RobotGeek

Death is a major factor in all storytelling, but it has always held a special place in games. This is at least in part due to the legacy of arcade games. Death, frequent and irreversible, was a major component of the moneymaking scheme behind the arcades. Designers needed a reason for people to continuously add quarters, and a good motivation for that is to make it so almost all failures are game-ending. Combined with the fact that most early games were about some kind of combat, this resulted in failure becoming associated with the death of your character.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Failure can instead come in the form of a loss of resources, or a slower path to your goal, or a less satisfying ending. Modern games have used all of these options and more. Still, the failure-as-death metaphor was enormously influential in the early days of games, and it still permeates how we think about failure in games today. You see it in the way people talk about “dying” in games like Tetris or Bejeweled, which have no living characters at all.

As with any broadly used metaphor, equating failure with death has consequences. On the one hand, it resulted in a tradition of punishing game design in which a wrong move frequently forces you to repeat a substantial segment of the game. This can be frustrating, but it also has more serious effects on the kind of stories you can tell in a game. If every major failure ends the game, then you can only beat the game with a character who never fails. Needless to say, this limits the kind of character arcs your protagonist can have. To solve this problem, major failures such as combat losses or character deaths get pushed into cutscenes. None of this assists in the ability to tell stories through gameplay.

Recent trends have produced games with a more forgiving attitude, but this usually means that the game removes meaningful failure altogether. In Bioshock, death leads to a quick respawn with few penalties and no lost time in the game world. Games like Braid and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time use time mechanics to reverse fail states. This is the source of the design dilemma outlined in Chris Bateman’s post on The Role of Failure in Gameplay. Does failure force you to repeat parts of the game, or can you shrug it off and continue? Punishing failure is frustrating, but ignoring failure can make gameplay feel flat.

It’s hard to find good solutions between these two extremes without coming up with new metaphors for failure. A few games have come up with interesting solutions. Heavy Rain treats failures – including deaths – as decision points in a branching narrative, which makes sense for that kind of storytelling. The classic Planescape: Torment is the most ambitious take: it builds its entire narrative around a protagonist who constantly dies and comes back to life. This is a brilliant treatment of the quirks of a game hero, but by its nature it’s a solution that can only really work once.

In order to move game narrative forward, it is necessary to take a more comprehensive approach to rethinking failure. There is no reason to let a decades-old business plan influence game design to the degree that it currently does. Failure can be meaningful in many ways. Ending the game isn’t the only significant thing that can happen, and ignoring failure altogether doesn’t solve anything. What failure needs is a new metaphor.