Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Duty and Death!

Today's Super Nerd Sunday is all about death in video games, with a big focus on Call of Duty 4. It also still mentions Bioshock. Maybe next week I'll get away from doing that. Anyhow, enjoy.

Odds are if you’ve played a video game, you’ve died. Few and far between are the games which don’t heap deaths upon players, old and new alike, and then do their all to make it seem like they didn’t happen. Sure, some of the old Lucas Arts adventure games featured main characters with realistic (read as: cowardly) senses of self-preservation, but for the most part death has always been a part of video games.

Part of the art of designing a game, then, is incorporating death into the game’s flow. Most games fail at this completely. Death is an interrupt, an inconvenience. If you died you did it wrong and you have to reload from an earlier save state. Oops. Maybe it’ll spit out a tool tip or two or let you know you can lower the difficulty level if they’ve really given their all. But for the most part games just break their flow on deaths. They treat them as if they should never happen, as if the player did something wrong in a scenario that they as a designer knew full well would come to pass.

Even great, meticulously designed games have fallen prey to this. Half-Life and its follow-ups and bastard children (Portal) all have the “whoops, reload” stance on death. Japanese games have a particularly infuriating way of dealing with player death, usually establishing an arbitrary limit on failures or setting up arbitrary, optional checkpoints from which the game can be replayed. Most games treat death as the wrong answer to a question and something you really should’ve known better than to do.

Despite this enduring trend of ignoring player incompetence, some people have sat down and made death a part of their story. I’m loath to talk about Bioshock more, after dedicating the last two weeks entirely to it, but it deserves a quick jerk of the head since it did a nice job of making death a part of its play. Its predecessor, System Shock 2, did the same with a nearly identical plot device. Prey devised an entire mechanic and plot device to account for player deaths. And these are just examples of making it a tolerable part of game play.

What’s always been more impressive to me personally is when people can make death a part of storytelling, even in a small way. Prince of Persia, or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time or whatever the hell they’re calling it now, had a great way of doing this. Beyond giving the player control over an “oops, I done fucked up” button they also gave us a nice two second sound bite that moved the death into the context of the narrative. You’re not incompetent, the Prince just has a terrible memory.

Assassin’s Creed had the same modus operandi. For all the flak people gave AC it really did account for the entirety of the game world and made sure that when you died you both knew you’d fucked up and didn’t have to hit a magic “load last save” button. It plopped you back a short distance away “resynchronized” with what you were supposed to be doing before you cocked it all up. Perhaps its a fine distinction rather than a sweeping difference, but it maintained game flow and made sure that however you chose to pace your play you’d never encounter any big flow breaking events, outside of the overlong assassination soliloquies (okay, they weren’t technically soliloquies but they really might as well have been; it was a dude with a knife in his throat talking to a laconic douchebag for a solid five minutes).

Some games took it to another level entirely. Torment had one of my favorite death mechanics ever, one which shifted dramatically based on context. Torment made death a part of advancing through the story and exploring the world. It took the concept of immortality that we bring to games already, the concept that we’re unkillable but not invulnerable, and turned it on its ear. Torment was smart. It’s too bad it didn’t sell more copies and too bad that it had pacing problems, but its death mechanic was masterful. The way it blended into the story, the mechanics and the game world was just excellent. Certainly a lot of that was owed to Planescape’s already expansive and imaginative setting, but Torment absorbed the knowledge that players were going to die and decided to make it a major game play mechanic from start to finish. And it did a pretty awesome job.

But the game which hit home most recently with its treatment of death was Call of Duty 4. If you’ve played through the opening sequence of CoD4 you know that the game forces you to die and makes these deaths a part of the story. Sure, it has the “load the autosave” problem games suffer from all too often, but it does make the concept of death a critical part of the game world and I think it warrants discussion.

The game opens with you, the player (or the president of Arabistan, depending on how you look at it), being driven through a nameless war torn city, tied to a post and shot in the face. This is Call of Duty’s world: violent, claustrophobic, and constrictively linear. You move from place to place under orders from unquestionable figures beyond your sight, objectives and perceptions changing rapidly and inexplicably. You’re a soldier in a modern context, a tool for those who want you to complete a specific task who is given just enough information to do so.

I enjoyed the earlier Call of Duties, but in 4 Infinity Ward finally hit their stride: they made a great game, completely unpretentious, which by either intent or accident was also a great work of art. Every part of CoD4 lends itself to creating an idea and a feeling of what it means to be a solider. You’re surrounded by chaos structured by your orders and in these orders you ground yourself. You generally have three things to think about: kill enemies, don’t die, and don’t fuck up the mission. IW doesn’t try to make soldiers seem like heroes; as Ben Crawhee points out both sides seem more like amoral psychopaths than heroes in their own right. Instead it portrays them as brave people struggling through a violent, oppressive world that doesn’t offer them any other options.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the famed twist of CoD4. If you haven’t played it yet and actually plan to close your browser and go get on that, because here thar be spoilers. Also, the game is like forty goddamn dollars. What are you waiting for? It’s awesome, and its on Steam. You won’t even have to put on pants to get it.

In Call of Duty 4 one of your beloved player characters, one of the faceless, voiceless protagonist cameras you’re all too accustomed to controlling in these games, dies. You don’t die heroically, fighting off a great advance or with your hands clutched around someone’s throat. You die because you make a decision. Your basic humanity overrides your orders and you go back to save someone. And you die for it. You die like a crippled dog, dragging yourself through ruined streets looking for help while your legs refuse to work.

I won’t say anything about the fact that the choice is made for you, but I will mention that your inevitable death does come as a result of disobeying the faceless voice in the sky, something Call of Duty makes sure you should never do. But that’s a topic for another essay. It’s more the grisly nature of this particular demise, rather than its thematic ramifications, that I want to talk about.

In most games you’ll die fighting. You’ll die because the game was too hard, because there were just too many of them, or because you accidentally walk off a ledge and topple hilariously to your death. In Call of Duty 4 you die helpless. You’re unarmed, unassailed. There’s no one for you to fight. You die in a nuclear wasteland, the wreckage of society generated by the carefully orchestrated and highly politicized violence you’ve been party to for the entire game. You die because in the modern world people are replaced and destroyed by these weapons of war. You die because soldiers die, and they don’t always die fighting. And Call of Duty 4 wanted us to know that.

And even if you didn’t draw all of that out of the experience it’s difficult to ignore the feeling of helplessness as IW puts you through your final moments on those unspecifically ethnic streets. Which is what makes Call of Duty 4’s treatment of death so great. It makes us play a tragic hero and it doesn’t remove us from the game to do so. It shows us that to be a tragic hero in the modern world is to die alone and helpless because you were just trying to do the right thing.

And Call of Duty lets us keep on playing for revenge, doing all we can to strike back at the people who put us through that slow and terrible death. It brings us to death’s door once again and gives us our revenge. Still, even then it’s bittersweet and the last few seconds of the game are tinged with survivor’s guilt.

It’s a fantastic use of player mortality as a game mechanic. Even though I’d died dozens of times along the way I was still struck by each of these sequences because they slowed down and let me process what was happening: I was helpless, aligned against forces bigger than me, and the only reason I was still alive was because of my squad mates and their sacrifices. It might sound cliché, but when I saw Zakhaev shoot Gaz anger overpowered fear in me. I wanted a gun. I wanted revenge.

And Call of Duty 4 let me have it, along with a moment of hope knowing I’d be alright and then a few seconds sadness knowing that Price, Gaz, and Griggs wouldn’t be. And then they had to cock it all up by inserting a voice actor’s Call of Duty inspired rap over the end credits.

But hey, the game itself was wonderful. And it used death in a way that both forwarded the story and reinforced the world of the game. And IW did it in a way that wasn’t entirely post-modern, which is in its own right impressive in the current world of game design. Although I am curious: why weren’t there any other bodies in the crashed chopper? Where was everyone else?

Death is always going to be a part of games. As gamers we seek to challenge ourselves, and that always means you’re going to fail. And most games are still going to treat death as a situation deserving punishment rather than an expected part of game play. But those titles that truly resonate, the ones that stand the test of time and exhibit greatness, the vast majority of them look at death and see an element they can use to tell a story. And that’s one of the great strengths offered by video games: that we can die many times and learn a new lesson with each demise.