#oneaday, Day 330: On Death And Videogames

Kids today, huh? Don’t know they’re born. Want everything on a plate. In my day, we died by touching a piece of wall that was the wrong colour. And then we had to start all over again!

I am, of course, referring to the changing face of failure in video games. Failure happens these days, particularly in shooters, but nowhere near as much as it used to. And certainly the penalties are far less harsh than they used to be. In days of yore, you ran out of lives, that was it. A few years later, we started to see the arcade-style “credits” system in our home games. Later still, we had games in which you could continue indefinitely. And today, we have games in which it is almost impossible to fail because of the abundance of checkpoints, regenerating health and the like.

I picked up the Sly Cooper Collection for PS3 this week, and I’ve been playing through Sly Cooper 1. I was a little surprised to discover that it is a pretty punishing game. Our hero doesn’t have a health bar and dies at the faintest hint of water, spiky things, fire or dogs with giant hammers. This was initially frustrating, but it was a simple matter to readjust to the way we did things in 2002. It was also marginally less frustrating in the fact that this was the era of unlimited continues, making the use of “lives” almost irrelevant.

I say “almost”, because running out of lives does send you back to the start of the level instead of your last checkpoint, so there is incentive to take a bit more care. But it’s not frustrating, particularly as the game is designed so well that any screw-ups are usually the player’s fault, not the game’s.

It got me thinking, though. The Sly Cooper Collection is bringing this style of gameplay to a whole generation reared on regenerating health—heroes who can simply hide behind a pillar until they wipe all the jam off their eyeballs—and is a very different approach to what people might be used to. While many modern games encourage experimentation and exploration, Sly Cooper punishes stupid moves by killing you immediately. This has the side-effect of keeping the player on track and discouraging them from going too off-piste or attempting to “break” the game (or, heaven forbid, encouraging those assholes who use the word “glitch” as a verb) but I can imagine it would be frustrating to “modern” gamers.

I understand the later Sly Cooper games do have a health bar, suggesting that the latter years of the PS2 may have started gamers’ shifting towards being the pussies they are today.

Yeah, you heard me. Pussies. You don’t know pain until you’ve got to the last level of Castlevania only to lose all your lives and have to start all over a-fucking-gain.

The nearest to this experience we have these days is in the humble roguelike, which has the decency to delete your save game once you die. Better not get too attached to that awesome set of armour you found, because this might happen:

And no-one likes to die by stumbling drunkenly into a wall, having had a blubbering icky thing crawling on them and brown mold spores spurting up their nose.