So, it’s happened again. You goofed. You’re on your back looking at a black screen telling you words you already know.
You’re dead, and the way you feel about it has everything to do with the game that killed you. If it was NetHack, you’re scheming about how to get past that part next time. If it was Team Fortress 2, you’re hungering for revenge. If it was Diablo III, you’re probably already typing your complaint on the Blizzard forums.
What separates the bad deaths from the good? Some deaths remind us that we’re sitting, staring at a screen, and playing a game that doesn’t seem to like us very much. Some, though, make us feel like storybook heroes. Let’s looks at four ways games can make death feel great.
1. Organic Damage
Organic damage is meant in the most literal way possible. Damage. To your organs.
For the readers out there who aren’t Batman (I know we have one or two), real fights don’t mete out pain in discrete arithmetic hit point packages. Humans avoid damage so desperately because pain carries consequences. A blow to the head can cause blurry vision for the rest of the fight; a fall might mean shattered bones.
Doing it Right: Faster Than Light
Since we’re wired to expect consequences, organic damage makes game death frighteningly real. No game drives this home better than Faster than Light. FTL is more-or-less The Oregon Trail in space. Your ship lives and dies on its vital systems. If your weapons die, you’ll be harmless until they’re repaired by your crew. If your Oxygen is knocked out, your crew will be distracted from their jobs by their inevitable asphyxiation.
Dying in FTL is so good because you can feel it coming. The game never says “oops, your life dipped below 1, guess you’re dead.” Instead, you’re treated to the panicked horror-show of everything you’ve built blowing up piece by piece. Whether you scrape through on a thread or go out in a blaze of glory, you feel like something huge just happened, and you want more.
Doing it Badly: Spiral Knights
Even disregarding its spiteful pricing system Spiral Knights is an exemplary failure in terms of death in games. Put simply, Spiral Knights gives a hurt player no feedback that they’re at death’s door. Countless times, I and co-op friends let out an exasperated “what?!” after dying. Without some feedback – like that beeping in Zelda or the screen-reddening in Call of Duty – we were caught totally by surprise.
Organic Damage is so powerful because it goes one step beyond that normal feedback. Beyond just seeing or hearing your impending doom, you feel it through your rapidly closing options.
2. Panic Buttons
Everyone wants a second chance. Allowing a player to say “no, I don’t die now” just once can make even the most flailing newbie feel like they have control over their demise.
Doing it Right: League of Legends
No game puts panic buttons front-and-center like League of Legends. In a game where every kill can be a game-changing swing, a spell that puts off death is at a premium, no matter how many times it gets nerfed. LoL’s teleporting panic button, flash, is so central to gameplay that teammates routinely call out when it’s been used, announcing that an enemy is vulnerable as long as their flash is on cooldown.
Doing it Badly: Munchkin
Munchkin, a spoof of traditional tabletop RPGs, makes players race to reach level 10. As a player, you get a sick twisted subversion of a panic button. You get cards that prevent players from gaining levels.
Instead of saying “no, I don’t die now,” these cards effectively say “no, you don’t win now.” Getting smacked with these cards feels horrible. You’re denied the thing you’ve been chasing all game long. Munchkin does particularly badly because these “no, you don’t win” cards make up such a huge proportion of the cards in the game. Winning Munchkin isn’t about engineering a perfect victory, it’s about waiting (and waiting, and waiting) until your opponents no longer have the cards to stop you.
Panic buttons succeed when they give a losing player a way back into the game. “catch-up” mechanics are very emotionally positive, especially for newer players. See more on catch-up mechanics here.
3. Player Responsibility
The worst feeling in gaming (other than BSOD/RROD/YLOD) is that you’ve died and there was nothing you could do. A fast, random death is awful. A fast, random death that you could have escaped if you’d only leveled up your warp drive? That’s compelling, and demands you go in for round number two.
Doing it Right: Magic: The Gathering
Trading Card Games in general have a leg-up on player responsibility, since players build a fully-customizable deck before play even begins. With its 19 years of competitive play, however, Magic stands alone as a game where you can outplay your opponents before the game even begins.
Playing the metagame – that is, building a deck to beat decks you expect your opponent to bring – is a primary skill in competitive Magic. In the 2005 Magic World Championship, the Japanese player Kasuhiro Mori re-defined metagame play. He anticipated that one particular deck, which we’ll call “Rock,” would be massively popular, so he build his own “Paper” deck to counter it. His planning went further: he expected that decks similar to “Paper” would dominate the first half of the tournament, so Mori added cards to give him an edge over other “Paper” decks.
“Via this transformational sideboard in particular, Katsu knocked the age-old metagaming narrative on its ear.
“On Day One we will cover the ‘rock’… but on Day Two, we shall become ‘scissors.’”
-Mike Flores, A History Lesson: The Best Selesnya
Doing it Badly: Diablo III
Player responsibility only counts if the game encourages the player to want to be responsible. By asking players to work with six skill slots, Diablo 3 makes players choose between defense and offense. In a game all about loot-per-minute, offense tends to win. When death happens, it’s ludicrously quick and almost always inspires a “there was nothing I could have done” response.
Responsibility is all about giving the player a feeling of control. That feeling can come from tight controls (Super Meat Boy, Dark Souls), strategic planning (Starcraft, The Oregon Trail), and elements that can be predicted with experience (World of Warcraft raid bosses).
4. Story-Worthiness
Some games just kill you deader than others. Sure, not every game can kill you with a sudden vampiric uprising or a self-summoned nightmare god, but the ones that do, you remember.
Doing it Right: Dwarf Fortress
There’s a word in the Dwarf Fortress community that has weight here: “spiral.” When one Dwarf (who we’ll call Urist) gets so angry that he kills another Dwarf’s (we’ll call him McHammer) family, you’ve entered a spiral. From there, McHammer’s mood drops, and his own rampage incites the survivors of two additional families. Soon, your entire fortress is in riot.
Dwarf Fortress’s spirals are so special because of the many ways they can go. What if, during McHammer’s war, an explosion in cat population threatens your space and food stocks? What if goblins pick that moment to lay siege to your embattled halls? What if the levees break and you must somehow pull your bitter minions together to save themselves from the flood?
For a grander perspective on Dwarf Fortress deaths, see Boatmurdered, the internet’s most famous example of a fortress death gone terribly terribly right.
Doing it Badly: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (DOS)
Really, any game where death is cheap – and not really your fault – could go here. These are games with bad controls, unfair challenges, or incomplete instructions. When you should be reveling in the events that led to your death, you’re stuck trying to make sense of what happened.
I love using Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an example, however, because it goes that extra distance to frustrate and alienate its players. See that picture (above)? It’s from the DOS version of TMNT. That jump (right picture) is actually impossible. That’s right, no one has ever beaten tmnt (dos) without cheating. this shines light on the importance of fundamentals. if the game itself is a tragedy, how can your tale of martyrdom hope to take center stage?
Special Mention
Doing it all Right: NetHack
NetHack, a dungeon-crawler in the vein of the first Diablo, exemplifies everything that is right in game death. To beat NetHack, you must do a thousand things right. Don’t look at the gorgon. Do identify the potion before drinking it. Don’t eat meat you’ve been carrying for days. You’ll die countless times trying to pass each test. However, NetHack succeeds where similarly difficult games fail by making sure you know exactly why you died, bringing you back quickly, and rewarding you for overcoming obstacles that bested you earlier. It doesn’t hurt that NetHack boasts a creative suite of panic buttons. Whether you’re randomly teleporting to another dungeon area or blasting a hole in the floor to fall to safety, you’re not dying, and that’s what counts.
Actually, debate rages over whether it’s even possible to beat NetHack without consulting its excellent wiki. Maybe you’ll be the first.
Click here to try NetHack. it’s free.
Wrapping Up
Game deaths come in many forms, and not all can (or should) have all the elements above. However, a death should offer some reason for the player to come back and try again. The player should take something away from the death, be it a story, some bit of insight, or simply a failure well-deserved.
