Grinn's Game Archive

15th February 2012

Post with 1 note

Meaningful Death

When I’m into an online FPS EVERYTHING else I try and play in the evenings ends up getting a major detour through a few hours of man-shoot du jour.  I’m still stuck on Battlefield 3 so that’s what I ve been doing the past two hours.  I say stuck because that’s exactly how sitting down in front of BF3 feels.  There were a few days of honeymoon happiness where I marvelled at the fluid movement, vaulting over railings and creates - gawking over splitering crates and bits of paper bursting into its blue skies at the gentle touch of my suppressed M4.

Now it annoys me, 80% of the time - but I still sit here and get mesmerized - no - strung along, by its deft fingers.  I could probably list the mechanisms interacting with my demands and needs, but that would bore the living hamster out of me, so I’ll focus instead on the constructive:  what would turn an otherwise affective engine into a the experience I desire?

Although there are several things I look for in my FPS-soulmate there is one that underlies most: MAKE ME GIVE A SHIT ABOUT DYING. 

If there is a common design element in FPSs I appreciate, or actually, a lack thereof it is this: their mechanics do not reward looping spawn-sprint-die cycles.  I don’t neccesarily get punished for dying, or have to wait till the round is over to spawn - I simply don’t want to be encouraged to run into a mess of projectiles and exploding penguins to try and accomplish said objective.  Games such as BF3 and MW3 reward this sort of behaviour by increasingly assigning more points to working towards objectives.  Great for the team vs team game - not so great for the random individual plus random individual equation. 

For someone with a competitive streak such as myself, ignoring the score is an uphill struggle - and one I know I will lose within a few deaths. 

I want to care that I die.  I want there to be a tactical, ludic and emotional penalty for having been killed so that I take the game more seriously.  Why?  Well probably because I prize the sense of being in the environment more than the satisfaction of winning for a team of people I don’t know or give a damn about and for that feeling of incorporation to occur I need to take the spatial, ludic and control dimensions fo the game seriously.  I need to feel like every street corner is a danger - an obstacle - an important cramping of my agency in the game. That corner becomes then imbued with more spatial meaning than simply a boundary to run beyond - die - respawn and run beyond again. 

After the novelty of the frilly bits wears off, the game sessions need to be meaningful for me to feel good about having engaged with them.  And no set of actions can be meaningful if those actions do not each bear the possibility of a meaningful consequence both positive and negative. 

()