Adventure Gamers - Forums

The main problem with death in adventure games is that the fear of dying only comes from losing progress, because dying in itself is typically of no consequence within the game world, and is trivialised even further by the ability to save/load at any time.

The only exception I can think of right now is Heavy Rain, where the death of a character meant something because the story would continue without them and change as a result.

The typical death/reload scenario in old adventure games creates more frustration than tension because there’s no weight or meaning to it. So no, I don’t miss it.

People are going to think that I have a axe to grind with Roberta Williams (I don’t, and I respect and enjoyed some of her work), but I really want to discuss that rock puzzle, because it epitomizes everything that’s wrong with that design philosophy.

The situation is as follows: the rock sits on a slope. If you push it (or pull it, it acts the same way) from below, it rolls downhill and crushes you. If you do it from above, you’re OK. The catch, however, is that the screen is very purposefully drawn so that you cannot know there’s a slope.

This is not about freedom to screw up: this is about Roberta Williams being a cunt. This is about her saying to the player: “This is the second screen in the game, and I’m showing you my power. I’m showing you that I can kill you whenever I want, however arbitrarily I want — because I’m the designer. I’m not a friendly storyteller guiding your steps along the way. I’m not your opponent in a fair battle of wits. I’m an all-powerful tyrant who’s going to abuse her power at every turn to prevent you from succeeding. That is the only rule of the game. But hey, if after a few weeks or months of getting stuck and dying and restarting, you manage to finish the game, I guess you’ll feel proud of yourself!”

I’m deeply convinced that when people say that they enjoy that unfair, punishing school of design, it’s just Stockholm syndrome speaking.

Oscar - 25 July 2012 11:40 PM

Annacat - 25 July 2012 11:25 PM

What you don’t seem to be understanding is that what people see as challenging versus just a pointless irritation varies from person to person and always will, so you’ll never “convince” people to share what are really just preferences.

It’s funny no one said that to Ron Gilbert when he wrote his article, but well said. It’s still fun to discuss though, isn’t it?

I’d actually be very surprised if NO ONE expressed some level of disagreement to him. Did you ask him about it before making that assumption?

One reason that, while I am not opposed to death as a consequence of game actions, I oppose making it substantially punishing (i.e. I think there should be an auto-restore) is because you generally CAN’T say that it just forces people to be careful, so they can avoid it. (Unless you define “being careful” as “saving a lot”, which is an action external to the game itself, IMHO.)

If doing dangerous stuff can lead to death, people WILL die, they will HAVE to, because I have never encountered a game with potentially dangerous situations where you are NEVER required to take actions that seem dangerous. If you are uniformly cautious, you probably won’t be able to finish the game. You generally HAVE to take risks that you wouldn’t in “real life” at some point. Often the only way to determine with certainty which of those risks is necessary to complete the game, and which will kill you, is to try them. That’s fine, for some genres of games, but to insist that the result of such failure MUST be a loss of all progress from the last time you thought to save in order for it to be “challenging” or “dramatic” is to propose a rather narrow and arbitrary definition of challenge or drama, IMHO.

Kurufinwe - 26 July 2012 12:58 AM

I’m deeply convinced that when people say that they enjoy that unfair, punishing school of design, it’s just Stockholm syndrome speaking.

Well, you have a point with the rock “puzzle” but I think once again it comes down to taste. It’s a one-dimensional view to say that the only purpose of deaths like that is to establish the dominance of the developer over the player, and nothing else. The fact is, some of us enjoy stuff like that. Even though that particular death is stupid, it and others like it add a level of interactivity with the environment, and they can be amusing in some strange way. You can go to youtube and find dozens of adventure game death scene montages. Clearly those people thought they were entertaining. That’s not masochism. Personally I find people who enjoy endlessly long dialogues and excessively talky games masochistic, but that’s only because I dislike them.
~
Anyway thanks for all the replies. I think I’ve learnt the issue is way more complex than I portrayed it. Deaths aren’t all good or all bad - there are positives to having deaths and not having them, negatives to removing them or keeping them. It depends on the game, the type of puzzle, the way it’s designed and a bunch of other factors, and most of all the type of player you are.

Mister Ed - 26 July 2012 10:17 AM

One reason that, while I am not opposed to death as a consequence of game actions, I oppose making it substantially punishing (i.e. I think there should be an auto-restore) is because you generally CAN’T say that it just forces people to be careful, so they can avoid it. (Unless you define “being careful” as “saving a lot”, which is an action external to the game itself, IMHO.)

If doing dangerous stuff can lead to death, people WILL die, they will HAVE to, because I have never encountered a game with potentially dangerous situations where you are NEVER required to take actions that seem dangerous. If you are uniformly cautious, you probably won’t be able to finish the game. You generally HAVE to take risks that you wouldn’t in “real life” at some point. Often the only way to determine with certainty which of those risks is necessary to complete the game, and which will kill you, is to try them. That’s fine, for some genres of games, but to insist that the result of such failure MUST be a loss of all progress from the last time you thought to save in order for it to be “challenging” or “dramatic” is to propose a rather narrow and arbitrary definition of challenge or drama, IMHO.

My response would be that the clever game will give you hints what will be successful and what will get you killed. That’s why I said AG deaths are rarely arbitrary, though that KQ puzzle and that list of KQ5 deaths seem to be. You should be able to examine a ladder and realize it’s unsafe and the better approach is to climb the wall using your rope, or if you examine the wall and it says “the rock is slippery” realize that would get you killed and you should find another approach. You should be rewarded for careful examination of things.

I was thinking about the psychological aspect, and you know this is interesting because it can apply to other genres as well. When I watch my friends getting together to play FPS games over LAN they try to avoid death like crazy, even though there’s no real consequence and they are dropped back where they were before. I don’t know what the psychology is behind that, or whether it applies to adventure games - I guess you could do an large scale experiment comparing two groups playing the same game, one with permanent deaths and a save function and one with autosaves just before all deaths. Does one group have more tension than the other, or does one group get more satisfaction on finishing the game?

Fien - 26 July 2012 11:41 AM

When my game is automatically saved before a possible death, I no longer see it as dying. It becomes a puzzle which is automatically reset. An example is the snake at the beginning of Congo: Descent into Zinj.

What about when you deliberately choose to save before a possible death? Do you see that as dying?

It seems almost exactly functionally equivalent to me, only eliminating several annoying breaks in the game for saving whenever a situation seems perilous (and periodically otherwise, just in case the game does a poor job of telegraphing that fact at times).

I don’t mind death. I do mind losing a bunch of progress when I die. And having to constantly save to avoid that ruins my immersion far more than any lessening of the sense of peril from an auto-save function. But that’s just my view of the matter, I know.

The funny thing is, I suspect that even people that seem to be disagreeing in this thread would actually enjoy a lot of the same games, death or no death, and find a lot of the same poorly designed death puzzles annoying, and likely save their games just as often, too, to avoid the harsh penalties of game ending deaths.

Personally, I don’t find death as a consequence nearly as frustrating as situations where you have failed the game, but have no way of knowing it. If I get killed, I usually learn that that was an incorrect choice, and can restore and move on, using that knowledge (even though I think that you should never have a case where the ONLY way to figure out the right course of action is through that sort of process of elimination). When I do something (or fail to do something) which makes it somehow impossible to win the game, but the game doesn’t make that clear (or only makes it clear MUCH later on, when it is too late to do anything about it) THAT’S when I feel the urge to punch the game designer, once I figure that out (sometimes only possible by reading a walkthrough, because whatever you did wrong isn’t made clear, and you are left with the impression that you are simply stuck because you don’t know what to do next). Thankfully, that sort of thing is all but nonexistent nowadays.

Mister Ed - 26 July 2012 12:20 PM

Personally, I don’t find death as a consequence nearly as frustrating as situations where you have failed the game, but have no way of knowing it. If I get killed, I usually learn that that was an incorrect choice, and can restore and move on, using that knowledge (even though I think that you should never have a case where the ONLY way to figure out the right course of action is through that sort of process of elimination). When I do something (or fail to do something) which makes it somehow impossible to win the game, but the game doesn’t make that clear (or only makes it clear MUCH later on, when it is too late to do anything about it) THAT’S when I feel the urge to punch the game designer, once I figure that out (sometimes only possible by reading a walkthrough, because whatever you did wrong isn’t made clear, and you are left with the impression that you are simply stuck because you don’t know what to do next). Thankfully, that sort of thing is all but nonexistent nowadays.

Yes. Definitely. Dead ends are a monstrosity. Which is why I dislike alternative endings and “choices games” where you make a significant choice in the game and it takes you to a different ending. I don’t want that. I know they’re trying to make the player choices meaningful, but it always feels there’s a wrong and right choice and after you’ve made the wrong choice it’s the same effect as a dead end.

Mister Ed - 26 July 2012 12:20 PM

Fien - 26 July 2012 11:41 AM

When my game is automatically saved before a possible death, I no longer see it as dying. It becomes a puzzle which is automatically reset. An example is the snake at the beginning of Congo: Descent into Zinj.

What about when you deliberately choose to save before a possible death? Do you see that as dying?

The difference is the player is involved, even if it’s by the save function. It’s the feeling that “gee, if I died there I would have failed in my quest and lost all my progress! - lucky i have that saved game” that makes the death feel permanent and much more serious. Autosave and autorestore feels very different, since there’s no consequence at all. Technically it’s the same effect if you save right before the death, but in practice the effect on the player is very different.

rtrooney - 26 July 2012 08:56 PM

OK! Death in early AGs was arbitrary. Nobody liked the SESO option because it got in the way of playing the game. But it was what it was. You had no choice. Oscar is of the opinion that careful observation could eliminate death. Eg, there’s a slippery wall, so trying to climb it with my rope might result in death. I have NEVER seen a game scenario that offered that depth of information. So I consider it a nice thought, but irrelevant.

>examine river
“The current is strong and the river looks too deep to cross”
>cross river
“You drown and have died in the swirling currents”


This was very common, at least in the older days and NOT just in text games. Legend Entertainment’s games did this kind of thing particularly well. How many games have you played exactly?