Super Nerd Sundays Presents: You're Going to Die Eventually!

I’m infected in The Walking Dead now.  It’s a scary prospect: I’m playing a character who is dealing with their inevitable death in this final chapter, a character I’ve put a lot of time into developing, a character who has been an organizational pillar for the other characters in each episode.  I’ve kept a man from falling apart after losing everything, saved a man’s life by finding him a doctor and helped a young woman find closure through violence. But all this is superseded by the fact that the little girl I’ve been taking care of, the centerpiece of my survival in this zombie apocalypse, has been taken, and it’s up to me to find her.

This is part of a bigger issue in games, one Call of Duty: Modern Warfare the First and Bioshock both brought to the forefront of their thematic milieus back in yonder day: mortality.

There’s a moderately popular school of thought that games are intended to be power fantasies.  They’re supposed to represent mental or metaphysical spaces where we get to play out a fantasy of being exceptionally tough, strong, smart and quick badasses who get to do the right thing, most of the time, and rarely have to compromise.   On anything.  If you want to play a particular way, you always can.  If you want to only use one gun for the entire game, you can.  If you want to just use a knife, you can probably do that.  There are games that will abide your behavior, however zany it may seem.  The game itself is just a vector for you feeling tough and powerful.  The followup Call of Duties, the Assassin’s Creed series and Mass Effects (despite its system of consequences) all fall into this category of game.  You churn through enemies and, regardless of how you choose to play, you are something of a super human entity: if you die it can only occur when control of your character is wrested from your grasp.  In Assassin’s Creed, every single bad thing requires an act of deus ex machina, where you are no longer capable of controlling whoever you’re supposed to be controlling.  This dynamic effectively destroys any meaningful commentary on life and death.  In a game so focused around mortality and fatality, making me limp for a while is not as effective as presenting me with a world where my actions have meaningful consequences.  If I can kill anything that I run into with minimal effort it’s tough for me to grasp my relative insignificance in this world.

Therein lies the draw of games like Bioshock and Thief.  These games, and their spiritual predecessors and antecedents, present worlds where you are far from the top of the pecking order.  In Bioshock you become quite powerful, but most of the game will be spent narrowly avoiding death at the hands of enemies who are as powerful as you or more powerful.  In Thief, there is no power curve: you will always have to fear the Undead, Burrens, Hammerites, normal guards, Mechs, Fire Elementals, Ghosts, a slough of environmental hazards, locked doors and long falls.  And everything else.  These are games that present you as a frail, weak creature in a world of exceedingly powerful enemies.  You’re probably going to die a lot here, and in the end the stories are less about you emerging through a conflict victorious and more about you escaping with your life.  In at least one of these games, you die at the end.  In a hospital bed.  Of old age.  In one ending.  The power fantasy is dismissed in favor of a nod to the inevitable mortality of the hero figure.  These are games where death is constantly present, and the best you can do is make it through the end of the story alive, but really even that won’t save you.

They hint at an aspect that other games, specifically competitive multiplayer games and Rogue-a-likes, rely on completely: the idea that you will lose, sooner or later.  In competitive multiplayer games, this is the crux upon which the game rests.  If a game presents a set of scenarios where the results are static, the game has no sustainable appeal as an experience.  You know how it’ll end before it even begins: you’ll lose at C&C 3 every time you boot it up if you aren’t schooled in the C&C franchise’s distinct form of RTS action, but in Call of Duty’s multiplayer you’ll be moving back and forth in the chaos of battle all the time, and even the worst player will get a few lucky kills in.  This means that part of the game is accepting the inevitability of running around madcap and resetting: that is to say, dying, becoming attuned to the cycle of game play.

Rogue-a-likes do this in a much more aggressive, pointed fashion.  They are founded on the premise that you, as a player, should expect to fail.  They wear it on their sleeve that you’re probably not going to make it to the bottom of the dungeon and, even if you do, you probably won’t actually be able to survive down there for very long.  And in the unlikely event that you do make it through the game and win, you’re just going to be doing it all over again because the expectation of failure, the hope that you, as a player, are going to lose sooner or later, is really what’s driving the play in a Rogue.  They operate on the premise that failure is interesting.  Failure as in death.  Death is a natural part of the game, rather than a plot point or a twist moment: it’s a thing that resets the play and gives you a new opportunity to employ the skills you’ve been developing in a new way.

This is where Rogue-a-likes and the fatalism that The Walking Dead’s posits collide: the idea that failure in a game is expected, perhaps even inevitable, but that the events that lead up to that failure are truly important.

There’s a certain poetry to this mindset.  Most games teach you to avoid failure at all costs.  Hell, most things in life do, to our discredit.  Because successes are considerably less edifying than failures.  But games that encourage you to take risks, games that encourage you to engage in behavior which conventionally equates failure, are liberating in a beautiful way.

I’ve put almost 20 hours into Dungeons of Dredmor at this point.  20 hours in less than a week.  During my first playthrough I spent around two days using the same character.  I generated her skills randomly and, as luck would have it, ended up with a fantastic mix of abilities that made the game a breeze and a joy to play.  I easily discovered traps and turned them into sweet, sweet cash money.  I had a pretty little moustache golem that followed me around and killed my enemies and repeatedly died for me.  I could teleport around and hit things hard.  It was good.

Then I died.

I died in a really dumb way: accidentally attacking the storekeeper with my laser eyes.  The storekeeper in Dredmor will one shot anyone dumb enough to attack him, or at least he will at the level I was at. It was over before I knew what I’d done.  My stupid mistake had cost me untold progress and set me back from uncovering the entire Golemancer skill tree, one of my mini-goals in Dredmor.

I was bummed.

For around an hour.  Then I walked back and loaded up a new game and a new character.  I gave him a stupid name and carefully selected my skills this time, picking the ones I thought I could use, leaving out the ones I didn’t see the point of during my last playthrough.  I felt well suited to the dungeon.

I got a whole extra floor down before dying, this time because I didn’t understand that one of the skills just didn’t do anything except make me skip a turn.  I became frustrated again, then rolled a new character, this time completely at random.  I jumped back in and killed this character before I left the first floor.  I’ve since done this something like seven times.  Each time is an absolute delight.

There’s a joy in participating in a structure where you’re encouraged to fail, and a certain beauty to it as well.  The play, not the payoff, becomes the key to the game and the moments you’d usually rush through, like grinding, become the moments you want to let linger.  I’m sure it will grow tiresome before I hit 40 hours of play (I’m counting on it; I’ve got a lot of papers to grade over the next few weeks) but for now it’s just wonderful to sit down and run through a dungeon, waiting to see how I’ll die.

I’ve also co-opted Dungeons of Dredmor into a bigger project, where I record how each character dies.  I don’t know if it’ll end up working as a poem or a story or anything.  But right now it’s just fun to read each absurd death out loud.  I imagine my death in the final episode of The Walking Dead (which I’m waiting until I return to Brooklyn to play) will be a great deal more serious.  But the fatalism present within the game will be no different, and with nothing to lose I wonder just what I’ll do to save Clementine.  Something terrible and perhaps amazing, I’m sure.