Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Playing to Die!

This is a bit dated, but I feel that Killing Floor’s recent free-trial on Steam has exposed a lot of people to a game they would’ve otherwise ignored. Paired with the recent addition of The Last Stand to Dawn of War II’s already overwhelming and constantly shifting multiplayer and Left 4 Dead 2’s upcoming release it seems that there’s a trend of games which aren’t really designed to be won.

Sure, you can survive Left 4 Dead 2 and Killing Floor if you play a certain way, but both these games have modes designed to annihilate players (Left 4 Dead 2’s Survival mode or a custom version of Killing Floor with settings tweaked so that the game never ends). And even some mainstream games like Halo: ODST and Gears of War 2 have taped on modes which have to end in player death recently, to great acclaim. It’s fair to say that of late there have been a proportionally larger number of games where players play to fail. Here’s the thing: they’re really fun.

You Already Know How This Will End

It’s a strange thing to enter into a game with the knowledge that you’re basically playing to lose. Most of these games alleviate this to one extent or another by giving players a set of goals to surpass over the course of play, but meeting these goals again and again won’t get you anywhere new, and it won’t help you survive. Eventually time and resources will run too thin and you’ll be dead.

But despite this it’s hard to play in any fashion other than a survival centered manner. Instead of thinking of adapting the game to my desires I’m playing to “beat” it, calculating waves and scripted events to see if I can pull off something that even vaguely resembles a “win.” On occasion I’ll do dangerous things to increase my “score” in a score based game, like grabbing points at awkward times in The Last Stand or trying to rack up a combo at the cost of health in ODST’s survival mode, but for the most part I just play to live. I’ll leap around orcs until my score multiplier hits 0 if it means I don’t lose. When it comes down to boosting my score by a few dozen points or making it a little bit further I’ll always choose to struggle on for those last few inches instead of caving to inevitably fate.

Rather than changing the way I play it seems like these survival games alter my expectations. After a round or two I stop seeing my deaths as failures and instead see them as learning experiences. I do that in every game to some extent, but in games which must inevitably end in failure I find myself relaxing about dying. I know it’s coming and, as such, I care a good amount less. Instead of worrying about the death which must come I look forward to dying in an interesting or creative way. If I drop out of a building in Killing Floor or get shot out of the sky by Marine plasma in The Last Stand I don’t want to bang my head against my keyboard. I want to laugh.

What’s the Point?

And that’s sort of the appeal of these games. They’re less about fulfilling the expectations of the developers, as most games are, and more about subverting them. I’m not trying to beat the challenges the design team inserted into the game for me, I’m trying to subvert their expectations and find new and creative ways to compete against their system. I stop playing with the designers and begin playing against them.

It’s something that many gamers do on a much higher level in general. Power games and speed gamers who run through games like Half-Life 2 in twenty minutes have been getting their rocks off by destroying the expectations of developers for some time. And some developers have even taken a tongue in cheek approach to the subject, with games like World of Goo teaching players how to subvert the normal function of their system in order to solve puzzles. At its highest level World of Goo is entirely obsessed with this subversion of the mechanics of their system.

These games, where fail states are necessities rather than punishments, encourage this sort of “man against the world” approach to the game world, and it’s telling just how fun it is. People no longer want to complete objectives in Left 4 Dead’s survival mode. They want to see how far they can push the system, to see what sort of absurd spawns Valve’s algorithms concoct when pushed too far. People playing The Last Stand don’t think they’ll make it through wave 20 (something a handful of players have now done, kudos to them). They’re playing to see how high they can jack their score up, how hard they can push themselves and the game and just what’s going to come next, either in their equipment load-out options or in the waves of enemies sure to eviscerate them. In fact, at the highest level they’re actually playing to see what comes next in Dawn of War as a series.

How Long Can We Hold Out?

But this sort of game isn’t without its problems. Repetitive gameplay can cripple these games if the system isn’t complex enough. Killing Floor, for example, barely held my attention for twenty four hours of its weekend-long free trial. It was an interestiing idea, certainly, but the game repeated its set pieces so often and made all of the game’s elements feel so similar that it lost its flair almost immediately. Even when I was fighting new monsters I didn’t feel like I was dealing with a new challenge. I felt like I was dealing with an upgraded version of existing challenges, and in the end it left me feeling frustrated instead of engaged. I was totally aware of the game and its attempts to keep me from winning, and it infuriated me.

Left 4 Dead’s survival mode is especially bad in this respect. Although it does, to its credit, do an excellent job of randomizing both the threats you encounter and the resources you receive to combat them, you are dealing with the same seven or eight set pieces being reconstituted in a new way on each playthrough. If not for the Director entity and the fluidity of the systems the game wouldn’t have any appeal at all, which just goes to show that a good game will always win out over a decent meta-game. Killing Floor was, on paper at least, a much deeper experience than Left 4 Dead, but it was less engaging in every way and considerably less entertaining. I have no qualms about purchasing Left 4 Dead for $50. I wouldn’t play Killing Floor for more than a day, even if it was free.

The Last Stand illustrates the best counter to this sort of dangerous repetition. Its units are imbued with all the personality of Left 4 Dead’s characters and enemies, and even though they roll out in the same order each time you’re never quite sure how they’ll react to a given situation. Their behavior is always a little bit unexpected, just enough to make you feel like the system you’re operating within is intelligent without making it seem cheap or random. This personality, paired with the slow, enduring character progression The Last Stand handles so deftly, is a big part of what keeps me coming back to the game, even as Brutal Legend, STALKER, Borderlands and graduate admissions jockey for my attention.

It’s worth noting that the variety offered by the progression system in The Last Stand helps keep the game fresh. Even when I don’t see the use of a particular item I still want to try it out and see how it will fit into my strategies. Compare this to Killing Floor’s progression system, which never really makes your character feel any different. Sure, it has some serious mechanical impact, but the impact is obscured by the generic nature of the game.

Everything Old Is New Again

These games, with their built in fail states, are fated to run afoul of repetition early on. But with a focus on personality and careful attention to the construction of a system which rewards repeat play and offers new experiences over periods of extended play they are some of the most interesting and engaging games on the market right now. Even knowing that they can’t win people still flock to these games and game modes, because there’s some nobility in fighting that unwinnable fight, something great about inhabiting a world where you can construct your own private Thermopolis. But the world has to have some sort of personality, the game some variety in order to keep players engaged. Plants vs. Zombies’ endless mode is the main way I play that game, and still play it months after release. Even knowing that I can’t win I still love interacting with that world and seeing just how hard I can push against the system that Popcap created.

As gamers we like to overcome systems, and offering us a system which by nature cannot be overcome is inviting us to revisit this system again and again in order to prove whoever’s said this wrong. Even if, in the end, they are quite correct we’re still inclined to hurl ourselves against these challenges again and again, drawn back by the strength of their imagery and the uniqueness of the experience they offer. Their appeal is as old as the arcade era, and it will always be there. So long as there are gamers there will be unwinnable games. And these games will retain their appeal until, as in King of Kong, someone proves that they can finally be beaten.