Death in games is “a bit sh*t”

Posted February 6, 2012 by Lewis Denby in News.

Player death in games is “a bit shit” according to Size Five boss Dan Marshall, who cites the likes of Uncharted 3 among the main offenders – but praises titles such as Super Meat Boy for their treatment of the trope.

It’s a generally accepted trope of videogames. You move around a world, you shoot some baddies, you get shot a few too many times and you die. You reload from a previous checkpoint and try again. But with an increasing number of games focusing on storytelling, one indie developer thinks its time to think more carefully about how player death is treated in the medium.

“Death in games is kind of old hat, and a bit shit,” said Dan Marshall of Size Five Games. Speaking at the Bit of Alright conference in London on Friday, Marshall laid into titles such as Uncharted 3, suggesting that the notion of a player character dying, only to be resurrected when you reload a previous save, leads to a stilted storytelling method.

Marshall also criticised the likes of Alien vs Predator and Sonic Generations for making death inevitable, yet setting you back a fair amount of time as a punishment for something unavoidable. And the Grand Theft Auto games – which send players to the hospital and strip their weapons when they ‘die’ – were slammed too for making things even harder at a time when you’ve clearly been struggling to proceed.

But Marshall praised indie titles such as Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV for their treatment of death. These games place an emphasis on trial-and-error, never forcing you to restart levels and only resetting you a few seconds before the challenge at which you failed. And he noted that Super Meat Boy even includes an explanation of your infinitely respawning character as part of its narrative.

Audience members chimed in with their own examples of how to tackle death in games – with BioShock’s vita-chambers and Limbo’s focus on hilarious and varied death animations receiving plaudits.

But how to remedy the problem is something Marshall has yet to decide. He’s currently figuring out a way of making ‘death’ make sense in Size Five’s upcoming title, The Swindle.

It’s a platformer, so it seemed ‘obvious’ to begin with that the player would be able to die. But now, says Marshall, he’s not so sure.

Tagged as Alien Vs Predator, Bioshock, Dan Marshall, Indie, Size Five Games, Sonic Generations, Super Meat Boy, The Swindle, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, VVVVVV