One of the first things you see upon setting foot in Rapture is a Vita-Chamber. No matter how many times you are killed, you are always “reborn” at the closest Vita-Chamber free to continue from where you left off. There are benefits to this approach, but also some validity to the criticism that overly explicitly encourages taking a path of least resistance through the game.
I believe that games should be designed to motivate the player to use the tools at their disposal. Playing BioShock I was aware of the potential to game the system, to chip away at enemies with my wrench and stockpile my resources. I could see this was a valid option but I never actively considered it because the varied ways in which I could use my Weapons, Plasmids and Gene Tonics to alter the environment was reason enough to experiment with several different combinations through the course of the game. Even though all I was doing was killing Splicers (or Big Daddies), the methods I used and the way the combat played out was visually interesting and varied enough to be a motivating factor in itself.
The second criticism of the Vita-Chambers is that they made BioShock “too easy”. Difficulty is a subjective matter, I can understand in a logical sense why not dying can make a game feel easier. Yet in any case if I die I can reload a saved game and continue, the amount of time or resources lost dependant on when I had last saved (Which brings up an interesting theory, that of quick-save usage as a manual difficulty adjustment). In BioShock I found the lost of time resulting from being returned to a Vita-Chamber to be on par with that I’d normally experience playing a similar game and using quick-load, but devoid of the associated cognitive break of a loading screen. I consider the notion that “failure must result in death” as an unnecessary hold over from the arcade era of gaming where player’s were required to spend money to continue.
Vita-Chambers work within the mechanics of BioShock and are a better fit with the overall narrative than a checkpoint or quick-save based system. However there is a side effect of their implementation that does bring up an interesting question.
Why does BioShock feature first aid kits?
2 replies on “One Life To Live.”
I think the concept of death as a staple of gaming is slowly getting eaten away, and while I have numerous problems with the Vita Chambers, I do think it’s a poke in the right direction.
Again, this touches on the nest-egg idea I mentioned. Two issues I noticed are 1) Every time progress is frustratingly difficult to any given player, a certain number of players will at that point stop playing the game (be it rented, borrowed, or boughten), and only a small portion of players will end up having both the skill and patience to complete the game, which would be like 80% of a movie’s audience leaving before the end. 2) in an emotionally charged game where the player’s successes and failures are tangible and permanent and alter the game world, allowing the player to undo mistakes, via either suicide or quickloading, would devalue the whole point of the game.
A solution I’ve thought up is simply making Player Death impossible (as well as the ability to load earlier saves), an extension of the Vita Chambers. If the world itself is a manifestion of some aspect of the player’s mind, it’d have a vested interest in keeping said player alive. The more negative the world (sentient and organic due to player’s failings), the more overt its intervention would be. So if an NPC is about to kill the player, and the player has failed to fight them off, perhaps a creature will happen upon the scene and drag the guy off, though if the player character is already ‘depressed’, and the world organic, maybe a giant mouth just appears out of the wall and eats the NPC. So while the game would technically be ‘easy’, failure would make it less pleasant, and if the player has no way to undo failures, such as say accidentally letting a character they like get killed, then they are forced to continue with those failures. As a bonus, people would be less likely to stop playing the game due to inadequate skills. Just because they didn’t grow up with a keyboard and mouse wouldn’t stop an older person from being capable of experiencing the game, they’d just end up experiencing a ‘different’ game, which would kind of be the point.
My concern with such a system is with the obvious “deus ex machina” of having conflict resolved by the game itself. It’s difficult to maintain a feeling that you actually have some agency over the world if the game is constantly hand holding, ensuring that you can’t make any fatal mistakes.
When it comes to the reasons people abandon games I don’t think death itself is the issue, it’s dying without understanding why, or having an idea as to what you could have done to prevent it. Feeling powerless or ignorant is much more likely to cause players to quit that simply being killed.
I don’t think character death is immediately damaging to a players emotional investment in a game. If you die in Halo or Call of Duty you return to a point just prior to the combat encounter you were in, effectively instantaneously. Even if you die a few times in the same encounter it’s never particularly jarring and once the battle is over it often easy to forget you died at all. It only starts to become irritating after you die dozens of times in the same situation, with no real clue of what you are doing wrong.
A bigger issue is whether allowing players to undo mistakes is really a bad thing? Ideally the game should be able to handle the death of key NPCs and carry on in an effective way recognising the role the player in their death, if any. But if somebody actively chooses to reload a game in order to prevent the death of a particular character haven’t we already made an emotional connection with that player? If they cared enough about that character to want to keep them alive then the emotional investment we are looking for is already there. Even if the point of the game is that “actions have consequences” it still stands because the player choose to try and save another character and the consequences still exist whether he reload and tries again or not.