Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/video-games/213589-dying-in-video-games

by Mclhuman • 11 years ago

82 43 11 years ago

travjones• 11 years ago

"FPS Doug" instantly comes to mind.

"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]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9qXbgrx9rg

billmanman• 11 years ago

uuuuuughhhh I completely forgot about those videos.

Cthulhu_• 11 years ago

BOOM HEADSHOT!

Kenji• 11 years ago

My goodness, so much rambling (excuse my bluntness). I really tried to find a single thought of value in the piece; I failed. It is literally void of content, except for the names of some games in which you can die.

btbuildem• 11 years ago

Indeed, he fails to come to any point at all..

slimsag• 11 years ago

Over the past five years, I've been actively researching game-development. The truth is that everything you see in-game is faked in one way or another. Faking things is _really really hard_.

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

breadbox• 11 years ago

It's sentences like these that make me think the author has completely neglected the technical and financial difficulty of game development.

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.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

I disagree with the part you quoted too. First of all, games are art form, they're not purely money driven, and some are not even tech driven, but they drive tech.

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.

anonymfus• 11 years ago

Mortal Kombat is example of game series where significant effort was spent on death scenes ("fatalities").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatality_(Mortal_Kombat)

0359B02149AB• 11 years ago

Death for you _is_ a binary switch, and once you're gone, you are gone. Games do a good job portraying that.

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.

orthecreedence2• 11 years ago

Movies, TV, games...they all desensitize us (everyday Americans, at least) to death, or a certain view of it, in so many ways. Yet, we're all (soldiers excluded) incredibly disconnected to death, to the point where we're actually trying to solve the problem of death. As if it's something we can logically reason out of our lives with science and medicine.

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.

vezzy-fnord2• 11 years ago

I'm struggling to observe any consistency on your part.

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.

astine• 11 years ago

    You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal.

The GP didn't say that we think death is no big deal, he said that we are attempting to convince ourselves that it is no big deal.

    We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it.

You have the causality backwards.

    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 said 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.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

Yet, we're all (soldiers excluded) incredibly disconnected to death, to the point where we're actually trying to solve the problem of death. As if it's something we can logically reason out of our lives with science and medicine.

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.

michaelochurch• 11 years ago

Death in videogames is, oddly, opposite to death in real life.

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.

fixermark• 11 years ago

At a fundamental level, video games are about control---what you can control and how, when, in what contexts. It is the interactivity of the game media that separates it from other media.

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?

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Your comment reminds me of that novel www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

tikhonj• 11 years ago

This discussion really reminds me of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which has the best view of death I've ever encountered. A specific line stands out:

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.

amelius• 11 years ago

I wish real life had the concept of "savegames".

jhallenworld• 11 years ago

Read the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan for some interesting ideas about this. In them, you can back up your mind and switch it to different bodies. If you get killed, you can restore your last backup but you lose any memories from then on.

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.

evo_9• 11 years ago

I was really hoping Dark Souls was one of his examples. The game incorporates its own take on death/mortality in a way that no other game touches upon. It's also brutally hard and death is actually expected part of the experience; often you can't get past an area without dying first and in a few sequence, you have to die to advance the story.

vacri2• 11 years ago

In Dark Souls, you are dead. Undead. That's the story. When your character is defeated, your essence goes back to the checkpoint because of a magic doodad (that no-one remembers (or manually uses the item, for that matter)).

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.

benatkin• 11 years ago

but what if the human playing the game is not kill?

benihana• 11 years ago

I think it's a personal thing that can't be applied generally. I find a lot of the death in video games very disturbing and not casual at all. I think all you have to do is look at the right things to see it.

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.

devsquid• 11 years ago

I am an avid gamer and I think about death all the time. If you were to actually take anything from games, you would realize how fragile life really is.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

I think the author missed the most obvious point. Let me copy what I originally wrote in a subthread:

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.

azurelogic• 11 years ago

The author mentions that many games now treat death as comedic or at least have backed away from in-your-face player death. I would love to see their take on death in the Dead Space series, where you are frequently treated to the sight of your character's body being dismembered by your enemies.

toolz• 11 years ago

I'm not sure what this title is about. "Wrecked" has such a negative connotation attached to the word. Are you sure your view of death is worse than it was before video games? What are the implications of your view being changed and doo you behave in a worse way now than you imagine you would with a different view of death?

strictnein• 11 years ago

Some of the single player parts of the Call of Duty series have featured you dying bad deaths.

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.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

Yes, that was Modern Warfare 1. I remember that part; it felt both sad and disturbing. You weren't just fleeing the city, you just finished an emergency rescue of a single person from the battlefield. Then boom, 40 000 souls are gone. I think Modern Warfare 1 and 2 were the first games when during the plot your protagonist died suddenly and unexpectedly.

kinsho• 11 years ago

I'll be perfectly honest...I found this article to be not only pointless, but full of false ideas as well. I'd rather read Elements of Style all over again than read that poor excuse of an essay.

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.

byerley2• 11 years ago

When are we going to accept the scientific evidence that video games (and movies before them (and books before them)) don't fundamentally change a person's philosophy? Books in particular are really good at helping you explore ideas and challenge your preconceived notions, but the subconscious effect is akin to hypnosis, completely incapable of making you do or believe something that you ordinarily wouldn't have.

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.

gpcz• 11 years ago

Can you provide some links to the scientific papers asserting that media doesn't fundamentally change people's philosophies?

Also, if media can't change people's philosophies, what does according to science?

byerley2• 11 years ago

The consistent trend going all the way back to the Payne Fund Studies is that someone somewhere thinks they can show some alarmist correlation between media and behavior.

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.

mattbgates• 11 years ago

Edge of Tomorrow, anyone? Heh.

TeMPOraL5• 11 years ago

This is not the end...

I must admit, I loved the movie. Went to see it twice, actually. (Watch. Contemplate. Repeat.)

manachar• 11 years ago

Video Games have gradually turned death, the most (only?) influential and thought-provoking aspect of human existence, into a nearly-unexamined cliché.

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.

egypturnash• 11 years ago

If the "thousands of copies raining down into a hellscape" bit is in a level, then this TAS suggests that it does keep track, as I don't see that happening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JHPrmQS29k

If it's in one of the cutscenes I have no idea, as those always get skipped in a TAS.

Enzolangellotti• 11 years ago

I expected at least a mention to Planescape: Torment.

ulisesrmzroche• 11 years ago

I dunno, I feel the games are cherry-picked. For example, just off the top of my head, "The Last of Us" had a great death scene right in the intro. And for that matter, people still talk about Aeris dying in FF7. These are super mainstream, blockbuster games so I'm not sure that the thesis is valid.

vacri2• 11 years ago

Better not let this author watch an old Road Runner cartoon...

Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

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