Inexorable Loss vs Cut Scene Death
Like many others, I recently finished playing Passage, a great lifetime-in-5-minutes game by Jason Rohrer. If you haven't played it yet, follow the links and do so. It's 5 minutes and you'll probably learn a lot more from playing it than reading this blog. Feel free to read the artist statement from the download page too.
Playing this game brought me back to the discussion of whether or not games can make you cry. Back to the Aeris cut scene and talk of Floyd the robot. Many people believe that the Aeirs scene in FF VII was cheap, because they used a cut-scene to deliver the killing blow to the beloved character. They believe that all the emotional impact was built up through traditional non-interactive media, and that the tragic event happened outside the game world.
The problem with interactive tragedy then rears its head. We can't have a loss that the player can actively prevent, because he will inevitably restart the game from his last save and play until he keeps said event from occurring. On the other hand, taking control from the player is cheap, and feels like cheating.
Passage introduces the concept of inexorable demise. If you decide to take the love of your life on the journey with you, she will grow old alongside you and eventually die. You too will die, but many seconds after she does. The first time this happens, it's a shock. One minute she's there with you, the next she's gone, just a cold stone in the ground to mark her passing. I was taken aback by this and definitely felt sad. The second play-through is different though. Instead of shock at the end, you play the whole game with this pall of dread looming over you. You know you're going to die. You also know that she will die. It then becomes about the time you spend together and what you plan to do with it (Or you can spare her by choosing solitude, her existence frozen in your memory as a youthful ghost on the horizon).
I think there are a lot of possibilities here for gameplay in a more complicated setting. Not saying that Passage needs stuff tacked on to be good by any means. It's an excellent and elegant game distilling the essence of mortality and inviting the player to fill in a lot of the narrative and emotional details. I think this inevitability of loss could be incorporated in a larger game to give it emotional impact while taking away the desire for the player to reload the last save to avoid the tragedy.
A good argument against this idea is that it takes away control from the player as much as a cut scene, and could lead to apathy in the face of an insurmountable obstacle. So perhaps I've come full circle.
Playing this game brought me back to the discussion of whether or not games can make you cry. Back to the Aeris cut scene and talk of Floyd the robot. Many people believe that the Aeirs scene in FF VII was cheap, because they used a cut-scene to deliver the killing blow to the beloved character. They believe that all the emotional impact was built up through traditional non-interactive media, and that the tragic event happened outside the game world.
The problem with interactive tragedy then rears its head. We can't have a loss that the player can actively prevent, because he will inevitably restart the game from his last save and play until he keeps said event from occurring. On the other hand, taking control from the player is cheap, and feels like cheating.
Passage introduces the concept of inexorable demise. If you decide to take the love of your life on the journey with you, she will grow old alongside you and eventually die. You too will die, but many seconds after she does. The first time this happens, it's a shock. One minute she's there with you, the next she's gone, just a cold stone in the ground to mark her passing. I was taken aback by this and definitely felt sad. The second play-through is different though. Instead of shock at the end, you play the whole game with this pall of dread looming over you. You know you're going to die. You also know that she will die. It then becomes about the time you spend together and what you plan to do with it (Or you can spare her by choosing solitude, her existence frozen in your memory as a youthful ghost on the horizon).
I think there are a lot of possibilities here for gameplay in a more complicated setting. Not saying that Passage needs stuff tacked on to be good by any means. It's an excellent and elegant game distilling the essence of mortality and inviting the player to fill in a lot of the narrative and emotional details. I think this inevitability of loss could be incorporated in a larger game to give it emotional impact while taking away the desire for the player to reload the last save to avoid the tragedy.
A good argument against this idea is that it takes away control from the player as much as a cut scene, and could lead to apathy in the face of an insurmountable obstacle. So perhaps I've come full circle.
Labels: emotion, game design, loss, passage
posted by Rich Wilson at 9:09 PM
1 Comments:
History has trained game players to expect a win, and this is probably the biggest rub. How do we successfully use the pain of loss in a game, when loss equals failure?
Many games have used radical mechanics to shock and startle players, the only pre-requisite being that they teach players the conditions of failure. Can we make a game in which there are no conditions of failure, merely branches of the storyline and event flow? In this case, assuming the player has been taught the language of the game, they may accept the pain of the moment and continue on, knowing it's a part of the ruleset.
This would also entail a real-time save feature that takes stop-and-start control out of the player's hands, much like an MMO does. When the wife dies, the player is forced to do the same thing that a character in a movie or novel would -- get over it and move on. Without such a save feature, they'll do the same thing I did in the Choose Your Own Adventure books, and keep their fingers in the moment of choice, ready to flip back for a do-over when they get run over by a train.
If we can teach players to accept a different set of mechanics and rules -- some that run very counter to the standards they've come to accept -- we can probably pull off this type of impactful (and perhaps artistic?) delivery in the interactive environment.
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