#6: Healing, losing, and fear-of-death mechanics
You can tell a lot about a game by how it treats you at low health.
In 2017, the video essayist Hbomberguy posted an hour-long defense of Dark Souls 2, the sequel to the legendary action RPG Dark Souls. (I talked about them in my essay about why video game writing sucks). In part, the video defended the game’s healing mechanic.
All sorts of changes were made between the two games, but changes made to the sequel’s healing items — replacing very few powerful items with many weak ones — were by far the most controversial. How controversial? Another essayist, MauLer, replied to Hbomberguy’s one-hour video with a series called “A Measured Response.”
A series. An eight-part series. An eight-part series of videos as long as or longer than the video it replied to. A rubber room with rats. “A Measured Response” critiques every line of the original essay’s script, printing each line on-screen in sequence, color coded to indicate validity and logical rigor.
This isn’t how you do criticism, in my opinion, but what fascinates me is how something as subtle as a change in health regeneration can generate hours of critical discussions, dragouts, replies, and replies to replies.
Emotions run high where healing mechanics are concerned because they exploit our desire to win or lose. Sometimes they exploit us literally. We’ll skin our knees to heal. We’ll pay real money. Healing is unique because it only matters when everything is on the line — and when you’re in it, when a game completely absorbs your focus, it’s hard to know what you stand to lose when your health runs out.
“Hit points” come to us from Prussian war games, trickled into pop culture via Dungeons & Dragons, and mean basically nothing.
See, games with health bars tend to celebrate violence. Video game heroes are riddled with bullets, and pin-cushioned by medieval weaponry, and torched by dragons, and gored by tusks, and struck by lightning, and thrown from the top of the Chrysler Building. They walk away completely fine. We expect our in-game avatars to suffer nauseating amounts of abuse and not complain.
For what it’s worth, this is also true of action movies. When John Wick or John McClane staggers to their feet, we as passive observers get to cheer. In games, since the player is the one staggering to their feet — or staying down — we need an easy way to check what shape we’re in. This is the purpose of hit points: to indicate suffering.
Game developers sometimes obscure this fact with a kind of narrative veil. In the Uncharted series, for example, your health bar represents your luck running out.
Sci-fi games use shields, war games use morale. Even in D&D, hit points code for some vague combo of armor, agility, divine favor and blood volume. So when I say hit points mean basically nothing, I mean that how they’re represented on-screen really doesn’t matter. Video game health is dramatic, not medical. It gives us a middle state between “totally fine” and “totally boned.” To quote D&D co-creator Dave Arneson (by way of Jody Macgregor’s history of hit points, which I will link again because it’s very good), “[Players] didn’t care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn’t want the monster to kill them in one blow.”
Developers conceived of low-health warnings for this exact reason: they’re alarm bells that indicate when every action might be your last. Listen to “Battle Trouble!,” the low health music for Pokémon Black and White. It’s designed to drive tension.
But tension is only one half of drama. Without any hope of bringing yourself back from the brink, low health is just a bummer. Chess has basically no comeback mechanic, and if you ever got hustled by someone who made a Chess.com account before watching The Queen’s Gambit, you know exactly how enjoyable that is. Nothing murders fun like a foregone conclusion.
In games, even when loss seems inevitable, we’re usually compelled to see it through. We want to keep playing. We want any excuse to imagine there’s hope at low health. Because health is the mechanic that, when you run out of it, you don’t get to play anymore. Healing is the mechanic that lets you keep playing.
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In the same way we let movies make us cry, and we let marathons make us hurt, we let games make us struggle. We take up the conditions of the test, and in return we get to toil. We agree to dribble the ball instead of carrying it around, and in return we get the privilege of shooting baskets.
The rule that tells you how to win a game is called its “victory condition.” Score higher than your opponent by the end of the fourth quarter. Capture the king. Defeat Bowser.
Health, on the other hand, does nothing to help you win. It doesn’t matter if you finish the game with one hit point or one hundred. Health is a weird mechanic because it only ever lets you lose. If you imagine that games are about winning, then health is a nuisance.
If you imagine that games are about winning, then nothing is more mystifying than Playfun, an NES-playing algorithm developed by Tom7 in the years before AI got weird and boring. Playfun learned to play Super Mario — and Hudson’s Adventure Island, and Bubble Bobble, and Pac-Man — but when it tried Tetris, the machine was completely inept. It let every block fall in the middle of the screen.
Then something else happened. Instants before Playfun lost its first game of Tetris, it paused. Playfun never unpaused. It decided to spend eternity in the moments just before loss, but never losing, until Tom7 shut the program down.
Why? Tetris has health: the taller your tower, the closer you are to losing. And it has a healing mechanic, letting you clear rows to make space. But it has no victory condition. Tetris is a game you can lose, but not win.
I don’t think Playfun has any kind of mystical sentience. I do think there’s a little Playfun inside all of us that would rather pause than lose. How else do you explain games with no victory condition? How do you justify the risks we take to heal?
Tag is another game you can lose, but not win. It also has an inventive healing mechanic: home base,1 which lets you catch your breath between running around. And it would be really useful here if I had some story about skinning my knee while sliding to home base. Maybe you have a story like that. But tag is usually played outside, which is, uh, incompatible with my childhood.
I did go to arcades from time to time, even though they were pretty retro. Sooner or later you’d play a game — Fantasy, which hit North America in 1982, was the first of these — where when you ran out of lives, a message flashed across the screen. In Fantasy, it read: “To extend play, insert coin and press start button within 10 seconds. If credit remains, press start once again.”
That’s terrible game design! With enough quarters in your pocket, you can “extend play” indefinitely. But as arcade attendance declined and more games implemented this approach — under the more brutalist “insert coins to continue” — it turned out players were willing to spend actual cash to keep playing, just like kids are willing to suffer scrapes and bruises to keep playing a game like tag.
We may say losing doesn’t matter — it’s just a game, after all — and yet we’re willing to harm ourselves out-of-game to preserve ourselves in-game, at least to an extent. It goes back to the basketball thing: all gameplay, but especially healing, is essentially exploitative. We care about not losing, so we give game designers permission to set up obstacles between us and survival. But because we let the game designer get in our heads, assigning us a self to protect, that means designers get to influence us at our weakest.
It’s the same argument you can make against loot boxes and microtransactions in mobile games, which let you pay real money for in-game advantages. If you really care about winning, wouldn’t you invest in victory? Arrangements that take advantage of your absorption in the game world for profit are at best halfway consensual.
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Some of us on the Supernormal team (and I won’t name names, but there’s only one of us) greatly fear death. I don’t know that it’s possible not to. I don’t know that you can inure yourself to it. I’ve seen plenty of deer on the shoulders of roads, and I still can’t believe that something big can be gone. But art has helped me conceptualize all kinds of experiences. It’s taught me to treasrue hope and accept messy endings.
Character deaths in fiction produce real grief. The degree may be different, but the fundamental experience of tragedy is the same. Loss is loss, whichever frame of reference you’re currently experiencing. But the character you lose in a game isn’t just anyone — it’s you. Loss in games is a loss of self.
Narratives help us practice grief and loss. I don’t think it’s crazy to think of games as practicing mortality. I call mechanics that extend play at personal risk — like Fantasy’s quarter-fueled healing system — “fear-of-death mechanics.” They take advantage of our desire to preserve ourselves in the game world. Spill some blood, and you won’t lose.
And, not that this proves anything, but I am a terrible loser. There are plenty of games that no one will play with me anymore, which are coincidentally all the games I’m very bad at.
Other games, though, I can lose hundreds of times. Funny enough, Dark Souls games are like this. When you lose in a Souls game, you’re sent back to the last checkpoint with nothing but the knowledge you’ve gained. There are times I’ve chained eight-hour days all in the pursuit of one victory screen. If I can eventually overcome the game, then I haven’t really lost.
I mention all this to show why, despite the potential for harm, we should let games exploit us. The same psychology that allows rogue capitalists to profit off of fear-of-death mechanics also gives us the experience of struggling to win.
In real life, loss is usually permanent and devastating. We’re rarely in a position to fight for our lives. When we are, it’s traumatic, not fun. But I think everyone needs to believe that, if the stakes were high enough, our strength of will could overcome any difficulty. A good game with a good healing mechanic lets us convince ourselves that, even in a game where loss is inevitable and victory is uncertain, we have a resource within us that lets us continue.
Games don’t just let us practice mortality. They let us practice hope.
What I’m having fun with lately
I’ve been on a huge album kick lately, which is funny because I basically never listened to albums before week. So far: Z, Madvillainy, channel ORANGE, Is This It, Discovery, Ctrl, Songs in the Key of Life, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Aja.
Since the last essay, I watched the first Mission Impossible. It isn’t the movie I thought it would be! Not an action movie, a real spy thriller. I think something like three guns are fired in the whole movie, and never by the protagonist?
I also watched Ocean’s Eleven, which, from a writing standpoint, that is a really weird movie. The actual characters in the world basically encounter no resistance: all of the conflict happens in the mind of the viewer, while George Clooney and Brad Pitt are completely on top of things the whole time.
Also the Oppenheimer/Barbie double feature, but that goes without saying. I may drop a shorter post soon about that experience, it was a good one.
I had a beer boot for the first time yesterday. 84 ounces. That is too much beer! But since it forces everyone — at least everyone of roughly my constitution — to sit around the table for a few hours, just talking and drinking out of a damn stage prop, I think it’s a pretty ingenious invention.
Thanks for reading!
Took me a little long to write this one, but it ended up being three mini-essays that I’m pretty proud of. And by the way, the games no one will play with me are Mario Party, Mario Kart, and Star Wars: Squadrons. Play D&D with me though, we’ll have a great time.
DR
Update 8/8: I just learned that Substack lets you edit posts, so I fixed all the typos, then added in one typo.
From Daniel Carter Beard’s The Outdoor Handy Book: For Playground Field and Forest: “There must be a place of refuge for every one. The wild beasts have their dens in the heart of the jungle, where they can retire in safety; wild men have their secret hiding-places in the mountains or forests; the old pirates had their islands, surrounded by shoals and rocks that would pierce the hull of any vessel attempting to land without a pilot; and civilized man has his home, which is sacred from the invasion of friend or foe, a place to which he need admit no man.”