
Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality - Mclhuman
http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/video-games/213589-dying-in-video-games
======
kinsho
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.

------
tikhonj
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.

------
slimsag
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
> 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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

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

------
manachar
> 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
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](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.

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

------
travjones
"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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9qXbgrx9rg)

~~~
billmanman
uuuuuughhhh I completely forgot about those videos.

~~~
Cthulhu_
BOOM HEADSHOT!

------
evo_9
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.

~~~
vacri
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.

------
TeMPOraL
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.

------
orthecreedence
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-fnord
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

        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.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
My first statement was admittedly ambiguous: I meant that the GP implies that
the figurative "we" think it's not a big deal from his position, not that the
GP themselves think that.

We are disconnected from death, and in doing so we are trying to solve its
disputed problem? Doesn't seem to be the case, as human desire for immortality
is quite ancient, precisely because of how visible death was.

As for the last statement, the GP contradicted themselves w.r.t. whether we
are desensitized or hypersensitized in the beginning and end of their post,
respectively.

~~~
orthecreedence
> they all desensitize us .. to death, or a certain view of it

This could probably have been written better. I was saying that we are
desensitized to the _idea_ of death but not to death itself. The two are
logically relatable but not the same.

------
byerley
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
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?

~~~
byerley
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.

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

~~~
jhallenworld
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.

------
strictnein
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
devsquid
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.

------
toolz
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?

------
ulisesrmzroche
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.

------
azurelogic
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.

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

------
Enzolangellotti
I expected at least a mention to Planescape: Torment.

------
mattbgates
Edge of Tomorrow, anyone? Heh.

~~~
TeMPOraL
_This is not the end..._

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

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

------
michaelochurch
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.

------
benihana
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.

