Hit Play with PixelVixen707: This Mortal Coil

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Death is back in style. Just ask blogger and scholar Ben Abraham, who's currently on a new playthrough of last year's African-set shooter Far Cry 2. A typical run through the game's campaign takes 30 or so hours, and you can save your progress along the way. If you succumb to a brushfire or take a hit to the head from a sniper, it's not a big deal: you just jump back to your last save and erase your mistake. But Abraham decided this wasn't enough of a challenge -- so this time he's playing for keeps. Living up to the title of his blog, Sometimes Life Requires Consequences, he's sworn that if he's whacked in the game, he will stop playing. Calling it the "Permanent Death" runthrough, he's been posting detailed notes and screenshots, and other gamers are following his example.

How does it change his play? Well, you can guess that he's being careful. He plots his course through the jungle to avoid guard posts and other risks, and he always keeps a buddy ready to watch his back. So far he's in the easy half of the game, but if he gets near the end and makes a fatal mistake, "I can certainly imagine being consumed with rage at the unfairness of the premature ending -- which itself somewhat mirrors feelings and reactions to death in the real world."

Actually, I hope when I die that my last words are, "Hey, watch this!" But Abraham's point is sound. Death has become meaningless in games -- so meaningless that we get lazy. Big league titles like Prince of Persia and Fable II even eliminated death entirely, treating us once-hardened gamers like a bunch of pink-cheeked babies. The tension and thrill Abraham seeks is seemingly out of date.

But let's take a look at what that thrill is. Initially, you may think that we had it better back in the days of coin-ops and arcades, when games were actually paid to kill you; every time you lost the game, you had to pump in another quarter. Naturally this kept you sharp and tweaked your adrenal glands. But I don't think that's what Abraham is after. After all, most coin-op games are repetitive tests of skill. Playing Nibbler for 44 hours is probably not the same as reaching the end of Far Cry 2. Games today have story arcs and character journeys. They have drama and surprises and denouements. And the designers are scared that all of you dumb players will keep messing up and missing these terrific endings they spent so much time on.

One genre today finds a happy medium, between a kind of narrative and a kind of mortality: roguelikes, the niche and nerdy descendants of Rogue and NetHack. These wonkish, low-tech adventure games have a long history and a diehard fanbase. But they all have two things in common: much of your adventure is randomly generated, giving you a different experience every time you start. And you'll start often, because in rogue-likes, death is permanent. As programming legend John Harris put it in a piece in Gamasutra, "Much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored."

The most popular modern rogue-like is Derek Yu's Spelunky, which you can get for free HERE. It casts you as an Indiana Jones-style archeologist who digs through old ruins, looking for treasure and trying to survive long enough to enjoy it. On every level, you run into the same basic elements - the spiders, the snakes, the gold - on every map. But the life-or-death details, the challenges and treasures that make each map so molar-grinding or eye-popping, always keep changing. And once you're dead, those maps are gone, hence Yu's motto: "death is fun." Death doesn't ruin the story; it completes it.

If the way you die doesn't matter, neither does the way you live. When a game like Far Cry 2 makes it easy to rewind a mistake, it's basically telling you that unless you follow the script and hit all your cues, you're not playing it right. By contrast, Ben Abraham is saying that your story is more important than the game's. Even if it's a bad one. Nels "Roadkill" Anderson, a game developer and blogger who gave Abraham's Permanent Death style of play a try, lost his life not in a Tarantinoesque eight-way shoot-out where everyone lost at least one eye, but when a jeep ran over him. Maybe that's a lame way to die. Maybe he didn't get an epic, Conrad-esque journey to the heart of darkness. But that's his story. And hey, at least I think it's funny.


Rachael Webster (a.ka.a SG member PixelVixen707) is SG's Hit Play games columnist. A game lover and game blogger living in New York City, she also writes at PixelVixen707.com and tweets as PixelVixen707.

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