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.
I am almost falling asleep on my keyboard here, so I'll keep this brief to prevent falling asleep with all the letters of the keyboard printed backwards across my face. I can barely keep my eyes open. I'm not sure why I'm so tired, though I have had people over this evening and I spent the first part of my day cleaning up in preparation for said visitors. We had a lovely evening, by the way, thanks for asking.
But no! Why should you get up? You've been working your arse off all week for little to no gratitude from the people that you work for. So you've earned this little sit down. You shouldn't feel obliged to do anything. So you don't. You say to yourself – possibly out loud – no. You are going to sit here until you're nice and relaxed, or at least until Top Gear has finished. Then and only then you might think about getting up to post that letter.
"But the post goes at 4pm, and it's 3.50 now," says your mind. "If you don't post that letter today, the council are going to charge you eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds for the privilege of another letter asking you where your eight-hundred and fifty-four pounds owed in money that they paid you by mistake actually is." You close your eyes and block out the whingeing and nagging that your own mind is setting about you with. This is your time. Besides, the postman will come again tomorrow, and you can always change the date on the letter to look like you posted it earlier and it actually got lost in the post and then feign ignorance when the council start hammering on your door and bringing the bailiffs round.
You decide to give up trying to be productive and you lean back on the sofa in a more relaxed posture. Perhaps your mouth falls open in an expression of gormless contentment. You stare into space for a little while as the light starts to fade outside and you wonder if you probably should get up and cook something, but you're not sure you can be bothered. You'd phone for pizza, but you don't have any cash, and ordering one with a debit card is always such a hassle because they always phone back and say it hasn't gone through and you think your card's been declined because you've got no money but it's actually them just typing the number in wrong and oh for heaven's sake being by yourself sucks and wouldn't it be much better if you had someone to talk to or cook dinner for? That might get you up off the damn sofa.
The first possibility is that you achieve victory over the soporific powers of the sofa, stand up and get something done. You post your letter, putting it right into the postman's hand just as he is emptying the postbox into his big bag. Then you go and buy toilet paper and milk and order a pizza. Your evening goes swimmingly well, and you collapse into bed satisfied that you have spent your day as productively as you possibly could, with a much-needed break in the middle for a little quiet time and reflection.
And the other possibility is, of course, death.