kinds of powerups in some games, that could be really cool. I think, though, that once the player has tasted power that they got through a lot of trial, having it taken away by a silly mistake or slipped finger as so often happens in MegaMan games would just be frustrating more than anything.

[Captain_404]

Well, what Jon Blow talks about in his lectures is the discrepancy between what game play "tells you" versus what the tacked on story "tells you."

(air quotes).

He uses Bioshock as an example, where you can either kill the little sisters or save them, and it's made out to be this big thing, but the actual gameplay provides only a cosmetic difference between the approaches, so the storyline and the game rewards are in conflict, and the whole thing seems confusing. On one hand you have someone telling you this is important and on the other hand it doesn't seem to matter what you do.

But yeah, that is confusing, whereas I don't find restarting after you die to be confusing. It's never like I have no idea what's going on after restarting or don't understand why I'm playing the game again after dying. It's sort of accepted convention. I mean, Captain_404 is right, I think, that it certainly disrupts the flow of the game to have to replay portions, but I don't think it's really confusing in the same sense.

I agree with you, it's definitely not the same kind of confusing as the Little Sisters. In that situation, the gameplay and story are completely at odds, each giving their own completely different value to the protection or killing of Little Sisters.

I'm not saying that dying in gameplay when you're not dying in the actual plot is truly confusing, but more that it creates a dissonance. It's not much, but it serves to shake the player out of the game's universe for a moment to realize that they are actually not a part of it. In games like Pac-Man or Space Invaders, this is perfectly fine. Both of these games have a certain level of abstraction that allows the player to realize that they are playing a game; the dissonance is really only created when the player believes, on some level, that the game they are playing is a sort of reality. In this case, death causes the player to realize it is not reality and they must re-suspend their disbelief once they re-enter gameplay.

Of course, that's not to say that a player can't get involved in Pac-Man or Space Invaders and still experience that dissonance from death, but it happens to a much lesser extent in those cases.

So, like you said, the Sisters and my concept of gameplay-plot contrast really aren't the same thing. However, in different ways, they get at the same sort of idea, the idea that contrasting elements within a game can quietly jolt the player out of the game reality and cause them to become suddenly and fully aware that they are not Super Captain Fred, but rather a person sitting on the ground staring at a screen with a plastic controller in their hands.

[Melly]

I've been thinking about what it'd be like to have a game in which death was permanent. Not just within one playthrough, mind you, but within the program as a whole. You die, you can't play the game again, ever.

Doubtful it could work. The game would have to be almost dumbly easy, with stuff like the game auto-pausing if it doesn't receive input for a few seconds, but I imagine the feeling that death wasn't just meaningful, but truly permanent, like in real life, would create a kind of feeling out of the player you don't see in any game, not even roguelikes.

Would probably never work in a commercial sense, but as an experimental free game, it'd be interesting to try.

[GP Lackey]

Try it! It shouldn't take much to do a proof-of-concept experiment.  But just a conventional game where you only can die once wouldn't be so interesting.

I don't see the dissonance in the BioShock example.  Its not like the game doesn't respond to your actions, I mean there's an explicit cause and effect.  It is very definitely a story of a guy who either does or doesn't save Little Sisters.  That it has little thematic weight is another issue isn't it?

In Prince of Persia the game suggests a continuity of narrative because the timer continues to count when you die and restart the level.  I always wanted to mod the game so that the corpses stay behind, so its not the story of one prince but a hundred, and one who made it.

In Sands of Time when you die the Prince (since the premise of the game is that it is a story being told in the past tense) says something like "wait, no, that's not what happened, let me start again" which is kind of hilarious when you think about what the story he's actually telling would sound like.  "And then I jumped directly into the spinning blades of the trap...wait, no I didn't, hold on a second..."

I love how Rogue-likes handle death because there tends to be a lesson in it.  No heroes.

[Chris Whitman]

I don't see the dissonance in the BioShock example.  Its not like the game doesn't respond to your actions, I mean there's an explicit cause and effect.  It is very definitely a story of a guy who either does or doesn't save Little Sisters.  That it has little thematic weight is another issue isn't it?

The dissonance he's talking about is between the story and the game rewards, though. In the story, you're explicitly told you will need Adam to survive and you're taking a great risk by sparing the Little Sisters, but gameplay-wise whether you spare them or save them makes no difference except for a different selection of abilities.

If you play for a bit and try out both options, it's obvious that there is no difference between the two in terms of gameplay. Obviously the story elements are still self-consistent, but the idea is that it doesn't make a lot of sense to explicitly refuse to tailor the gameplay to make sense in the context of the story.

I mean, I actually liked Bioshock, mostly because it was stylish and the plot twist was clever, I thought (it's a shame about the huge anti-climax, unfortunately), but I admit that he has a point.

In Sands of Time when you die the Prince (since the premise of the game is that it is a story being told in the past tense) says something like "wait, no, that's not what happened, let me start again" which is kind of hilarious when you think about what the story he's actually telling would sound like.  "And then I jumped directly into the spinning blades of the trap...wait, no I didn't, hold on a second..."

I actually really dig this part of the game. Usually, I hate it when games try to fit elements of the 'application' part of the game (i.e., saving, etc.) into the game, because while I can handle the idea that you hit escape to go to a menu and save your game or whatever, I find it extremely disruptive when someone's like "Son, before I die... you must... remember to touch the spinning globes you find scattered around the world to record your journey... ugh." It's like... why is that in here? Why is 'recording my journey' a game element?

However, in Sands of Time, the first time I died and heard him say, "No, wait! That's not how it happened." I laughed pretty hard. I don't know why, but the idea of him flubbing the story seemed a lot more believable.

Also, I had always just assumed that he was like, "Then I fell into the spinning blades and... no, I guess I didn't fall into the spinning blades there." Because normally when I play I am falling into spinning blades half the time anyway, so it would make sense that sometimes he would get confused about exactly which blades he had fallen into.

[Xion]

But in the newest Prince of Persia it is literally impossible to die. If you fall off a ledge you get carried back to the nearest solid ground you stood on. If you fail a fight, you get rescued and the only penalty is the enemy's hp going up a little bit. I was at first very put off by this, but eventually got used to it, to the point where solid ground before huge sequences of acrobatics acted more like a checkpoint. The fighting thing still annoys me though. I think it would be more reasonable for the chick to maybe carry you somewhere safe and like, heal you there or something, rather than just pushing the enemy off of you. It would be a larger setback but yeah, that's what you get for failing. The fights are easy as pie anyway.