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.