Cargo Interactive

Here’s a video I saw a while back, but felt it particularly inspiring. It’s a discussion among some of today’s most recognized independent game designers.  Pioneers, showing that small teams can make truly enjoyable and innovative games.

For a long time people have been very critical over the use of “lives” in video games. In fact, using them seems to be a relic left over from the arcades which is slowly becoming extinct. It used to be that a quarter would buy you with a number of fatal mistakes, metaphorically called “lives”. Often you would loose a life when your character died: rolled over by a barrel; crashed into a mountain; shot by a laser, etc. Lives work in the opposite direction of points, while you perform well in the game you are rewarded with points, meanwhile if you perform poorly you will be punished by losing lives.

Now this has worked extremely well for a long time. In fact, it was a staple in home consoles for well over a decade. It worked on the premise that once you reached a point where the gameplay became too difficult, and you would run out of lives. This means it starts slow, and builds your skill over time. As you learn to deal with the challenges of the game, tension increases as the enemies move faster, or become more aggressive. The near misses become closer and more frequent, and you know that a wrong move will mean its all over.

And that’s where the problem comes in. Often, a game that has finite lives is going to have to end before you want it to, and chances are you are going to be frustrated by that. Especially if you have to start the ball rolling again. Like Sisyphus, you start at the bottom once more and work your way up toward the peak. To combat this, game developers began to make quick ways to get back to where you died, curbing frustration. Warp pipes, level selects, or infinite continues. Unfortunately this can dampen the thrill of an encounter: If you know you can just try again without any severe punishment, you will not be nearly as frustrated, because you won’t feel like anything is at stake.

I think, however, that this frustration comes from failing to achieve a goal. You just nearly reached the summit, only slip and have to start all over. But this is not as much a problem if you really enjoy the task you’re involved in. If the game provides you with pleasure from moment to moment, and your goals are simply something to focus your attention on, failure will be much less frustrating. Starting over can still be pleasurable, especially if the game still presents a challenge to you where you start.

I think lives can be a very valuable currency which allows the player to push themselves to their limits, allowing them a few missteps along the way, if however, losing your lives means being plunged into agonizingly slow and unchallenging gameplay, they can be of very little help at all.