There is/was an interesting
discussion at AWTR
about the healing mechanic in games and their ability to break
verisimilitude in games “in a way that magic, dragons and
sword-fighting don’t.” Personally, I find just dying breaks
verisimilitude in games. Every death reminds me that I am just
playing a game after all, and not living through an immersive
experience along with the character I am controlling.
The discussion focuses
intensely on RPGs because the author is “less interested in
[FPS-type games] in general” but I would like to look at two games
outside of RPGs as ways of exploring the idea of realistic healing,
or injury, mechanics.
The first is Dead Space.
One of the aspects of losing health in Dead Space
is that Isaac Clarke’s body slows down and at it’s lowest starts
staggering with heavy breaths. It’s a great mechanic that adds
intensity to the game when you are also low on ammo and you know that
the last batch of necromorphs were a struggle to dispatch and if you
don’t find health soon, those next lot of necromorphs down that
dingy looking corridor are going to be the ones dispatching you. It’s
intense and at least semi-realistic. That is, until Isaac finds
health and all of a sudden he’s back to his old boot-stomping, leg
and arm decapitating self again. It’s amazing what Med-Packs
can do in the future!
Could Med-Packs actually work
that quickly in the future? Well, I guess it’s possible. With a
little adrenalin mixed into the concoction, I’m sure a standard
Med-Pack could get you back into tip-top condition almost
immediately.
I
would like to propose a way of getting around that in a more
contemporary scenario without the mechanic causing frustration for
the player. Imagine being injured; you struggle, you limp, but you
can still shoot
– that’s important of course, and no programmer would be daft
enough to take that away from the player. But what about after
finding your health pack? Do you just spring back into action like
you have just been injected directly with heroin? Perhaps. If the
health pack had heroin in it … So let’s assume that it doesn’t.
Maybe it takes time to heal properly. Not an overly long period of
time, but just enough for the player to still be cautious about what
they do with themselves, where they tread, how often they recklessly
poke their heads out from behind cover, knowing
full well that they need to nurse that wound like their life
depended on it. Because after all, that’s exactly what an in-game
injury should simulate.
There
is also the scenario of
being able to mix different concoctions.
Say a Med-Pack is slow
working but heals you fully when the healing is complete, and an
adrenalin pack gives you that much needed stamina boost. Mixing those
two together would literally cause you to spring back into action
allowing the healing pack to still do it’s work in the background.
I
like the idea of healing
having a real-time consequence, especially in games like Dead
Space, where your injury causes
tension in high-strung scenarios. It seems to have a lot less
consequence in Fantasy-based RPGs when
magic is flying all over the place and healing happens as quickly as
inflicting damage. In fact I want a game where being injured is a
huge factor, and where injuring an NPC is just as consequential for them – they stagger,
they limp, you get an easier target, but at the risk of being hit by
the stray bullets that the
NPC is now recklessly firing
at you to try to keep themselves covered. Although I may not be a
huge stealth game fanatic, Dark Souls definitely
tested my patience (I passed!), while Deus Ex: Human
Revolution gave me the enjoyment
of choosing stealth if I desired it. Maybe it’s a case of
programming, where the logistics of dividing pixel bodies up into
parts that are affected accordingly might end up taking up all your
programming resources. However, if Fallout 3
could do a minor simulation of it in an open-world, I don’t see why
a linear shooter couldn’t do it to an even greater extent.
“The
healing mechanic is perhaps small fry in relation to the overall
issue of integrating storytelling and gameplay. […] But when I look
at such actions from a distance, they do affect the degree to which
I'm immersed in the story, and looking ways to increase immersion is
never a bad thing.”(sic)
I
would argue that the healing mechanic is only ‘small fry’ because
no one has found a way to integrate it
with a story that continues
to move forward. This is where every environmental object has weight
and is able to be used as cover, something to lean up against,
something to rest and inject yourself with a health pack, or drink
water and allow for the time to heal; a chance also to check
directions, clues and inventory items. Like in Dark Souls
and Dead Space where
inventory checking does not pause the game, it would seem logical not
to be doing this out in the open but in a secluded or safe area –
the bonfires as an example in Dark Souls.
Waiting for your leg to heal might be a good time to check some
details with that sidekick of yours that hangs around also. I
just like the idea of an injury that takes real-time to heal,
creating a cautionary play-style for the player. It’s something
that could do wonders for the stealth game, or the tactical horror
game.
Down
on
page 3 of
the fifteen (!) pages of comments, CultureGeekGirl
says:
“I
feel that the idea of death and respawning in a video game is more
immersion-breaking to me than any other mechanic possibly could be.
The death mechanic is deeply engrained in the way games have worked
from the very start, so you have to have that to some extent, but
dying always kind of jolts me out of any reality I may have invested
myself in - even in really game-y games”
But
no
mention
was made of that much maligned
game
Prince of Persia
(2008)
where death was skipped altogether and whenever you screwed up you
were saved by the comforting hand of Elika. While many saw this as
making the game too easy by not dying therefore not learning a
lesson, few realised that it was the gameplay that didn’t make the game challenging enough, i.e.
‘teach the player anything’.
Dark Souls
has one of the most integrated versions of
respawning to
story and setting that I know of,
but despite the ‘YOU DIED’ in red fading into my screen, I never
actually felt like I died in Dark
Souls.
Sure, my humanity was stolen from me, but respawning is respawning;
it’s still
not
dying
and the game loading to a previous checkpoint as though nothing
happened. Instead,
it’s
like being killed figuratively but still being able to keep all your
memories and inventory of collectibles and losing only your souls
(‘money’) and humanity (‘human spirit’), and then restarting from a previous checkpoint.
With
Prince of Persia (2008)
I had finally found a game that made internal sense in relation to
the story that it was telling. If the character is going to win,
because that’s the role of the hero in the story, then he literally
can’t die. In Prince of Persia (2008)
the Prince doesn’t die, he is saved each time by the hand of Elika.
“Where is the fear of dying to create the challenge for
the player?” asks the
detractors. Admittedly, in this game, there was little challenge. But
that had nothing to do with the ‘no-death’ mechanic I would
argue. That had everything to do with the environmental challenges,
the boss battles and the general fighting mechanics themselves being
too one-button easy to traverse.
What
the ‘no-death’ mechanic did was not
only eliminate the loading
screen, but also keep the
player’s story immersion intact. Very
rarely did I ever feel like I wasn’t a part of the game.
Also, just as a minor note,
PoP (2008) had an
injury mechanic, though very basic and pretty ignorable. If the
Prince was hit while in battle, he would clutch at one arm.
“The
death mechanic is deeply engrained in the way games have worked from
the very start.” We know,
as discussed in a number of other online critiques,
that win states are a simple
part of gaming that drives player accomplishments, and dying seems to
be tied up in the failure state. But that certainly doesn’t mean it
has to be. It’s just there because so many games are combat based
and death seems the logical failure of playing these games - “you’re
supposed to stay alive, idiot!!”
But why can’t it be “You’re
supposed to traverse that area without the walls collapsing around
you and setting you back at the start and needing to find a new way,
idiot!!” Sounds
like too much thinking would be involved. But I do like the idea of
being injured setting you back as a failure because now you have to work
harder to achieve the goal that you could have achieved easier if you
weren’t injured. See, now that’s an injury that makes sense and
would become a challenge to overcome: “Don’t get shot!
No, you’re not going to die, but you are going to have to work a
whole lot bloody harder at this section now that your injury is
slowing you down, idiot!”
