Personally, I’ve always considered the learn by dying approach to be quite an effective teaching method. You throw a ball out into the middle of a busy road and ask the annoying little boy who lives next door to retrieve it for you, and he learns not to do it again because he is now dead. Learning occurs far quicker when the teaching material elicits emotion because the information becomes grounded in a meaningful context.
I am of course referring to a game design feature when I use the term ‘learn by dying’, the feature that originated in traditional arcade games such as Space Invaders and Missile Command, but went on to feature in certain action and/or adventure games such as those in Oddworld Inhabitants’ Oddworld series. However, the pervasive notion of game accessibility has caused this design feature to recently come under fire from developers. Players should not be forced to learn the mechanics of a game through being ‘punished’ by failure, or so the argument goes.
There certainly exist fundamental laws of game accessibility, models implicating so much advantage that to ignore them means almost certain commercial suicide; tutorial modes, redefining controls, difficulty level adjustment, the provision of 3D audio cues, and so forth. But designing a game so that your avatar is unable to die is, to me, ludicrous.
Of course, the example I began this blog with is purely fictional and such an affair would illicit entirely impractical learning conditions due to its whole ‘being dead’ element. But in games, we cannot die. We are permitted the ability to attempt success as many times as we like. So, teaching players the algorithms governing success in a game world via avatar death is not the same as doing so in the real world. Why, then, is it the modern condition of videogames to increasingly restrict a player learning the mechanics of a game in this way? I ask you, where on Earth is the fun in that?
Take the latest Prince of Persia game as an example. The Prince is unable to die when falling from a platform because his accompanying partner Elika rescues him. It is noteworthy that this game was received negatively by gamers due to the absence of sufficiently challenging gameplay.
There are certainly better and worse ways to go about employing this mechanic. It’s no good having the player-character die under ill-defined conditions, for example. The death must work to help define a goal in some way. The player must understand what it is they did wrong and what they must now do in order to succeed. Abe’s Odyssey is a fantastic semi-modern game that is notorious for its level of difficulty. Avatar death is central to the learning process. At several points, the player-character is required to save fellow Mudokons (the alien breed of the protagonist, Abe) by pulling a lever which shuts off an electrical barrier. However, if you pull the wrong lever, you will kill yourself. It is only by trial and error that you learn the nature of the two levers. “Wow, what a conniving little developer” you mutter to yourself as your sorry Mudokon ass is obliterated by the thriving electricity.
Games that involve a high amount of avatar-death, such as Abe’s Oddysee, keep your feelings of satisfaction, excitement, frustration and disappointment in a constant state of flux. As a result, you come away from the experience feeling exhilarated. Regardless, however, the majority of modern game design textbooks will actually talk to you as if you are some kind of dirty, perverted deviant to want to make the player die once in a while (first-person shooters aside). It will actually teach you that it’s wrong to design games in this way, that it is unfairly penalising that poor, naive little player who simply wanted to engage with your project. Will somebody please, for heaven’s sake, give that player some frikkin’ respect?
Bad UI design frustrates me. Poorly implemented difficulty adjustment frustrates me. Defining a challenge by initially causing me to fail, however, excites me. I want to feel the fear that accompanies the possibility of death. I want to feel the thrill of mastering a jump that has laid claim to my avatar several times over.
So, I say to all of you game designers out there: challenge me, taunt me, hurt me. It’s what I’ve come to you for.
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