*listens to part about narrative disconnect between badassery and dying a lot* I'd love to touch that one, but I honestly can't, especially with the example I have in mind.
Again, well thought out and then clearly presented.  I hadn't heard the Battlefield 2 example before about how it tackled death - I can see how that would really work and make you feel like sharing the conflict in a bigger way as well. Other examples of games tackling aspects of this issue that popped into my head while you were speaking were: Bioshock's use of the vita-chambers to provide a fiction behind respawning on death; GTA4's use of different dialogue before a mission when retrying it so that hearing the same thing again isn't jarring/annoying/boring - of course the mission is the same again though.  Another method I've thought about that might not be appropriate in every case is by randomising/procedurally generating certain elements to avoid the loss of a death taking away from the freshness of having to approach a new situation for the first time and all the extra gameplay elements and thought processes that that requires. To quickly make clear what I mean by that - Spelunky's entire game is centred around that with each death prompting a complete restart and a newly generated dungeon. This can be done for just smaller sections of a game after checkpoints rather than the whole thing and it doesn't have to mean generating everything again. L4D doesn't create new environments every time but that the zombie horde and special infected attack you in different places everytime meaning you not just executing pre-learnt actions because you know, for example, there's going to be a boomer coming round exactly this corner. In a game like Rainbow Six where you might be storming a bank the guard placement and patrol paths or types of equipment could be changed each time so intel gathering is just as important every time and isn't lost. You could even rotate around the order different missions need to be completed having died in order to keep the player on their toes without switching off their brain - depends what's trying to be accomplished of course. There's a whole bundle of thoughts anyway.
@RagingLion: The problem that I have with the Vita-chambers is that they render death irrelevant and make the game piss-easy. Nothing is a challenge because you can die as many times as you want while fighting things. They also raise all sorts of new questions, most importantly why nobody else uses the chambers. This reduces us back to point 1: my power comes not from awesomeness but from the quicksave key. In this case, the quicksave just happens to be a game mechanic.
Procedural generation could be applied very well to this problem in the right circumstances. It really depends on how much story and such has to come across in the span of a checkpoint. If it's just "Yo, you fought dudes" then procedural generation could work great. Otherwise things get trickier. Of course there are also the inherent problems of procedural generation, in that it will never feel as tight as something well designed, but that doesn't always matter either.
You remind me of the Extra Credits guy except you are actually pretty cool about it instead of being an annoying, condescending, jerk. Good job! I usually hate discussions like this, but you actually make it kind of interesting.
The way in which death is dealt with in games is often startlingly trivial. Especially in games like Modern Warfare, where every tiny, realistic detail is added everywhere else, except death. Soft fails in Heavy Rain, or death as the very end of the game like in Passage, give the act more weight. Heavy Rain built up to a moment where death was meaningful (not perfectly of course). Passage made death a reflection on life, an inevitability but not trivial.  In shooters especially, I feel developers have a responsibility to make death evoke something more than apathy in players. If it means seeing each new character I control (and subsequently die with) stay dead, before moving on, then I think that could be leveraged to present the more random, destructive elements of war. You talk about death in most modern shooters creating ludonarrative dissonance, or breaking the narrative, but often it just enforces the bombastic, ridiculous elements of a lot of them. I wish it wasn't that way but it is for the most part. Changing the way death works would go a long way to making conflict in military shooters more than just an opportunity for vapid man-shoots.     I have more to say on this but it's late. Nice blog.Â
@Brodehouse: This is true (I think, the ending of that game is a blur to me), but I have to take issue that I have with the whole thing for one reason: It isn't revealed till the end of the game. This means that during most of the time that you are actually playing Bioshock, the Vita-chambers seem like an absurd contrivance. Both the player and protagonist are asking themselves the entire time: Why the hell do these only work for me? From the character's perspective it's a hint that he is somehow connected to Rapture. From the Player's, it is a clear gameplay contrivance.
Actually, this is interesting. It seems like gameplay elements with actual story behind them need instant explanation, because otherwise they risk being written off as mere game design. I must ponder this topic further.
@supermike6: Thanks, I'm always a little concerned about coming off as pretentious. I'm really glad that I'm making the deeper aspects of game design sound exciting! That, ultimately, is my goal here.
@EndSarcasm: The fact of the matter is that most military shooters ARE vapid man-shoots. This really stems from our continued insistence that games be "fun". Any time a game designer tries to create something meaningful, they have to realize that a certain segment of the population is going to be turned off because it isn't fun. Probably the most impressive thing about CoD is that it has managed to appeal to both audiences. When I think about CoD, I'm remembering the nuke-death. When my friend from work thinks about it, he's remembering shooting a lot of dudes.
I actually think that military shooters are popular not because they provide clear opportunities for resonant and powerful moments, but because they make the killing completely guilt-free.
So I agree with you, but as it stands only a very small number of people care about either Heavy Rain or Passage. Even many game designers will say that they are irrelevant and dumb. I disagree with them, but compromise can lead to fantastic things. There is room for all kinds of different approaches to failure, from the deep and insane to the completely indifferent.
You remind me of the Extra Credits guy except you are actually pretty cool about it instead of being an annoying, condescending, jerk. Good job! I usually hate discussions like this, but you actually make it kind of interesting.
He's one smart cookie, isn't he?
Great stuff, my man. I can't really think of any game that keeps narrative flow and death sequences. Too Human had an interesting spin on it, but it was too lame.
I can't really think of any game that keeps narrative flow and death sequences.
Omnicron and Messiah come to mind, in both of those games you posses other people, so if you get hurt, they will die, but you will not, you go on an posses somebody else. Prince of Persia is another interesting example, it doesn't make the player invulnerable, but it removes death from the game completely, whenever you fall, Elika will catch you and bring you back to the nearest platform, if you "die" in a fight, Elika will jump in and let you recover some health, enemies will however also recover some health, so that mechanic can't be abused as easy as the Vita chambers in Bioshock. The problem with the Vita chambers was that they become part of the strategy, if you fight a big daddy, you just die a lot and respawn a lot, there is no reason to plan the assault a little better, as the cheap tactic works perfectly fine, every time. Checkpoints or quicksaves don't have that problem, as you still have to solve the challenges yourself.  Anyway, back to failure in games itself. I don't see much of a problem with the narrative impact failure, as I consider it to be close to non-existent, as it is the player that fails, not the game character. The game characters story is the one timeline with all the success the players had, the failures don't become part of that. The core problem with failure is much simpler: being forced to replay challenges that you already beat. That is what makes failure annoying and disruptive, as it moves you away from the problem you want to solve, to an earlier problem you already figured out. Games have been getting better at that over the years, bad having a reset point before a cutscene, instead of after it, still happens quite frequently.  And a few words to the way Battlefield handled failures by letting you jump into other squad members: Eurofighter Typhoon used a similar approach, it gave you five pilots for the war, they could be captured, die or just live on and fly their missions. The player had control over all of them and could jump into any of them whenever he wanted. The problem with that approach is that while it makes death not a Game Over, which sounds nice in theory, it does something far worse: It delays failure. If the player makes mistakes you should be notified instantly of them, if the mistakes are potentially fatal, he should be forced to try again. The Void is a game that essentially ruined itself that way for many people. It is an easy looking game and you can play it for hours without ever encountering anything challenging, you just collect resources and plant them to create more and here and there you fight a harmless enemy. The problem is that resource management mistakes early on can screw you up hours later in the game, without even giving you much of a hint on what went wrong.  Long story short: The most important part is that a game doesn't force you to replay challenges you already solved, if it does that well, failure becomes close to a non-issue. In a perfect world every game could simply have a Braid like time rewind, that works always and without restrictions.
Interesting discussion. There definitely are very few games that acknowledge the player's death in a narrative way, let alone work it in a cohesive fashion and balance that with the gameplay. You may have addressed it previously but the only game I've ever seen that's dealt with death/failure in a way that's both narratively consistent and significant to the gameplay is Planescape: Torment. And that required working the entire plot of the game around the main character's immortality.
Super Meat Boy had a humorous play off of Meat Boy's amazing revival ability in some of the cutscenes, but it was never really addressed. Lost Oddessy similarly involved some immortals as the main characters that played into the game mechanics and plot, but doesn't work as well as Planescape. Bioshock had the vita-chambers, but I agree those failed the game in terms of gameplay, even if they were explained narratively. And almost everything else has a thin paper covering over the player's death, at best. Your discussion of Bayonetta reminded me of Chrono Trigger, where some game over screens were replaced with "The Future Refused to Change" or a shot of Lavos destroying the world. But you still just loaded the game and continued on as if nothing had happened.
Overall, especially for action games, I don't think there's any good way to make player failure both significant and narratively consistent unless you a) entirely work the plot and gameplay around the death/failure mechanic or b) paper over the death/failure mechanic with some contrivance (e.g., a person telling the story from some future point and "game over" causing him to say "that's not how it happened" and jump back to a checkpoint; Crackdown's use of clones with each death representing a new clone). For a) usually it's not worth the effort or it would harm the story the developers want to tell to do and b) is really only a few steps removed from a game over screen and can still tend to make death insignificant.
Interesting view on death in video games. I like the BF2 example. My conditioning has led me to just excuse it as well, video games. Failures impact on the narrative, for me, is very dependent on the game. You did touch upon a real game breaker for me in the part about Bayonneta being a real bad ass in the cut scenes, yet can get worked in gameplay. That does bring a disconnect. I think, as a game developer, you need to keep the context of the world you are creating, and the feeling your going for in mind. For me, it was Black Ops. Here you are as a bad ass soldier with over powered modern weapons. You can blow up a truck no problem, but a non destructible plank of wood is just too much. In the cut scenes, every moment is dire, and every bullet counts. Yet in practice, you are a bullet sponge, and a few seconds out of battle and your ready to fight. I don't think this would bother me as much if it was done in a cartoon like fantasy way. Â This is what I personally would like to see in a modern military shooter. To go in with a squad of three or four, and when one is down, someone has to get them to a medivac. That character would be hospitalized and unavailable for the rest of that level. Characters that died in the level would stay dead, and have to be replaced with new recruits. These new recruits would have less field time, and therefore lower stats (movement speed in full gear, reaction speed ext.) that would get better the more missions they last through. This is the most important part, missions can be failed. Failed missions may make others harder (don't take out radio station, enemy's have communication).
This is what I personally would like to see in a modern military shooter. To go in with a squad of three or four, and when one is down, someone has to get them to a medivac. That character would be hospitalized and unavailable for the rest of that level.
Characters that died in the level would stay dead, and have to be replaced with new recruits. These new recruits would have less field time, and therefore lower stats (movement speed in full gear, reaction speed ext.) that would get better the more missions they last through.
The problem with such mechanics is that, while more realistic, they would make failure a hell of a lot more annoying. You would end up restarting levels a whole lot more whenever one of your elite soldiers goes down. The problem here is that the punishment doesn't fit the crime, your characters might die because they got stuck on a piece of geometry, because you got surprised by an enemy or whatever, but your characters death is essentially never die due to an active failure of the player, which makes the punishment feel extremely unfair. You would also end up punishing the weak, as bad players would end up with a troop of shitty soldiers, because they can't keep anybody alive long enough to level him up, while good players would get a better and better squad with each level. Never the less, there have of course been games that worked that way out side the shooter genre (i.e. X-Com, Syndicate, etc.) and it would be interesting to see such forms of meta-game applied to a shooter.
@nintendoeats: I think the best story influences on gameplay are the kind that seem like a complete contrivance that the experienced video game player writes off, and then later discovers that it's actually key to the game's plot. BioShock is probably the single best instance I can think of. Kojima attempts to do this sort of thing but isn't always successful (the nano-syringe that normally recharges your psyche meter being used to take down a boss). Assassin's Creed went incredibly far to attempt to rationalize all gameplay conventions in their setting.
@Brodehouse: I love the Assassin's Creed approach, because the know how to take advantage of it. because the failstate is desynchronisation, they can take away health for things like killing civilians. I really respect this aspect of AC.
The problem with Bioshock's method is that it DOES require you to write it off as a gameplay contrivance. The best blending of story and gameplay comes when you can't tell what came first. Games can still be great with clear contrivances, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be improved by eliminating them. Further if the player doesn't find out the story explanation for a gameplay mechanic until late in the game, it doesn't change the fact that the early experience was disjointed.
Great Job. That made me think about the merits and mistakes made in games like Prince of Persia 4 and the way AC presents death as a story oriented mechanic. Keep up the good work!
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