Chris Olewicz
CHARACTER
ASSASSINATION
Game developers are big fans of capital
punishment - but are there better ways
to pull heartstrings and punish players?
6
A
mong the rollercoaster of concepts in video games,
death has always the
most prominent. And
in the great majority
of games, death symbolises failure. Specifically, the failure of the
player to perform to the
standards expected of
them by the game designers.
From the earliest arcade games, which
gave you three “lives”
in which to accomplish
a highest score, death
has always played an
important role, regardless of genre. Sonic
the Hedgehog, Assassin’s Creed, Modern
Warfare, The Sims,
and Leisure Suit Larry
may treat death in different ways – without
it some games would
never end - but death
is still there, even if just
an obstacle overcome
simply by having another go.
The punishment for
failure can vary. Some
games send you back
to the last checkpoint,
a predetermined location on the map or a
certain point within a
level, or the start of a
mission. In this sense,
you take on the role as
actor working through
an already completed
narrative, and having
fluffed your lines, are
simply asked to do the
scene again and again
until you perfect it. This
is certainly the case
with modern games,
which have become
more and more lenient.
In this respect, death
acts as both an educative tool, and sometimes as a frustration.
Having failed, a player is given another
chance, and will naturally revise their approach in order to succeed. Act too harshly,
either in terms of difficulty, or the amount of
gameplay they have
to repeat in order to
potentially fail again,
and they might become
frustrated. The Grand
Theft Auto franchise is
a frequent offender,
one that fairly allows
the player to take their
frustrations out on the
game in killing sprees
that lead to certain
death.
Some game designers delight in taunting
and chastising players for their failure.
For years, the masters
were adventure game
developers Sierra Online. From their first adventure game – Kings
Quest – Sierra packed
their games full of ways
in which your character could die. Many
of these were punishments for the player’s
own stupidity, such as
walking into a moat,
or pushing a rock onto
yourself.
Sierra also adopted
dead ends as a means
of prolonging game
time. Having perpetrated a mistake that
renders the game unwinnable, a player is a
zombie, dead but without knowing it. Caused
by failing to overhear
a conversation, talk
to the right person at
the right time, failing
to pick up an item, or
using an item for the
wrong purpose, dead
ends were present in
games as far back as
the earliest text adventures, but Sierra perfected them.
Death in adventure
games divided fans.
Some Sierra titles
took the idea
further and
started
openly