Thaumaturge
05-06-2008, 03:56 AM
Warning: Very long post. ^^;;;;
At the moment I don't have a game idea. However, I do have thoughts, and, especially if I get feedback on these thoughts (which I would appreciate, I believe ^_^) and carry them further, they may direct me towards a game.
I had originally planned to put the following into the Competition 19 thread, but the post was starting to look long, and would be coming directly after another long post, so I thought that it might be better to start a new thread for my thoughts, rather than further clogging that thread, and perhaps allowing people not interested in reading this rather long post to pass over it more easily.
So, onto my thoughts. For the sake of (some vague semblance of) brevity, I'll not recap the last that I had in the Competition 19 thread.
Death has a further function that has occurred to me: it increases or introduces tension. This is, I think, done through two methods, both, essentially, based on fear.
The first is the simple fear of death - if the game succeeds in getting the player to care about or connect with the character, they may come to fear the death of the character.
The second, and perhaps more salient fear, is fear of loss, specifically of something gained. The simplest element that might be list is perhaps progress: by sending the player back to a save point, saved game or the start of a sequence, their progress through the sequence has been lost, and they face repeating it. Much abused in save-point systems, I feel. Other than that, there is loss of gained advantages and bonuses, such as weapons or powers gained, or perhaps bonuses (for example, an RPG might include an XP modifier that increases until you die, upon which it resets).
The trick, then, to eliminating death in a game, is to find replacement fears, or replacement implementations of the above fears.
Perhaps most simply, one might find other ways to send the player back - temporal distortion, portals, vacuum tubes, giant winged horrors from the nether worlds, etc. Similarly, one might find other ways to remove bonuses and equipment (energy fields, mind wipes, giant flying horrors from the nether worlds, etc...).
Including other fears is perhaps more interesting... The question then becomes: what else do human beings commonly fear? There's fear of harm, especially of certain parts of the body (eye damage is quite disturbing, I believe), fear of loss of control, fear of loss of individuality, fear of lack of recognition, and of oblivion. There are also common phobias, such as heights and spiders.
I imagine that the trick would be to not necessarily have these appear, but to threaten the player with them, perhaps only showing them in place of actual death.
Having taken a look at the Wikipedia entry on psychological horror (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_horror), it seems to me that what I'm thinking of is to normal death-inclusive games as a psychological horror movie is to a gore-based movie. I wonder, then, how one might go about building up tension and fear of fearful things just beyond the player's view in a setting in which the player has at least some degree of control...
Of course, psychological horror games exist. Am I just arriving at them then, instead of something new? :/
Perhaps the metaphor of movies will help. Instead of an action movie, in which the hero is worried about being shot, or a psychological horror movie in which the protagonist is afraid of dark and terrible things, I want a movie in which the protagonist is afraid of... what? Loss of something? Love? Partnership? Sanity? Wealth? Autonomy?
Perhaps a game in which it is the player's goal is to avoid some force or being taking control of the player's avatar, perhaps made a little more interesting if combined with the potential loss of sanity on the part of the avatar? (Okay, I like horror. :P)
Perhaps I should think more on movie (or book, for that matter) types, and uses of the sorts of loss (and, perhaps, others) that I mentioned above...
On another track, a perhaps interesting thought is that the idea of death as a bar to progress brought me back to my idea of sending the player through a sequence of worlds, passing through on death, with early death leading to worse results. Of course, this is perhaps less a challenge to the use of death in games than a slightly different expression of it, in which each play-through may be a complete play-through, even if the player dies quickly. An end can always be reached. (In this way it strikes me as being similar to an adventure game with multiple endings, and no death screens. In the place of an adventure game's completion of side-quests or alternate solutions, this game would have the degree of completion of the levels.)
Note that the causes of death needn't be combat, as such, although it amounts to much the same thing, it seems to me.
That's as far as I've gotten thus far, I believe.
At the moment I don't have a game idea. However, I do have thoughts, and, especially if I get feedback on these thoughts (which I would appreciate, I believe ^_^) and carry them further, they may direct me towards a game.
I had originally planned to put the following into the Competition 19 thread, but the post was starting to look long, and would be coming directly after another long post, so I thought that it might be better to start a new thread for my thoughts, rather than further clogging that thread, and perhaps allowing people not interested in reading this rather long post to pass over it more easily.
So, onto my thoughts. For the sake of (some vague semblance of) brevity, I'll not recap the last that I had in the Competition 19 thread.
Death has a further function that has occurred to me: it increases or introduces tension. This is, I think, done through two methods, both, essentially, based on fear.
The first is the simple fear of death - if the game succeeds in getting the player to care about or connect with the character, they may come to fear the death of the character.
The second, and perhaps more salient fear, is fear of loss, specifically of something gained. The simplest element that might be list is perhaps progress: by sending the player back to a save point, saved game or the start of a sequence, their progress through the sequence has been lost, and they face repeating it. Much abused in save-point systems, I feel. Other than that, there is loss of gained advantages and bonuses, such as weapons or powers gained, or perhaps bonuses (for example, an RPG might include an XP modifier that increases until you die, upon which it resets).
The trick, then, to eliminating death in a game, is to find replacement fears, or replacement implementations of the above fears.
Perhaps most simply, one might find other ways to send the player back - temporal distortion, portals, vacuum tubes, giant winged horrors from the nether worlds, etc. Similarly, one might find other ways to remove bonuses and equipment (energy fields, mind wipes, giant flying horrors from the nether worlds, etc...).
Including other fears is perhaps more interesting... The question then becomes: what else do human beings commonly fear? There's fear of harm, especially of certain parts of the body (eye damage is quite disturbing, I believe), fear of loss of control, fear of loss of individuality, fear of lack of recognition, and of oblivion. There are also common phobias, such as heights and spiders.
I imagine that the trick would be to not necessarily have these appear, but to threaten the player with them, perhaps only showing them in place of actual death.
Having taken a look at the Wikipedia entry on psychological horror (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_horror), it seems to me that what I'm thinking of is to normal death-inclusive games as a psychological horror movie is to a gore-based movie. I wonder, then, how one might go about building up tension and fear of fearful things just beyond the player's view in a setting in which the player has at least some degree of control...
Of course, psychological horror games exist. Am I just arriving at them then, instead of something new? :/
Perhaps the metaphor of movies will help. Instead of an action movie, in which the hero is worried about being shot, or a psychological horror movie in which the protagonist is afraid of dark and terrible things, I want a movie in which the protagonist is afraid of... what? Loss of something? Love? Partnership? Sanity? Wealth? Autonomy?
Perhaps a game in which it is the player's goal is to avoid some force or being taking control of the player's avatar, perhaps made a little more interesting if combined with the potential loss of sanity on the part of the avatar? (Okay, I like horror. :P)
Perhaps I should think more on movie (or book, for that matter) types, and uses of the sorts of loss (and, perhaps, others) that I mentioned above...
On another track, a perhaps interesting thought is that the idea of death as a bar to progress brought me back to my idea of sending the player through a sequence of worlds, passing through on death, with early death leading to worse results. Of course, this is perhaps less a challenge to the use of death in games than a slightly different expression of it, in which each play-through may be a complete play-through, even if the player dies quickly. An end can always be reached. (In this way it strikes me as being similar to an adventure game with multiple endings, and no death screens. In the place of an adventure game's completion of side-quests or alternate solutions, this game would have the degree of completion of the levels.)
Note that the causes of death needn't be combat, as such, although it amounts to much the same thing, it seems to me.
That's as far as I've gotten thus far, I believe.