Results tagged “difficulty” from Softcore Gamer

I get the impression that not a lot of people have heard of - let alone played - Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. That might not be the case for long, though. The WGA just announced their nominees for best video game writing, and DHSGIT took the dark horse spot. I haven't played, um, any of the competition, except a little bit of Fallout 3, but I'd love to see a well-written indie game like this one take the prize.

I certainly recommend that you give Dangerous High School Girls a look, although it isn't by any means a perfect game. In this interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, author Keith Nemitz stated that "the story is about the culture of small-minded people and how strong, truthfully educated women can improve it." The writing is charming, funny, and does an excellent job of telling that story.

My reservations about the game come from some of the design decisions. Mostly, it's structured like a standard RPG, with semi-random encounters, experience, and character leveling - although it distances itself from any of that terminology. This structure works really well, actually, except that it doesn't allow the player to do any grinding.

In most RPGs, the player progresses the story by exploring a space and completing encounters. Succeeding in an encounter gives the player's party experience, which eventually causes them to become more powerful. Failing in an encounter, typically, does not give the player experience or progress the story (because, typically, it results in a fail-state, forcing the player to restore a saved game). The player, therefore, gets more powerful as the story progresses; later parts of the story open up new areas where the encounters are more difficult, theoretically matching the player's advancement.

Sometimes, though, the player doesn't level up fast enough. That's where grinding comes in. If the encounters become too difficult, the player can take a step back and play through some additional encounters in an easier area, gaining enough experience to tackle the continuation of the story on better terms.

Dangerous High School Girls doesn't have a death-equivalent fail-state, which I like. At least, it looks good on paper, but in practice, it doesn't always work out well. Instead of having to restart when you fail an encounter, you suffer some form of negative reinforcement and then play continues. At best, this negative reinforcement takes the form of a missed opportunity - a chance to have gained experience or some other bonus, while the story continues to progress. Frequently, however, you actually lose a buff or one of the girls in your party. Which makes it easy to find yourself falling behind the difficulty curve, facing encounters that are way out of your league.

Grinding is supposed to provide a way out of this situation. But Dangerous High School Girls takes away lower-level encounters as it opens up new, more difficult areas - or at least, it obscures the lower-level opportunities by putting them in the same space and not distinguishing between encounters of different levels. Add to that the pressure of time continuing to progress with each encounter, whether successful or not, and... well, the bottom line is that I feel like I'm falling further and further behind the more I play, and that my subversive little cadre of girls is becoming more ineffectual rather than more empowered as the story progresses.

Anyway, this post was really just supposed to be a couple of links and a brief review of the game. To sum up, then: worth playing, not perfect, but great writing. You can get a demo from Manifesto, here.

For a long, long time I have been intending to recommend Violet. So here's the recommendation: Go play Violet. I discovered it through the recent IF Comp 2008 and it quickly became one of my favorite works of IF. It's a locked-room puzzle, of a sort, with an absolutely charming narrative voice and some really clever writing. If you have any interest in IF, this is a must-play. This post may contain minor spoilers, but will not ruin the game for you.

Let me give a little bit of background. My long-term goal is to get my parents into gaming. I started on this a couple years ago, when it became clear that gaming is more than just a hobby, it's a career. At that point, it became important that the people close to me "get" games and why they're so important to me. Both my parents have been incredibly supportive, and even interested to engage in conversations about games and game design. But neither of them are gamers, so they don't have the opportunity to know the things we talk about first-hand.

I started with board games. The past two years, I've gotten board games for everyone in my family at Christmas, and then we've played them together afterward. Carcassonne, Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Lost Cities, Pandemic - some of them have have gone over better than others, but they've started to give us a set of common experiences that allow us to talk about games differently, more meaningfully, and with a shared language.

So this year, I decided to raise the bar and try for some digital games. One of the major barriers I've encountered is the perception (derived from Pac-Man) that games are fluff without substance - repetitive activities designed to pass the time rather than tell a meaningful story. My parents are busy people with lots of hobbies. They aren't looking to kill time. The traditional route for incoming inexperienced gamers - Bejeweled, Snood, Diner Dash - isn't going to do it for them. They want complex, mature, interesting stories, and they want them right away.

So interactive fiction seemed like an obvious choice. Modern IF is on the cutting edge of interactive storytelling. There's no complicated interface to come to terms with, no twitch gaming to worry about. For the most part, games are short - designed to play in under two hours. It's also about as unlike Pac-Man as you can get, which might help toss those preconceptions out the window. To be honest, I picked Violet because I had played it recently and liked it so much, and because it seemed to make sense. It's a touching story told in a beautiful narrative voice, without robots or spaceships or violence. It's simple; you don't need to draw maps or navigate conversation trees. It only took me 45 minutes to play. It has a built-in hint system. It won the IF Competition. It seemed like a great idea.

It wasn't a great idea. It was a terrible idea. My mother and I spent almost two hours going through a sixth of the game, and eventually quit in hopeless frustration. She made a heroic effort, but she didn't connect with the game even a little bit. She was confused. She was discouraged. She wasn't having fun.

In retrospect, it's obvious that jumping into Violet this way wouldn't turn out well. I thought that the lack of interface would make the game more accessible, and it did, but it couldn't make up for all the things she was expected to know a priori in order to properly relate to the game. I expected some of this; we had a couple conversations beforehand about how text input works and what to expect from the parser. But I obviously didn't put enough thought into it, because I substantially underestimated the amount of pre-existing knowledge required to play this game.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about. These are very basic concepts that we take for granted the player already understands. There are probably others that apply, as well.

• Progressive Examination of Scenery - Look at everything. Start by examining your surroundings; then examine every object mentioned in that description. Keep doing this until you're confident that you've examined everything that's visible. Do this first, before you do anything else.
• Implied Significance of Objects - Everything has a purpose. If you find a key, expect that there will be a locked door later on. If the author tells you there's a wad of chewed-up gum in the trash bin, expect that gum to be vitally important to the story later on.
• Kleptomania - A corellary to the Implied Significance of Objects: take anything that isn't nailed down. If you find something that is nailed down, keep your eye open for a way to pry it loose. You're going to need it before you're done.
• Puzzle Recognition - Understand the formal elements of the puzzle that underlie the narrative elements applied to it. In Violet, for example, the underlying structure of the puzzle involves eliminating all the distractions so that you can finish your writing. That's why you aren't permitted to just buckle down, ignore distractions and write the damn thousand words.
• Implicit Reward in Multipart Puzzles - Sometimes, especially in adventure games and especially in locked-room puzzle games, you have to do a lot of things in order to accomplish a goal. It isn't obvious that you're making significant progress toward your goal by doing these things, especially if the game doesn't give you points for each thing you do, unless you realize that, in this type of game, doing things is progress.
• False Dead Ends - In an adventure game, when you think you've discovered the solution to a problem, your first attempt at implementing that solution might fail. This doesn't necessarily mean that you're on the wrong track. The solution you identified might be correct, but maybe you need to do something else before it will work, or have something else, or approach something in a slightly different way. Don't lose interest in a potential solution just because your first attempt didn't work out.

Some of these are specific to interactive fiction, or locked-room puzzles, or adventure games. But the phenomenon is pretty universal. And as far as I can tell, there is a direct relationship between the the barriers to entry for playing a game and its potential for complexity and substance. Bejeweled, Snood, and Diner Dash are accessible, but not that interesting. That makes sense, at least to some extent. Games have developed a language - a set of common references, understood meanings, and shared expectations. By building on these building blocks, developers can create experiences that are more complex, more subtle, and more satisfying.

Complex, subtle, and satisfying in terms of gameplay, at least. But is it necessarily true that games as a storytelling media are restricted in this way? Is it possible to create a complex, subtle and satisfying interactive narrative that is accessible to people who, like my parents, have no experience with digital games to build off of?

I suspect that Violet was a particularly bad choice for the introductory work of interactive fiction. Next time I get to spend time with my parents, I'm going to try again with Photopia or The Baron - other favorites with strong narratives that are at least a little less puzzle-oriented. That might help - they might prove to be the right balance of substance and accessibility. But this issue is certainly something that I'm going to be devoting some thought to in the coming months.

Over at my IMD blog. Link.

I've been having some serious trouble formulating a response to this post over at HardCasual. A couple days ago they called out me and the rest of the blogosphere for the way we've handled You Have to Burn the Rope. HardCasual's point is that YHTBTR is a "smart" game, like Passage, and that games journalists are making it out to be merely "clever," by which they seem to mean "good only for a cheap laugh." I've been reading HardCasual for a couple weeks now, and I like it a lot, but something about this rubbed me the wrong way. I do agree, though, that YHTBTR is worth a bit of deeper analysis.

Aside from being funny, what, exactly, is YHTBTR saying? It's an almost perfect example of a classic action-adventure puzzle of the sort you might find in a Zelda game. It's simple, but its simplicity shouldn't be overestimated. Under normal circumstances, a player would naturally spend a couple minutes jumping around bullets and throwing axes before he or she figured out how to beat the Grinning Colossus. The point, of course, is that these aren't normal circumstances, and the game takes every available opportunity to point out the solution to the puzzle ahead of time. Knowing the solution removes all - well, almost all; there's still some platforming that requires twitch-play - the challenge from the game.

What's interesting to me is what that leaves you with: this super-simple, ultra-short, minimally challenging game is a perfect test case for an experiment about the relationship between difficulty, accomplishment, and fun. I've played YHTBTR a dozen times now, despite the fact that there is very little reason to do so. One play-through is almost exactly like another; it's impossible to lose, and no significant way to win with style. There's no emotional build, and likewise no significant narrative arc. The credits song is catchy, but I've already got it as an MP3, so that isn't a great motivator. The only good incentive, as far as I can make it out, is an emotional burst associated with winning, even in the absence of a challenge.

Possibly I'm reading my own reaction all wrong. It's conceivable that the real attractor to this game is the relatively high production value. Certainly, YHTBTR is well polished. Its graphics are solid, its interface is very well designed, and its self-aware sense of irony is downright charming. But it seems to me that there is something about burning that rope; maybe not a feeling of accomplishment, exactly, but a sense of satisfaction, or at least completion, that provides some sort of positive reinforcement. Something which indicates that - or rather, reinforces my belief that - at least for some gamers, myself included, a game can impart a sense of joy that is unrelated to its difficulty.

Is this what Kian Bashiri was trying to way with his game? I don't know; maybe not. It's what I got out of the game. If you're interested in the author's intentions, there's an interview with him over at IndieGames that's worth checking out.

The problem I have with HardCasual on this issue, aside from the pretentious tone that they adopted and the fact that they seemed to spend more energy complaining about the blogosphere's reaction to the game than on their own analysis of it, is that the production of FAQ files and video walkthroughs is not counterproductive to the message of YHTBTR. In fact, from my perspective, it's an excellent demonstration of the game's lesson. Creating elaborate guides for this game simply reinforces the central point that the puzzle is not a significant challenge, and doing it with the evident joy expressed on blogs like Rock, Paper, Shotgun or my own supports the thesis that a game without a significant challenge can still be fun. I think the fact that these fan-creations were so quickly aggregated on the YHTBTR homepage is further evidence that, far from detracting from the game, these artifacts are very much in keeping with what the game is trying to accomplish.

I woke up this morning and checked Rock, Paper, Shotgun to find this gem of a flash game. It's pretty short, although the difficulty is not what you would expect for this kind of thing. In fact, it's so extreme that you can't help but feel that the designer is making a larger comment on the difficulty of games in general, or perhaps the role of difficulty as an element of a game's design. Regardless, the game is enough of a conceptual treat that I'd recommend you give it a try so that you can see what it's about, even if you don't finish it. And for those of you who stick it out to the end, the credits song is the best thing since Still Alive.

(If you want to get to the end but are having trouble, there are several resources available. Check out the official game manual first, and then IndieFAQs has a walkthrough and RPS has a puzzle guide. There's also a video walkthrough on YouTube.)

Alright, usually I have no compunctions about spoiling a game when I attempt to dissect, analyze, or even just comment on it. Especially if the game, like Photopia, is ten years old. But this situation is different, because I know there are people out there who don't get as much vitamin IF as they should, and because the game in question is so overwhelmingly about narrative experience that spoilers would ruin it completely. That said, Adam Cadre's Photopia does touch on a number of themes that I'd like to talk about in greater depth. Which makes for a dilemma.

So here's what I'm going to do: today, I'm going to recommend that you go play Photopia. If that's not enough to make you actually do it, then let me mention that the game comes well recommended. It won the 1998 Interactive Fiction Competition and has recently been favorably reviewed by both Play This Thing! and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Go ahead and read those reviews if you need convincing, they won't spoil anything either.

Photopia is interactive fiction, light on the interactive. The story is extremely linear, and although it does contain a couple puzzles, they're simple and pretty straightforward. There should be little of the adventure-game-style frustration that often accompanies this kind of game, although it is text-based so you will have to work with a parser. The other thing I'll say about it is that it's only about forty-five minutes long, and it's worthwhile to find yourself a little block of time to play through the whole thing. I played it over the course of two days, and I wish now that the experience had been uninterrupted. Oh, and also, I want to repeat RPS's advice: when the time comes, for God's sake, talk to Alley about astrophysics.

After you've had a chance to play the game, I'll talk some more about the specific things it sparked for me. So here's your warning: sometime in the future, subsequent entries on this blog will contain Photopia spoilers. And you will be much better off, as a reader of this blog and as a human being, if you've played the game before that time comes. You have been warned!

ETA: PTT! has links to the game and relevant interpreters, so go there for the download.

Happy new year, everyone! I've been on vacation for the past couple weeks, but now I'm back in L.A., trying to overcome this holiday inertia. And you know what that means: obligatory end-of-the-year post! Er, admittedly, a couple weeks late. Nonetheless! With a little prompting from Ethan Kennerly, I'm going to run down the list of favorite moments from gaming in 2007.

10. Super Mario Galaxy - I lent my Wii to a friend for the end of the year, so the only Mario Galaxy I got to play was an extended romp following Thanksgiving dinner at Jamie's. I'm not sure that I'm ready to accept the proposition that it's as much fun as Mario 64 was, but it is fun. Long-jumping off of a platform and into orbit around it is one of the more satisfying things I've ever done in a game. But that isn't why Mario Galaxy gets a favorite-moment mention. I love collective play - when many people connect with each other over the shared experience of a game as it's being played - but I don't get nearly enough opportunities to play games in the environment you need to achieve it. The night I played Mario Galaxy, however, I was playing with a room full of happy, friendly, and turkey-stuffed people sharing the experience. A collective intake of breath accompanied every near-suicide as I attempted to navigate the Sweet Sweet Galaxy, and only by our collective force of will, and Jamie's cat-like reflexes as my P2, did Mario clear that last platform to safety. I think it was one of the few times this year that I got to feel the sublime sensation of shared play; certainly it was one of the most fun.

9. Bioshock - I still haven't played enough of Bioshock to give it a proper review, but I've played more of it than I had when I reviewed it the first time. And I have to admit, there's a lot to like about this game. It deserves a spot on this list just for the absolutely stellar atmosphere and environmental design. As for a favorite moment, well, on several occasions through the game I've experienced a quiet awe as, after clearing an area of zombie-like Splicers, I had a chance to walk around and take it all in. Perhaps my favorite such instance occurs before Splicers even enter the picture when, upon entering the lighthouse at the start of the game, I found a space somehow cavernous and claustrophobic, beautifully and lovingly and richly decorated, yet disquietingly empty. The air was filled by that haunting music, and I felt like I was looking in on something that had once been grand, and was forsaken.

8. Trauma Center: Second Opinion - I don't know why I love Trauma Center the way I do - it's much too hard for me, and that usually turns me off right out of the gate. But there's something entrancing about it, especially at the early levels, when I know that I can succeed as long as I don't screw up, and that knowledge makes me work furiously to finish before the patient flatlines. My favorite moment comes when Derek shouts, in one of the only bits of voice acting in the whole game, "I will save this patient!" It's cheesy, maybe, but the character's frank determination is infectious. And it's refreshing to play a game where success involves saving lives, rather than taking them.

7. Sam & Max: Season One - I was vaguely aware of Sam & Max, as a franchise and as a modern episodic game, before I picked up Season One this summer. I didn't realize that I would get quite such a kick out of it. After too long, this was my return to adventure gaming, and it was easy to remember why I loved the genre. The games are witty and clever but simple; the lack of complex or abstract puzzles puts the focus squarely on the story, which is fun and funny and nicely compact. Playing six 2 to 3 hour games made me realize that, while marathon games like Oblivion have their place, short games can be an incredible joy. My favorite moment was getting thrown into an old-school text adventure in the episode Reality 2.0. I'm just that much of a geek.

6. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass - You may remember that I was a little skeptical about Phantom Hourglass in the days leading up to its release. Drawing a path for your boomerang would be cool, no questions asked, but the whole concept of drawing on your map seemed a little gimmicky to me, and I was afraid it would bring down the whole game. Boy, was I mistaken. Phantom Hourglass is fun, although due to the onslaught of games this holiday season I haven't gotten to play as much as I'd have liked, but my favorite part by far was the dawning realization that I had seriously underestimated how developers could use that little gimmick to add innovation and depth to the play mechanics. For as many times as I've talked about data as content and information as currency, I had to play the game to understand how well treating information as a prize could work.

5. Once Upon a Time - I played Once Upon a Time for the first time during the week after Christmas, with my sister, while we were snowed in up in the mountains. I was extremely pleased to see how simple the game is, and how much fun it was to play. It falls into an odd and delightful cooperative-competitive category, where each player is ostensibly trying to win in a zero-sum fashion, but really everybody's goal is just to keep the story going. My favorite moment was when Captain Bart, the king-cum-pirate, instructed his lover to poison the kindly old woman who had cooked them nothing but potatoes every day. That's the kind of plot twist you just don't see in many of your commercial games.

4. Elite Beat Agents - Rhythm games have always held a strange appeal to me. I'm terrible at them, which is what makes it so strange. Also, I tend to get bored relatively quickly. I have a Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix mat gathering dust from the brief period when I was bursting with excitement about that game. Ditto the bongos from Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. In fact, the only rhythm game that has stayed consistently fun since the time I got it is Guitar Hero II, which I guess is what I love so much about Guitar Hero. I got tired of Elite Beat Agents pretty quickly, too, but damn was that game fantastic while I was playing it. I absolutely love the idea of people being able to overcome any problem with a little luck, perseverance, and the support of a team of snazzy male cheerleaders dancing to pop hits. The wonderful, cheery absurdity of the story was like, well, music to me. Favorite moment: Cheering on a parrot in a scuba helmet to the tune of Y.M.C.A. Also, the phrase "Agents are GO!"

3. Mass Effect - Mass Effect was, by far, my most anticipated game of the year. And it lived up to it's promise as a worthy successor to Knights of the Old Republic, which is one of my favorite games of all time. Certainly, the game isn't perfect, but most of its problems boil down to the fact that some of the secondary systems aren't as well designed or polished as the rest of the game. In other words, it's important to continually stress how not-perfect the game is because it's really so damn good. As with KOTOR before it, I'm partial to the romantic subplot in Mass Effect. I guess that my favorite moment of the game was when I ultimately turned down Kaiden's advances in favor of pursuing Liara. I'm used to any romance in a game like this being linear, if optional. Having to make a choice, and follow through with it by explicitly rejecting a character that I had rather gotten to like over the course of the game, was emotionally potent, especially because the characters and situations were so well presented.

2. The Baron - The Baron deserves a proper review, and I'm still planning to give it one eventually. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, this is a work of interactive fiction that I found through the Play This Thing! blog last summer. It's a cyclical game, meant to be played more than once, and on the first play-through it's a good example of what the form brings to the table. The game is structured as a short series of encounters, where the overall organization is almost entirely linear, but there are many ways to navigate each individual encounter. The text interface makes me feel more of a sense of freedom in my interaction with the world, and it's worth playing the game just to remember what we lose by using graphical interface systems. There's a moment of realization at the end of the game, however, that imbues the whole experience with an additional layer of meaning. Maybe because I didn't really see it coming, or maybe because of the subject matter of the game, this was one of the most powerful moments I've ever experienced in gaming.

1. Portal - Come on, what's not to love about Portal? I can't even count all the favorite moments that came out of this game: perfecting the double-fling, discovering the graffito-ridden back rooms, Jonathan Coulton's song, reading the history of Aperture Science on aperturescience.com, the cake... Clearly I'm obsessed, but Portal is in many ways a masterpiece of a game. If I have to pick just one favorite moment, though, it's the line, "There was even going to be a party for you. A big party that all your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend the companion cube. Of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him."

Portal could be the best game of the year. I'm just going to put that out there right now. I know, I know; there's a lot coming out in the next two months that I'm pretty excited about. But even so. I'm pretty sure it's head and shoulders above anything that's come out so far, which is saying a hell of a lot. Better than Guitar Hero II; better than Phantom Hourglass; better than Halo 3; and speaking confidently without having played it, better than Bioshock. (Anything I'm overlooking?) These are all fantastic games, but I'm absolutely in love with Portal.

The game's best quality, without question, is its spectacular sense of humor. This is a pervasive aspect of the environment, and although it's strictly secondary to the gameplay (primarily taking the form of the unmistakable modulated voice-over you'll recognize from the advertising, as well as signage and graffiti decorating the game's levels) it absolutely makes the game. The game actually has a surprisingly varied emotional score - surprising for a puzzle game, certainly - with a fair bit of pathos thrown in, like the humor, almost off-handedly. The bit about the Weighted Companion Cube is brilliant. All of this contributes to the game's sense of style, which is excellent. Not the same caliber as Bioshock's, perhaps, but still very well done.

As for the gameplay itself, all of the fears I had about the game being more of a platformer than a puzzle game proved completely unfounded. Certainly there is an element of platforming, but that is almost never the focus of the game. There are threatening elements, but they exist primarily in service to the art direction; there's just enough to create a sense of danger, without ever making the player feel like they're fighting against the level designer. The levels are actually put together to be quite forgiving (the thing that really assuaged my worries is that the character doesn't take falling damage), which fits the general puzzles-first philosophy: the hard part is always figuring out what you have to do and how to make it work; once you have a solution, you might have to practice a couple times to get it right, but you don't have to worry too much about the execution. And when you do trip up on something, well, there are two things that come to your rescue: one, the game is generous with its save points, so dying has a relatively low cost; and two, the nature of the portals means that if you fall from the area you want to be in to an area you've already completed, nine times out of ten there's still a portal open up where you want to be, so getting back is trivial.

Let me say a couple things about the portals, while I'm at it. They're great. It's incredible how Valve could take a physics-based puzzle game, add a set of completely nonphysical interactions, and make the whole thing feel so damn intuitive. Partially it's the way they've put together the physics of the portals - the first time you see yourself through a portal across the room, or watch a cube bobbing up and down between two adjacent portals in the floor, you'll be amazed at how natural it seems. Mostly, though, it's a testament to the level design and difficulty progression, of which I have never seen the like. The game is divided into nineteen parts, but really it's seventeen tutorial levels, one practice level, and then the game proper. Each tutorial level teaches you something new - introducing you to an aspect of the environment or a skill - but almost all of it is taught by discovery. That is, unlike every other game I've ever played a tutorial level for, you are never explicitly told how to interact with the environment. The things you're supposed to learn aren't spelled out for you. That might sound intimidating, but it's done so skillfully, you hardly notice it. The pedagogical goal for each tutorial levels is so simple that it's easy to figure it out, but when you start using them all in combination it's breathtaking.

I'm also a big fan of some things that are more indirectly related to the game. The theme song, which plays in full over the credits, it by one of my all-time favorite artists and is one of his best. (If you're looking for the song, "Still Alive," there are several YouTube videos that include it, or you can find just the mp3. But be specifically warned, the song contains some spoilers, and you're really better off playing the game first.) There's an Aperture Science website that was launched a while ago as part of the marketing for the game (type "login", any username, with the password "portal" to apply to be a test subject, which is fun) but there's actually some extra content there for anyone who pays close attention in the game. (Again, watch out for spoilers on the website. If you really want to see it, use the username CJOHNSON and password TIER3 and you can read a history of Aperture Science. Spoilsport.) And, not least by any stretch, the Weighted Companion Cube has turned into a whole thing, which I could not be more pleased about. Rock, Paper, Shotgun, also excited, has been doing a fantastic job keeping track of it. They're reporting that Valve is planning to release a plush WCC sometime before Christmas, which will go great with my new wallpaper.

I probably don't need to gush any more, so I'll wrap up. In summary: if you inhabit space, have emotions, and if you have any interest in puzzle games at all, go play Portal right now. I can't personally vouch for any of the rest of the Orange Box yet, because I physically could not tear myself away from this game, but basically I can't imagine that you'd be disappointed with your purchase.

I was playing God of War this weekend; I've been playing quite a lot of it lately, because I'm finding it a very interesting and radically different experience, and I want to get through it before I'm overwhelmed by the fall lineup. I'll post some general thoughts on the game a little later, but the sections where the gameplay flips from brawler to platformer have gotten me thinking about death. On two occasions yesterday I played through an extremely short segment of the game between twenty and thirty times, trying to get past difficult platforming challenges, which unlike the rest of the game are unforgiving - a relatively minor misstep kills the player character - and do not scale well in difficulty. Kindly, God of War autosaves the player's progress just before these sections of the game, so the cost of dying is relatively low. Still, repeating the same actions twenty times - and being met, every time, with the words "You Are Dead" thrown up on the screen in blood red - pushed me to the limits of my patience. And rather suddenly I realized that I had entirely lost emotional connection with the game.

The issue of player character death is one of the most fundamental in modern game design - perhaps because modern games are so disproportionately focused on violence and death. In more general terms, the death of a player character can be equated to a game state from which it is not possible to complete the game. Placing fourth in Mario Kart is not not equivalent to dying, since it doesn't prevent you from completing the race; scoring too low in Elite Beat Agents is more or less equivalent to dying, because it prevents the player from continuing the game to completion. Whether or not it literally takes the form of a character's death, the way a game handles this sort of state has significant consequences on the narrative of the game. Some of these consequences are positive, and some are negative.

First of all, death is a great motivator. Competitive games have failure states built into them, providing a player with a clear goal ("win" or, alternatively for some games, "don't lose") and continual motivation to progress. Non-competitive games lack such an inherent motivator unless there is a constant threat of imminent failure. Of course, there are other ways to motivate players. The games of the Monkey Island series are prime examples of design that doesn't include the concept of character death or an equivalent failure state, and keeps the player motivated by rewarding progress with humor. Death is also a powerful narrative tool. The notion that the player character is risking their own life in order to achieve a goal amplifies the significance of their actions and can increase the player's emotional involvement. Some party-based RPGs, such as Knights of the Old Republic or Final Fantasy VII, even add emotional drama to the plot by using the death of a member of the party with narrative effect.

But the inclusion of player character death can also have negative consequences on the narrative, especially if it is implemented thoughtlessly. A character's death frequently breaks the continuity of the game, and triggers an extra layer of user interface (like God of War's "You Are Dead" screen) that prompts the player to try again. Trying again generally means restoring an earlier gamestate saved at an explicit or implicit savepoint - frequently at the beginning of the level or just before a particularly difficult section. The act of restoring the game's state effectively erases any progress the player had made past the savepoint, and implicitly asks the player to pretend, for narrative purposes, that the experience never happened. This disrupts the player's experience and forces them, to some extent, to disengage from the story, frequently at a moment when emotional engagement is especially high. If the cost of dying is low and it happens infrequently, then this disruption may be easy to ignore, but the effects are multiplied as the player grows frustrated.

I think it's fair to say that most games include some sort of death-like design element somewhere along traditional lines. But it's worthwhile to consider the many games that have taken a different tack, finding alternative ways to motivate the player. The new episodes of Sam & Max follow the same paradigm as the Monkey Island games, rewarding progress with humor. Puzzle Quest utilizes the inherent motivation of leveling by making level progression relatively rapid and providing a magic system that encourages the player to try out different play strategies. Animal Crossing relies on heavily on the collecting paradigm, and also draws upon social relationships to inspire the player to continue playing.

One of the most interesting examples of games that break from the traditional paradigm is Prey, in which player character death is presented in familiar terms, but doesn't actually represent a failure state or necessitate a break in narrative continuity. Contrast this which Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, which attempts to mitigate the disruptive effects of death by integrating a narrative segue. In Prince of Persia, death still represents a failure state, and the game returns to a previous state and the player is required to try again. Myst is another extremely interesting example, in which the failure state can only be reached at one specific point in the game; throughout the rest of the game, there is no concept of death or death-like failure. In this game, exploration, imagery and story are the primary motivators, and death is used only for dramatic purposes.

I'm of the opinion that the games that don't include this sort of failure state tend to give the player a smoother and more accessible narrative experience. Of course, the issue whether or not to include player character death in a game, and how to handle it if it is included, depends entirely on the context of the game. God of War, while it does have a story and certainly puts a lot of energy into creating an absorbing narrative experience, is at heart an action-oriented, ultra-violent brawler. Death is an important aspect of the game and the traditional model is entirely appropriate. There are only a few segments where I feel the narrative disruption becomes especially problematic. The traditional model of death and failure is valid in many cases, but it's important for designers to recognize that it isn't universally implemented, nor is it universally applicable. These sorts of examples remind us that there are alternative ways to structure story, player motivation and gameplay, when death is not desirable.