where do pixels go when they die

Yes, you could spend your five minutes trying to accumulate as many points as possible, but in the end, death is still coming for you. Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone. This treatment of character death stands in stark contrast with the way death is commonly used in video games (where you die countless times during a given game and emerge victorious---and still alive---in the end). Passage is a game in which you die only once, at the very end, and you are powerless to stave off this inevitable loss.

Jason Rohrer

The Passage is a beautiful short game that should play.  Its about death and life and over the course of the five minutes of the game you navigate your eight pixel high character through his own compacted stylized representation of his life, choosing whether or not to take a partner, to seek rewards from treasure chests or just to walk through your life which at the beginning of the game spreads out in front of you, and as you near the end of the five minutes begins to stretch behind you until you inevitably turn into a coffin.  You really need to play it, and the developer’s design note can be found here. 

This game got me thinking about these twin games: Death and  Life. 

Both are meta aware games that ironically don’t want you to play them, spending their time instead reminding you that there is a world out there, that life is precious and short and by playing these games you are wasting it.  Death is a simple 2d shooter with scrolling text at the bottom, encouraging you to “go out and look at the stars”.  Life is an un-winable game, where as soon as it starts up you die, basically an unplayable game that forcing you to go live Life.  I like them.  They’re simple and they playfully subvert all the attempts towards immersion that most games undertake these days.

There’s a question within these games that is also echoed by Tale of Tales beautiful game the Graveyard.  In the game you play an old woman.  You control her to make her walk up the path of graveyard to a bench in the shadow of a church.  Once you arrive at the bench she can sit, and a cinematic cut scene plays, a song about death underpins moving shots of her face.  In the free version of the game, the scene ends and you direct her out of the cemetery gates.  In the full version of the game, there is the added feature that the old lady may die whilst sat on the bench.  The game is very powerful and haunting, and this as well the above game question that crucial relationship that is death and the digital game.

Death is the stalwart of most digital games.  Failure is defined by the death of the avatar, most games becoming a competition between the player and the ever present spectre of in game death.  Death is so embedded in the game lexicon that to generally not succeed at a game is to ‘die’ even if that game be something like Pong which does not depict a life/death situation but an abstracted game of tennis.  If all games require conflict to be defined as ‘game’ which is a generally perceived rule, then the resolution or failure of that same conflict has become synonymous with life and death.

Death is also the single most controversial element in digital game discussion. All of longer analytical posts I have written here are in some way concerned with death and its depiction in game and the manner in which we interact with it. 

I think there are two things primarily a stake, one is ideas and concepts of representation and a second is a question of performance in play, and player implication.

The games mentioned at the top of this post are all games that concern themselves explicitly with the representation and undergoing of death by the player avatar.  By playing the game you are agreeing to explore the idea of death and to participate in a performance of it, thus implicating you as player and participant. And although the game itself is driven by death and the promise of it, to achieve death is not a failure, but rather the cathartic agency of the games themselves.

In games that remain in the realm of the abstract such as the classic Mario, death is cartoonish with no in-world implications that are perceivable to the player.  Any immersion that occurs in-game during a session of Mario is wrapped up in a sense of ‘pure play’ that is more closely associated with sport or competition for point and completion.  The video below shows not only Mario but other classic video game deaths:

As games strive to produce more indepth play and immersive experiences for players the representation of death becomes more complicated and also more loaded.  There is a whole satellite debate about age rating and the effect of violence in video games, and I really don’t want to get into that.  However as the trend in digital game moves away from abstraction the role of death as a central mechanic and agency of gameplay becomes greater and crucially not only can the player avatar die in more extravagant ways, so too can it kill.  Compare the above video with the one below (its some pretty brutal stuff, so if easily offended by violence, just take my word for it, it’s nasty)

Quite a difference.  I suppose a key difference is that the second video is a series of increasingly inventive and gruesome ways in which a player can exact death on in game opponents.  There is a moral shift that is required to accommodate these games within our playing experience, similar to the one required to enjoy the violence of action or horror films, but the difference here being the inherently performative quality of gameplay.  The pre-rendered and animated gruesome death sequences are activated by the player by choice, in a closed game system such a computer game you can not choose to walk up to the opponent and try and negotiate, you can only chose from a pallet of pre authored choices, by direct interaction with the narrative.  The fact that the narrative itself is a one dimensional meat churning murder machine, is a different point altogether, the choice of activating the game is one made by the player.  I personally think that the screen below taken from the youtube page where I got the video from is more telling of our society’s unfortunate approach to mediatised death as in ‘related videos’ to a montage of computer game deaths is the execution of Saddam Hussein:

The execution of death in digital game has come to represent not just what is perhaps wrong with an industry that spends more time exploiting pre existing cinematic tropes rather than truly developing its own, but also in parallel a vehicle for perceived ‘meaningful play’.  Games that profess to allow for more meaningful adult play often offer a player a binary choice of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’, a series of action they can undertake to influence the outcome of the game and often their character development.  In Fallout 3 your character is famously offered the choice to explode a whole town with a nuclear device.  Committing mass murder obviously plunges your ‘karma points’ an ingame mechanic used to regulate your behavior as a player and determine how the game world responds to you.

The two video feature the design team talking about the moral choices in the game, and the ways in which you can affect the world and its inhabitants.  The performance of inflicting death in the game is designed to have relevant repercussions, killing civilians will affect your character’s standing, so the dynamic of play/death is affected in a way that is no longer simply a binary progression of fail/win, but rather a branching tree like structure of narrative possibilities.

Returning to Call of Duty Modern Warfare again, the performance of death in this game is different.  The infliction of death is the key motivator for progression through the game.  You kill the moving bad guys and gain their territory.  In the process, you can die too, but crucially are resurrected at the last checkpoint.

However there are two key differences in the performance of death in these games.  On the one hand there is a trivialization of death, both ingame as a player and of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys.  In this screenshot I’ve used before the unmistakable desert cammo of a dead American marine is painted into the scenery, 

as you play your fellow marines drop around you with little in game reference.  However there is a strong narrative performance of death that game also puts you through as a player:

and also the frankly disturbing execution scene, where you briefly play a deposed moderate Arabic leader who is driven through a non specific middle eastern town in revolt only to be tied to a post and executed, all of this performed from a first person perspective with you the player in control of the camera:

The difference here being that the player is performing his own death within the narrative of the game.  There is a strange friction created by the inherent elements of the First Person Shooter and this heavily narrative implicated death sequence (or sequences as Modern Warfare 2 does it at least four if not five times). So ‘winning’ and progressing through the game seals the fate of the characters as their deaths are inevitably programmed into the narrative.  The performance of death is on the one hand trivialized and also at the same time given great weight, on youtube you can find tribute videos made to the fallen character soldiers of the game, which are similar in timbre to the tribute video made for real life fallen soldiers both informed by similar aesthetics. 

The in game deaths that are embedded into the narrative implicate the player in their performance.  The player still retains control of the camera and to some degree motions of the character but is also inevitably led towards their character’s death.  So the dying undergone when trying to progress through the level is not real death, it isn’t finite, because in Call of Duty death is finite when tied into narrative development and emotional progression of the game.

I’m personally a bit torn by this, on the one hand its quite a powerful narrative device that I remember quite clearly experiencing, on the other hand it lends itself to a strange perception of war related casualties.  The high levels of casualties that the generic ‘mujahedin’ characters sustain in a landscape suspiciously devoid of civilians raises some interesting questions about representation of death, comparing the disposable death of the nameless ‘bad guys’ and glorification of the heroic narrative led ‘good guy’.  It’s a shame that these games in no way engage with the other half of the premise that raise.  Death does have a consequence, and when performed by the player is a subversion of the traditional victory achievement: your reward for succeeding at this level is a bit of narrative where you are killed..

These games’ key mechanics are the distribution or reception of death, the use of narrative allows for these to be embedded and perhaps justified or at least contextualized in their representation.  What about game systems whose key mechanics are life.  The Sims for example a game where you maintain a family of Sims, keeping them alive rather than dead.  They can die, but the key emergent features of the narratives rely on their surviving.

there are 18 ways in which a Sim can die and perhaps the most touching and genuinely moving is the last one, dieing of old age, the grim reaper appears along with a suitcase packed and invites the Sim to gently go into go into that good night.  There is something pathetic and futile about the other deaths shown, the mundane ness (apart from the woman eaten by the giant plant or the satellite falling on the stargazer) of it all makes it strangely moving and tragic, in a way that the deaths shown in the action gun toting games weren’t.  The death of the Sims contextualized as existing only within their own imaginary society lacks the piggybacking narrative punch of a Modern Warfare, but in the process gains a true life like sadness.

What then does it mean to perform one’s own death digitally or in a game system?  There is a friction between perceived ideas of life and ‘living’ and digital media, let alone game playing.  In Second Life, an online community where participants create their own online identities and play out ‘lives’ devoid of a game context of any kind (Second Life has no aim, you just ‘are’) there is a struggle with how to accommodate real life death.  Here a woman talks of her grandfather who she taught to use Second Life dying but their choice to maintain his Avatar (his digital identity that presumably can still be played) a strange immortality in a world where a bizarrely large amount of people choose to represent themselves as cartoon foxes. 

The article also mentions a charity setting up a counter that updates the amount of children who have died of poverty since second world was created.  A powerful reminder of the constant friction between digital identity and performance and the mortality and passing of real life.

In performance we talk of the live moment of the performer on stage being a reminder to its watchers of their own mortality.  To watch live performance is to watch the disappearing body, to be acutely aware of shared time passing, and mortality slipping.  It’s a beautiful way to think of performance.  Where does this concept sit in relation to the moment of live interaction.  As makers of interactive work the presence of the audience/player creates the exchange needed for the work to exist, where is the mortality in the act of participation?  For me it is heightened even more as the moment in which we participate is shared and finite in a way that observed performance is not.  By becoming and being we chose to live no longer as observers but as living components of the work, which has the potential to immortalize the moment as well as remind us of its passing once the interaction itself is finished and slips further away with time.  By participating in the digital, the artificial and the simulated we are reminded of the live moment of mortality precisely because we are engaging in its alternative, making the ‘live more live’.  I don’t use the term ‘live’ through some fetishistic attachment to live performance, for me that whole argument died a long time ago but rather in relation to our representations of death.

Death in the live event holds a powerful theoretical hold, that can lead to the conclusion that all live performance is at its core about death.  In a way I agree, but that does also mean all art becomes about death, and in many ways all that we do reminds us of our own mortality.  Is this where escapism comes in?  Games are often written off or justified as escapism.  ‘Its not real violence its just escapism’, ‘games can’t be about important things they’re just escapism’.  As arguments go its about as effective as saying people only go to the theatre or watch films to be entertained.  And although some do, and some games can be about escapism, they can and should be about so much more, I mean even Hairspray’s fundamentally about race once you get past the shiny white teeth. 

So how do we begin to deal with the idea of death in configurable media and systems?  In my pervasive game Sniper’s Alley, I ended up using a game system heavily influenced by some research I did on Sarajevo years ago.  In the game a hidden sniper is monitoring civilians trying to get from a starting zone to a safe zone carrying their shopping bags.  This is influenced narratively (although loosely) on situations where market lines and civilians were repeatedly attacked by Serbs laying siege to the city.  When a sniper gets a target in his binoculars he calls out the name of the target (fake game allocated names written on large signs the civilians are wearing) down a phone to the game master.  The game master in turn rolls a dice to determine the result of the sniper hit, if it kills the civilian outright or if it simply injures them, there is a 2 in 6 chance that they will be killed and the other four would mean the loss of an arm or a leg, which means they have to react accordingly, not use the corresponding leg or arm.  This will I imagine create some pretty intense play for the civilians coming under fire, the way that they use cover, and what they do once they are hit  Likewise for the sniper, although the game is fun and not meant to have an overbearing moral flavor, the choice of finishing off the injured player and the immersive nature of the role (binoculars and hidden position) might well lead to some difficult decision making.  This is further compacted by the use of the human shields.  They are dressed in U.N blue and are there to shield the civilians.  Killing one of them results in a larger point deduction from the sniper, meant to symbolize global opinion, media frenzy, and the biased weight given to life in a war zone.  This in turn will hopefully create an interesting friction amongst the civilian team whose lives are more expendable than those of the U.N shields, and for the sniper again in his decision or not to shoot them.

Like most non digital games Sniper’s Alley relies on a certain amount of abstraction to create its mechanics and its representation.  An equivalent digital game would be difficult.  Sniper games or missions involving snipers tend to involve a lot of sneaking, but the actual shooting mechanics and the targets themselves are generally Nazis or othersuch bad guys.  In Sniper’s Alley there is a clear moral dilemma dressed up in interpersonal interaction.  In the right context the game could even serve as an educational L.A.R.P although I wouldn’t recommend it. In board games or systems that are more open than those traditionally presented by digital media the representation and undertaking of death, both delivered and performed, is generally executed in abstraction the result allowing for a detached immersion in both the gameplay and meta narrative. 

In his essay on table top wargaming Matthew Kirschenbaum talks eloquently about the table top wargame as an emergent and procedural system of narrative creation.  That the rules allow for emergent narrative and gameplay (non determined paths unlike many digital games which tend to limit you to a series of structures) and by participating in their procedurality the player in turn becomes implicit in the flow of the narrative the game creates.  The execution of death as well as the performance of it by the player is undertaken in a transparent and procedural manner, you can see the dice roll, and calculate the outcome, are implicit in your unit’s demise.  Although the performance of death itself is highly abstracted the system of table top gaming allows for an emotional and narrative connection precisely through the abstraction and the act of performing the procedural steps necessary in the creation of the procedural game play.  The large scale hegemony of war gaming’s impersonal units on the large expanse of hexagonal battle fields is later resolved by the use of heroes or characters; individual models and figures with their own rule set and characteristics which in turn led to the creation of the seminal RPG (role playing game) dungeons and dragons, where the player character connection can become almost umbilical through repeated play and long campaigns.  Here crucially the death of a character or player is shared event, contextualized through play and dialogue.

Is the performance of death attributed with greater weight through its liveness or does the perceived immersion of the digital system allow for death and its performance to be more affecting to its player?  Well I think neither.  I think a key issue at play is the idea of representation over enaction.  Controversy surrounding games and polemic opinion is often a matter of representation and contextualization of death.  In the infamous Airport Scene a slightly belligerent youtuber commented on how if the scene was set in America the game would never have been made.  The controversy surrounding ‘real war’ games such as 6Days in Fallujhah is primarily concerned with the representation of the death of real soldiers.  Does the representation of death in Call of Duty trivialize death, no, does it trivialize the death of the ‘other’ the anonymous generic foreign combatant at the other end of an M16, yes.  Can a game such as We All Had Names, mentioned in previous posts, represent the death of 6million Jews in a manner that both appropriate, sensitive and correctly weighted?  These are the concerns expressed over representations of death within narratives that are in some way owned.

We, as a society and specific groups within that society feel a sense of ownership over certain narratives and by proxy over those deaths and the manner in which they should be represented, a similar ethos as demonstrated by some American Media on 9/11 denying the existence of people jumping from the twin towers, as a representation of death that did not fit within the narrative of the day.  The manner in which a game deals with these deaths is a sensitive subject, and the ever present friction of success/failure, death/life in digital games makes for an interesting reading of these events.  This is why the Call of Duty paradigm of narrative performed death is relevant: a rewriting of the association of dearth in combat with failure, and rather death in combat as heroism, accompanied by appropriately soaring string sections and camera work.

But what of the gentler death, the quieter death?  The one that doesn’t happen in a hail of bullets and gunfire, the one that resembles our own deaths a lot more.  Narratives, be they books, films or simply stories we are told, have almost always structured themselves around death.  The death of a beloved character can be moving on every watching, can make us consider our own death, or that of others.  To procedurally participate in that process, by pressing the arrow button in the passage, rolling the dice, or simply playing the game for long enough implicates us in a different way than a game whose key mechanic is violence.  By participating in the game as an act of play and performance we participate in the death of the avatar willingly in the same way we know the ill movie star will probably die by the end of the film, but we still commit to his story.  These games of life allow us to contemplate and perform death cushioned by the artificial and simulation, because in play as the pixels die we become aware of our own cells living.

And as for the mainstream market that keeps into trouble with games like Manhunt, the conversation sadly keeps getting caught up in talk of censorship and moral equity.  In a game market so semiotically focused on death, it’s a shame that energies are being spent thinking about new and excitingly disgusting ways to kill enemies rather than what the killing itself means.  It’s not a question about whether you can show those things, of course you can, but its whether you should.