Insta-kills: Intention vs. Results. Or: A Wrongful Death Suit Against Game Developers

With the rise of so-called cinematic games in recent years, there has also been a push to implement enemy behaviors which similarly express those cinematic elements. “What could possibly be more dramatic and striking than a cinematic player death?” I imagine someone with way more coding, game-designing, and artistic prowess than me saying. The giant monster renders the player helpless and kills them in a realistic manner, bypassing the more gamey elements that are their health and armor. In theory, this sort of threat makes the player feel vulnerable and small against forces much more powerful than himself. Sounds pretty good, right? And hey, it works well for World of Darkness so why wouldn't it work well in Mass Effect 3 (BioWare), the The Last of Us (Naughty Dog), and Skyrim (Bethesda)?

I have mentioned Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek’s “Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics” framework in other posts, and I feel the rise in insta-kill enemies in modern action games is the result of ignoring one of the most important points in this framework. Designers and players experience the three elements of Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics from fundamentally different directions. The designer experiences the Mechanics—the raw systems that make up the game—through designing how the game works. The Dynamics—the system interactions or “the run-time behavior of the game”—develop out from the Mechanics and the developer experiences these through playtesting. Finally, the designer constructs the Aesthetic which represent the desired emotional response of the system. By contrast, the player experiences the Aesthetics first through the tone the game conveys, the dynamics second as they begin to understand how the game’s elements interact, and the mechanics last when they understand how all of the systems work.

In the case of the insta-kill, the goal is to build the aesthetics of “challenge” and “drama” by engender feelings of vulnerability in the player. In theory, the insta-kill monster necessitates the player exercise caution in approaching an encounter, since he knows that if he lets the insta-kill monster get too close and start its animation then he is going to die. In essence, the insta-kill enemy is an attempt to build from the aesthetic first. The problem with this approach is that it creates conflict between the ludic information the system is communicating and the reality of play. By definition, a health mechanic is an abstraction of the amount of damage necessary for the player to reach a fail-state. This abstraction can be percentage based (Mass Effect) or a one-to-one reflection of damage values vs. defensive values (Skyrim, Pokemon, Persona 4, etc.) or of the number of hits (Ratchet and Clank 1, Rez, etc.). The underlying implication is that each incoming hit has an assigned damage value and in most games this value is less than the maximum player health.* As a result, the player understands the amount of hits they can sustain to be greater than one. They can also understand that damage infliction in terms of very specific events. Insta-kill abilities by their very nature bypass the abstraction. No matter how much health the player has, an insta-kill will always reduce it to zero and it will lock them into a brief animation while it happens. The problem is that an insta-kill cannot be tutorialized without acknowledging the violation of the established system. In other words, the player cannot learn that an enemy can break the clearly established system until it has already happened.

"This is what you get for being in the same five-foot space as me!!!"

As a result, the player will be unaware that an enemy is capable of an insta-kill until after the insta-kill has bypassed their health-bar and killed them. As a result, the player experiences frustration because the ludic language of the game never taught to expect an insta-kill. Rather than feeling more vulnerable, the player feels cheated because this new enemy does not play by the established rules. Worse, since learning about the insta-kill necessitates player death, it generates a fail-state loop which restarts the player at the last check point, meaning that whatever tension built up before the insta-kill took place is now lost. But because the player now has foreknowledge of what is ahead, the process of rebuilding that lost tension becomes much more difficult for the designer.

A screen writer once described tension to me as “asking a question and not answering it for as long as you can get away with it.” In an action or horror setting the question is always, “can I survive this encounter?” An insta-kill is an immediate “no,” so tension dissipates the minute the insta-kill begins. Survival with a sliver of health left in a dangerous situation is unresolved tension. Granted, the player may still die from one hit in the encounter, and that is okay as long as the death follows the rules established by the system.

So, how can developers avoid destroying all their built up tension while still making the player feel vulnerable? Simple: instead of killing the player outright, the insta-kill creature should do lots of damage. If the player is already down to half health by the time they meet the big not-quite-insta-kill monster, and one swipe from the thing takes them out, that is still fair! Or better yet, the player might lose all but one unit of health and just barely survive the encounter. With one unit of health, they will go into the next encounter more cautiously and more concerned that they might get taken out at any second! If the developer absolutely must have an insta-kill for the purposes of realism, make it possible to get out of the kill animation once it has started. I purchased almost no upgrades in The Last of Us because I spent the entire first half of the game saving up pills for the "get out of an insta-kill at the cost of a shiv" upgrade. This upgrade made the game feel less like it was cheating me and forced me to horde my shivs like there was no tomorrow.

Hey, human.

Now, of course there are exceptions to this rule. First, when the insta-kill attack obeys the rules of the game. Pre-animated insta-kills explicitly bypass the health system and thus, do not obey the rules. There are plenty of RPGs where a creature can down the player in one hit, for instance Dark Souls, but said insta-kill obeys the laws of the health bar, a slightly stronger character or a dive at the right time might have let me survive. Second, the insta-kill must come from something in the environment that is absolutely 100% obvious. For example crushers, bottomless pits, lava, acid, high-speed vehicle collision, pits with spikes, or places where the narrative makes it explicitly clear that the player will die if they do X-action. Lastly, an insta-kill is okay if the game has no health system like in Pac-man, Hotline Miami or The Walking Dead.

So in short, game developers, if you are gonna insta-kill me, please don't cheat to do it!

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* There are exceptions. A game with a leveling system may have creatures whose base damage far exceeds the player’s max health. But the presence of a leveling system communicates that the player should avoid things that are beyond his level.

Determinism and Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bastion

Ludonarrative dissonance—the conflict created when mechanics and narrative communicate different messages—is a design concept that has been creeping closer and closer to the mainstream in the past year. Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us both attempted to ameliorate their dissonance with varying degrees of success. And Spec Ops: The Line took advantage of its own ludonarrative dissonance, using it to emphasize the game’s themes about American military adventurism and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For obvious reasons, violence has been a major factors in the dissonance in most of these games, primarily because violence provides an easy mechanic and tends to result in games that sell. But one game that does not often get mentioned in the discussion of dissonance in games is Supergiant Games’ 2011, action-RPG Bastion. 

Set in a world that mixes elements of fantasy, steam-punk, and the old west, the story of Bastion is a deceptively simple one. The player assumes the role of an unnamed silent protagonist called, “the Kid,” who wakes up one day to discover that an apocalyptic event called “the Calamity,” destroyed his home city of Caelondia and most of the world. The Kid seeks to restore a place called “the Bastion,” which can supposedly fix the world. Along the way he meets an elderly Caelondian named Rucks, who provides the game’s running narration, in addition to two other survivors Zulf and Zia—ethnic Ura, the original inhabitants of the continent Caelondia colonized. Rucks provides one of the most troubling figure in the game. He is a thoroughly unreliable narrator and is the physical manifestation of narrative in the game’s ludonarrative equation.

Rucks is an unflinching imperialist in terms both his interaction with the world and his role as narrator. While The Kid may be the player’s avatar, the areas the Kid inhabits are contextualized by Rucks and through the lens of his nostalgia. Meanwhile, the Kid’s thoughts are locked away from the player through a silence which Rucks’ narration enforces. The Kid is still capable of interacting with other characters, but it always falls to Rucks to relay snippets of the conversation. In essence, Rucks’ dominion over the narration emphasizes the subaltern status which Caelondian society imposed upon the Kid, Zulf, and Zia. No one can speak. During the final level it is established that the narration throughout the game has been Rucks retelling the Kid’s story to Zia in order to pass the time while they wait for the kid’s return from the final mission. This revelation presents a deterministic tyranny of the storyteller but one which is not wholly in conflict with the concept of player agency, since some of the more player driven story elements. For example, like if the player decides to break some environment objects early in the game for no reason, Rucks will note: “the Kid rages for a while.” Rucks story elements tend to fall into place shortly after the actions that prompt them. The lag indicates that Rucks' narration is not the creator of what is on screen but a reflection of it. Yet at certain critical moments, such as the moment when the Kid finds the Journal which kick-starts the game’s central conflict, the Kid’s actions are a fixed point which cannot be changed by Rucks or the player.

The interpretation that Rucks provides runs parallel to the ludic experience provided by the environments and the core gameplay. The overlay of narration on top of the ludic information establishes a space in which the two are able to compliment and inform one another while also being distinct from one another. The ludic information provides authority to the narration while also providing a space where it can be questioned. Although Rucks’ first line of narration notes that a “proper story is supposed to start at the beginning” and that it “ain’t so simple with this one,” the fluidity between fixed points of the story and emergent (ludic) elements call the deterministic authority of the storyteller into question. The tension between these ludic and narrative forces can be seen the first time the Kid encounters an enemy. 

First encounter with a (lonesome ghost of a) Gasfella

As the Kid enters a small clearing, Rucks asks “That a survivor? No ma’am, it’s a Gasfella, forced up from underground.” In theory, the original question of “is that a survivor” must be answered with an unequivocal yes because the Gasfella is clearly alive. Though Rucks is at times an unreliable narrator, he is frank about details regarding the world. He repeatedly personifies Gasfellas, and even goes so far as to outright say that they are sapient: “[they] ain’t much that different from normal folks. All they want is a warm place to stay and a decent meal.” And yet by implying that the Gasfella at the start is not a survivor, he demonstrates his bias against the Windbags and makes it clear that his only interest rests in saving human survivors. Ludically, Rucks’ bias against the Windbags proves correct. With a few exceptions, Gasfellas and other creatures inhabiting the floating ruins of Caelondia are universally hostile towards the Kid. That Rucks’ racism is supported by the ludic language of the game establishes him as a character that the kid and the player ought to trust, while also generating tension. 

As the player finds it easy to accept Rucks’ rationales, so too does the Kid, even though he has very little reason to want Caelondia restored. During the Kid’s tobacco and exhaustion fueled dream of “Who Knows Where,” it is revealed that the Kid’s life in Caelondia was never a good one. He was ostracized by peers, dropped out of school, and volunteered for two tours of duty on Caelondia’s “Rippling Wall,” an act Rucks implies was tantamount to suicide. At the end of the dream, Rucks admits to taking advantage of the Kid’s lack of direction. Rucks is the only character who knows about the true purpose of the Bastion, so he sends the Kid out telling him he’s saving the world. And yet Rucks’ rationales provide an easy security blanket for the Kid and player to cling to even when it conflicts with reality. For example Rucks establishes early on that every piece of floating ground the Kid journeys to has a “Core” keeping it afloat. The Cores are necessary to power the Bastion, but removing the core will cause the area to fall into oblivion. Later Rucks comments that Gasfellas get “territorial” around Cores, which directly conflicts with their earlier characterization as being sentient. Rucks’ characterization of them as “territorial,” creates an easier to accept justification for smashing through them to get to the core than “they will fight you every step because they know they will fall into the abyss.” Moreover, the Kid almost always returns to the Bastion without seeing much of the damage from the core’s removal, but the knowledge of its occurrence remains, creating further dissonance.

The tension between Rucks’ narration and reality comes to a head during the Kid’s dream in “Jawson Bog.” Unlike the dreams of “Who Knows Where,” which fit snuggly into the framing device and act as ludic holding patterns which allow Rucks tells Zia and the player about the back-stories of the three silent character characters, the bog dream is completely disconnected from the framing device. Rucks admits after the dream finishes that the Kid never told him what happened in the bog and the abandonment of conventional tropes of oral storytelling are abandoned in favor of a surreal breakdown imply that the Bog dream’s narration is a part of the Kid’s perception. Rucks’ once supportive voice becomes hostile towards the Kid. Lines and events from earlier in the game get retread and altered in ways that emphasize the Kid’s violence and his complicity in the deaths of many non-human survivors. 

The Bastion: Jawson Bog Edition

When the Kid enters the Bastion for the first time and meets Rucks, the old man narrates “Did anyone else survive? Sure enough, he finds another. He finds me.” In the bog, the Kid enters a Bastion overrun with wilderness fauna and the line changes to “Sure enough, he finds…Peckers. Lunkheads.  Wallflowers.  Pincushions.  Vineapples.  Swampweeds.  Anklegators,” implying similarity between the creatures the Kid has killed and the survivors at the Bastion. The presence of the narration in an entirely subjective space implies that the Kid internalizes Rucks’ goals and rationales while the hostility of dream Rucks indicates his uncertainty and guilt over what those rationales have led him to. The litany of dead creatures acknowledges the ludonarrative dissonance inherent in the Kid’s mission to saving the world by destroying bits of it, and uses it as a metaphor for guilt and self-loathing. That the dream ends with the Kid re-experiencing the moment when he found his first weapon—the hammer which Rucks describes as his “life-long friend”—resulting in a confrontation with a shadow version of himself, further emphasizes his internal conflict over and with his own violence.

The final level is the unraveling of Rucks’ narration, the revelation that Rucks no longer knows what is going to happen frees the Kid from the deterministic bonds of the “story” but not the ludic bonds. Binary choice gets a bum rap from game designers but used sparingly, any choice of that kind is still interaction. The final choice is a value judgment by the player as to whether it is worth attempting to undo everything and risking it all happening again, or setting sail into an unknown future. In terms of game design, this question asks if we want to keep retreading the dissonant laden landscapes of modern design or attempt to find another way forward.

Game within a not-game (?): Smugglecraft and Ruminations on Alternate Interactive Media

[Full Disclosure: The following article is a case of "shot-gun writing." I had less time than usual this week and the stuff I was originally working on wasn't panning out so I decided to go with something a bit more... this. I hope it worked out.]

I once played on a Minecraft on a rather bizarre server. This server was a communal server among friends in the for-real-world. The server OP considered himself a generous OP since he freely gave out a good deal of food and pick-axes and supplies to every person on the server. And yet, there was one rule, only he could benefit from god-powers. Only he and his projects could have unlimited resources. Only he could fly. Only he could teleport. Only he could build without mining. If you offered to help, and promised not to use your god-powers for any project but his, you could have them until you were done helping him.

The players chafed under this restriction. Some players like to have unlimited powers for building, some did not mind mining to get resources, some of them, just liked messing with their friend the OP. But they disliked the inequity.

Thus began Smugglecraft. A game in Minecraft.

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I read an article the other day by a Hendrix alumn, Malcolm McCrimmon, which for perhaps the first time got me interested in the "game vs. not-game" discussion. The article drew largely from the theory put forth in Chris DeLeon’s essay “Games Are Artificial. Videogames Art Not. Games Have Rules. Videogames Do Not,” and defines games as a combination of the abstract—the artificial rules of play called the “play space”—and the concrete—the immutable or physical elements known as “props.” The play space of a game consists of arbitrary agreements and limitations. Physical pieces in Chess have only cosmetic differences but we agree that each piece has different movement properties. Likewise, we agree that the goal is to checkmate the king. Props by contrast are immutable factors of the game that do not need to be innumerate in the rules, like the effects of gravity on a ball or that a single Chess piece cannot physically occupy two separate places in space simultaneously. By this reasoning, Smugglecraft was a game established by the rules the OP set and used Minecraft as a prop.

The OP’s new rules were not coded into Minecraft, the underlying system of the game did not change but the OP’s impositions added arbitrary rules onto the system. Minecraft was no longer just about creating but about creating while deceiving.

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Pictured: Subtly.

In order to get god powers, players began offering to help the OP with his massive projects. When his back was turned or he was away from the keyboard, the “helper” would fly back to their base and fill their chests with whatever they wanted.

I said before that Smugglecraft had rules, and it did. The OP would check players’ buildings for evidence of the abuse of his OP-given god-powers and upon finding a stash he would reclaim the ill-gotten resources, repair any damage he caused finding the stash, he never tried to reclaim chunks of our buildings which were built with stolen resources or god-powers, and there were never any reprisals beyond the reclamation of our chest-bound items. When items were mistakenly reclaimed, the OP replaced the items and added some extra resources.

The game grew more complex when building searches began. Players began hiding their stashes in the walls of their constructs. And the OP began searching the walls and the floors. The players knew their buildings would be searched so they made dummy stashes with notes for the OP or stashes which were intentionally poorly hidden, in the hopes that he’d think he had found everything they had to hide. They began hiding their stashes in remote areas and the OP began randomly teleporting to people's location to see where they had gone.

So the players kept adapting, they would hide stuff in the OP’s own buildings, where he would never look, or they would hide a single chest full of stuff in an unassuming patch of ground, mark it with a flower, and write down the co-ordinates.

Pictured: A far more badass version of our server OP

Eventually, a player who had known the OP for years spoofed his password, and gave everyone god powers. The players toyed with the idea of removing the OP's god-powers, since he was actually an hour+ drive away from the computer running the server. The idea was rejected on the grounds of being mean. The OP never suspected that his occasional connection hiccups were the result of people logging in as him. Players took pains to make sure they put his character back where it belonged after logging in as him. 

Smugglecraft tapered off shortly thereafter. If there was a win-state in Smugglecraft it was: acquire as many resources as humanly possible without the OP finding out, and by secretly acquiring god-powers, the players won, though perhaps not in the way originally intended.

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The point the original article ultimately raises is that we should be attempting to consider props as their own medium, separate from games. And I do not object to that distinction. Games like The Sims, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Gary’s Mod could arguably be considered tools or props rather than games. They are simulation spaces which allow for the imposition of user generated goals or rules. As a genre, that could be incredible! The whole point of the story of Smugglecraft is to show how useful such a medium could be. And while I do not object to the evolution of interactive software as a medium, I do feel that the acknowledgement of a game as a prop could be too easily used to continue ghettoizing some games into the category of “not really games” based on whether or not the game has a win-state or complies with overly strict definition of “fun.”