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Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

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Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#31

Post by 0359B02149AB »

slimsag wrote: post #5

Over the past five years, I've been actively researching game-development. The truth is that everything you see in-game is faked in one way or another. Faking things is _really really hard_. Realistic death doesn't tie into the general character animation model because they're skeletal-based animations and not physical ones (again, fake). When rag-doll physics is employed the skeletal-based animated body is simply sw…

> Death for you _is_ a binary switch, and once you're gone, you are gone. Games do a good job portraying that.

Yea, I think this culture is way too obsessed with the idea of binary opposites. It's just as hard to demonstrate that what seems like two distinct and opposing things are actually the same thing, and it's just that you've allowed yourself to grow into this mind that believes otherwise. You can see every life as something that is in a constant decay towards death, and you can see everything that has decayed to contribute to the creation of new life. Stars don't have life or death, yet we come from them. At some point our own complexity perplexes us, and is that where we draw the line?

As someone who has as well, dealt with more thinking about death than most people ever will in their life, I don't know if I'll ever see how I see things get expressed in a video game. I just don't think it's capable of being expressed.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#32

Post by jhallenworld »

amelius wrote: post #11

I wish real life had the concept of "savegames".

Read the Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard Morgan for some interesting ideas about this. In them, you can back up your mind and switch it to different bodies. If you get killed, you can restore your last backup but you lose any memories from then on.

Where do these bodies come from? Well one form of punishment is where they back up your mind and sell off your body (why waste it?)... When you get out of prison, you end up with a different body. Bodies are expensive, so getting out is only viable if you are rich.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#34

Post by manachar »

> Video Games have gradually turned death, the most (only?) influential and thought-provoking aspect of human existence, into a nearly-unexamined cliché.

Death? That thing that happens to everybody and everything (except for that one weird jellyfish). That thing that's is random (oh look, a brick just fell off the truck in front on me and it went through a car window immediately snuffing out the passenger's life), capricious (childhood cancer?), and just plain everyday (most people eat other animals on a daily basis).

Additionally, if you look at history you'll see that attitudes towards death vary greatly. From celebrations of the dead, to fear of the dead, to just a shrug.

Meanwhile you have video games that play with the idea of death and destruction, just like much of Indo-European epics have for millennia.

God of War has you killing the gods and everything in your path, including innocents. All because you killed your family.

Super Meat Boy has a brilliant scene when you first get to the afterlife and you see thousands of copies of you raining down into a hellscape. I didn't count, but as the game keeps track of how many times you've died, I wouldn't be surprised if it's raining the dead versions of all your failures.

Then there's the really disturbing (in the good way) take of Binding of Isaac or Braid or Limbo. Even mainstream games like Final Fantasy will play with it.

Video games are great for exploring the ideas of death and life. Sometimes they treat it sadly, sometimes is relatively inconsequential, and sometimes it can even be humorous. Honestly, I find they treat death better than most other mediums.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#35

Post by anonymfus »

breadbox wrote: post #12
slimsag wrote: post #5

Over the past five years, I've been actively researching game-development. The truth is that everything you see in-game is faked in one way or another. Faking things is _really really hard_. Realistic death doesn't tie into the general character animation model because they're skeletal-based animations and not physical ones (again, fake). When rag-doll physics is employed the skeletal-based animated body is simply sw…

> It's sentences like these that make me think the author has completely neglected the technical and financial difficulty of game development. I tend to disagree. If the creators (and/or the players) thought it was important to portray death more accurately, effort would go into it. Look at the effort that goes into boob physics. The fact that that's even a term shows that video game writers are more than willing to…

Mortal Kombat is example of game series where significant effort was spent on death scenes ("fatalities").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatality_(Mortal_Kombat)

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#36

Post by agumonkey »

fixermark wrote: post #9

At a fundamental level, video games are about control---what you can control and how, when, in what contexts. It is the interactivity of the game media that separates it from other media. Death acts as a convenient lose-state because it's at first approximation a loss of control---transitioning from life to death (for a player-controlled avatar) is transitioning from a state where you can control an aspect of the wor…

Your comment reminds me of that novel www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#38

Post by vezzy-fnord »

astine wrote: post #13
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling to observe any consistency on your part. You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal. We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it. The implication being that the drive to achieve immortality and/or extend lifespans is some recent phenomenon that emerged in the last century, which is patently false, and that trying to reason abou…

You say we are hypersensitized to death, yet also think it's not a big deal. The GP didn't say that we think death is no big deal, he said that we are attempting to convince ourselves that it is no big deal. We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it. You have the causality backwards. In addition, I'm skeptical of your implication that the rate of emotional sensitivity to d…

My first statement was admittedly ambiguous: I meant that the GP implies that the figurative "we" think it's not a big deal from his position, not that the GP themselves think that.

We are disconnected from death, and in doing so we are trying to solve its disputed problem? Doesn't seem to be the case, as human desire for immortality is quite ancient, precisely because of how visible death was.

As for the last statement, the GP contradicted themselves w.r.t. whether we are desensitized or hypersensitized in the beginning and end of their post, respectively.

Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality

#39

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

I dunno, I feel the games are cherry-picked. For example, just off the top of my head, "The Last of Us" had a great death scene right in the intro. And for that matter, people still talk about Aeris dying in FF7. These are super mainstream, blockbuster games so I'm not sure that the thesis is valid.
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