My Fear of Immortality
Oh my god, I’m hurt, there’s no way out, and they’re closing in… I think I’m going to die. Oh well, I’ll just hit restart.
That’s how I feel when I play Uncharted, when I play Call of Duty, or Assassin’s Creed or almost every major game released this generation. Games are easy — even most “hard” games are easy. Sure, you might have to restart a few times if there’s a particularly tough baddie, but eventually you’ll win. There’s no emotional attachment to your life, and your death has no meaning, as a restart is just one click away. The only real hassle is that you have to replay a small section of the game.
Perhaps I’m being old fashioned, but I miss the days where your death actually meant something; it meant inserting another coin or “oh damn, only one life left before the whole game is over.” You took your steps carefully, you turned corners slowly, you cared. Limited lives meant that your life had a worth, each one was precious gift from the developer who set you a challenge that only a few mere mortals could overcome. I was proud to tell people I completed those games, that I had done what was actually an accomplishment, rather than simply replaying tough levels until an inevitable victory.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.
― Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer.
Sure, there are some games that still have a limited life policy, and the Souls ‘series’ has provided gamers with some truly difficult titles, but overall games have become easier as the years have progressed. I expected more of a challenge as I got older, like how I play with harder games of trivial pursuit, how I play chess at a higher level. Instead, as video games have become increasingly mainstream, they have become increasingly easy, little more than on-the-rail experiences where you just have to press X at the necessary point.
But this genre has also been home to the next evolutionary step in the value of game life, with titles like Heavy Rain weaving complicated stories where death isn’t the end, but simply a key point in an ongoing narrative. It’s a bit much to ask this for all games due to the sheer scale and complications of a branching narrative, but it is sad to see the decline of harder games with a limited life system. It’s understandable that publishers don’t want to fund extra-hard games which are inaccessible to the majority of players, but is it isn’t too demanding to want some real difficulty with the ‘hard mode’ on games, rather than less health and weaker bullets?
The success of the Souls games showed that some gamers do actually look for titles that test your true limits, but do you agree that games are getting easier, that the value of game-life is just too meaningless? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
13 Responses to “My Fear of Immortality”
I love everything about this. I’m sure we could talk for hours about this kind of subject and how it’s influence game design, but this is a nice summary. Great work Seb.
I’m not going to post a long comment due to time constraints, but I would like to say that I see a favorable change going on at PSLS in terms of subject matter and maturity in the content of articles. As an adult, I appreciate thoughtful discourse. If you guys could weed out the profanity that sometimes pops up by the writers on the site, you would really be setting an example for the competition. Leave the swearing to the little kids populating the talk backs. “Profanity is the crutch of a conversational cripple.” Beyond that, great job.
totally agree mr moss
I can see and appreciate what you’re getting at, but as a gamer for over 30 years, I’d have to say that the lack of ‘lives’ is a welcome change. Yes, limited lives present more of a challenge, but growing up, I lost count of the number of games I never completed because the constant need to restart from the beginning just became too frustrating.
The biggest problem I used to find was that you didn’t have the chance to devise a strategy to deal with particularly tough levels or bosses, simply because once you lost 3 lives you had to go right back to the beginning – so you had to start fresh in more ways than one. And that was IF you got back to that point again.
The last thing developers want today, given that games cost so much to make, is for people to be turned off of their games because of what would (probably) be seen by many as ‘excessive and unnecessary’ difficulty. There have been enough complaints about the bosses in Deus Ex HR, and that’s even with the ability to keep retrying!
The reputation of the Souls games is a good example. As good as they undoubtedly are, how many people DIDN’T buy those games because of the stories of the difficulty level which preceded them? Me for one. I’ve nothing against a truly challenging game, but what I don’t like is the thought of having to re-play hours of a game because one character is particularly hard to kill and took me by surprise. It used to be that I found that kind of thing frustrating; these days, I simply don’t have the time (or, frankly, the desire) to put up with that.
Oh, and just for TheMadGreek – youtube.com/watch?v=s_osQvkeNRM
I played ‘hard as nails’ games in my PS1 & PS2 days but now i really can’t be bothered being stuck on a game because it is to hard :-/
+ COD:MW3 very hard mode was easy LoL Uncharted 1′s crushing mode made me hate that game in the end(but U3′s crushing mode seemed a bit easier tho)
I just like to play games on normal mode & just enjoy them without crying:D
+ i have missed out on a lot of Platinum Trophies because i can’t be assed doing the hard modes. Oh well.
I noticed that about Uncharted 3′s crushing too. I’m not done with it, but it seems no harder than “hard” and only a little bit harder than “normal.” I’m playing through it at about the same pace as I played through normal and hard.
Man, I was just talking to a few friends about this very subject last night in a Hangout on G+. I miss the games that were that hardcore. However, at the same time, I don’t have that kind of time to commit to a game like that anymore. As much as I miss that style of game, I’d just end up getting frustrated and moving on to another game. Heavy Rain was an awesome example about how things should be done though. I loved the fact that even if someone died, the story would just move on, taking that into account. More games like that would be interesting, but very hard to do.
Games are definitely “easier” today than they were back in the day. I’ve already played through Uncharted 3 on normal and hard and I’m about halfway through it on “crushing.” Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be that big a leap even from normal to crushing. I think games needed to be harder back in the day because they were so much shorter. Super Mario Brothers only had 8 levels. If they made it too easy you could blow through it in no time.
On the other hand, if they implemented the concept of “lives” in today’s games, no one would ever finish a game. Imagine playing through 40 hours of a game and losing your last life and having to start all over. I would take that game to my nearest game store for a trade-in ASAP. I think you trade some difficulty for longer games with more in-depth stories. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some insanely difficult games out there though. God of War III made me pull my hair out. I only got about halfway through before I sold it. Cal me a quitter if you want. I just don’t have that kind of patience.
it’s not right to say that gaming has gotten easier, because that’s not true. for instance, my mom could play NES games, but there’s no way in hell she could play UC3. it’s more fair to say that gaming has evolved.
Doesn’t a lot of that have to do more with how much more complex UC3 is than an NES game? That’s not speaking to the difficulty of the game. More the complexity of today’s games as compared to the days of the NES. I can play NES games too but I’ve never beaten Super Mario. I think if older people would take the time to learn the complexities of longer, more involved games that use more than A button, B button, and a D-pad, they would see that a lot of today’s games are much more forgiving by comparison.
I remember the good ol days of the nes. Where megaman, castlevania and ninja gaiden truly punished you if you died.
I was just talking to my uncle about this today. I was talking about Skyrim and how I shut off the autosaving feature because it kept crashing my system. Although not exactly like having a limited amount of lives before I was forced to start the entire game over, it forced me to slow down in the game and strategize my battles instead of running full steam at a dragon. (This is because I tend to forget to manually save, so it is like I am playing large sections of the game in a single life).
I do miss games that forced you to go back entire “chapters” or restart from the very beginning….happy to hear I am not the only one.
I tried to play some old style games last year and hated all of it. I have being gaming since the Atari and I simple can’t go back to have three lives. Today I play more for the enjoyment of the story and not for the challenge. Imagine having to start a game like Assasins Creed after spending ten hours of gameplay and because you missed a jump you died?
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