I wish real life had the concept of "savegames".
Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#12Over 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 work on simulating things that are _really hard_ if they think it will sell games.
The fact that it wouldn't is the point.
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#13Movies, TV, games...they all desensitize us (everyday Americans, at least) to death, or a certain view of it, in so many ways. Yet, we're all (soldiers excluded) incredibly disconnected to death, to the point where we're actually trying to solve the problem of death. As if it's something we can logically reason out of our lives with science and medicine. Seems like 100 years ago, people were dying a lot, all the time…
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.
We are trying to solve the problem of death, yet in doing so we are disconnected to it.
In addition, I'm skeptical of your implication that the rate of emotional sensitivity to death increases with more exposure to it. It should be the opposite.
The GP's argument is that because we as a society are less connected to death that we are therefore more afraid of it than ever, that the commonality of death in the 1800s made it something less fearful, more banal, to them than to us.
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#14I was really hoping Dark Souls was one of his examples. The game incorporates its own take on death/mortality in a way that no other game touches upon. It's also brutally hard and death is actually expected part of the experience; often you can't get past an area without dying first and in a few sequence, you have to die to advance the story.
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#15My goodness, so much rambling (excuse my bluntness). I really tried to find a single thought of value in the piece; I failed. It is literally void of content, except for the names of some games in which you can die.
Indeed, he fails to come to any point at all..
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#16but what if the human playing the game is not kill?
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#17I think it's a personal thing that can't be applied generally. I find a lot of the death in video games very disturbing and not casual at all. I think all you have to do is look at the right things to see it.
With games being more complex and having higher budgets for things like special effects and voice acting, killing people isn't just making some pixels disappear. Take for example using a corrosive gun against a human in Borderlands, or shooting a bad guy with a fire arrow in Tomb Raider (the most recent one): Killing enemies this way usually involve them dying slowly as they are corroded away or burned alive. There are voice actors who act out horrible agonizing death rattles for that (in both instances, there is an initial painful scream, a second of panicked realization, then horrible screaming for seconds afterwards). Animators had to make people writhe around in agony as they slowly die. Game designers made a conscious choice about how they would proceed with the deaths of people - these things have costs and I would imagine they aren't small.
More obviously with Tomb Raider: there are some horribly gruesome death sequences for Lara if you mess up. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen her get impaled, or crushed, or shot and all of the deaths are horrible and disturbing. Every time, I've felt it, and thought about how horrible it must be to die that way. I don't think I can really ask for more from a video game when it comes to expressing death, while still making a game enjoyable to play.
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#18I am an avid gamer and I think about death all the time. If you were to actually take anything from games, you would realize how fragile life really is.
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#19Over 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…
I disagree with the part you quoted too. First of all, games are art form, they're not purely money driven, and some are not even tech driven, but they drive tech.
Secondly, games were experimenting a lot with death. It used to be that your character just fell and disappeared. Then you could wound or chop off its limbs. It would die differently when shot than when falling, etc.
Heck, Dwarf Fortress actually does simulate arrows penetrating internal organs and its consequences in great detail.
The ultimate reason why games portray death in simplified, binary way is the same as reason why movies portray death in simplified, binary way - because if you went into gory details of last moments of a person with a lung punctured by a bullet, desperately trying to catch a breath while slowly bleeding out, calling out to his god or his family, your player would freak out and probably puke. That is assuming that you'd be allowed to sell the game in the first place.
Games and movies are meant to be enjoyable, not disturbing, so death is always simplified, unless there's a strong reason to go into details.
Re: Death is not the end: video games wrecked my idea of mortality
#20I think the author missed the most obvious point. Let me copy what I originally wrote in a subthread:
The ultimate reason why games portray death in simplified, binary way is the same as reason why movies portray death in simplified, binary way - because if you went into gory details of last moments of a person with a lung punctured by a bullet, desperately trying to catch a breath while slowly bleeding out, calling out to his god or his family, your player would freak out and probably puke. That is assuming that you'd be allowed to sell the game in the first place.
Games and movies are meant to be enjoyable, not disturbing, so death is always simplified, unless there's a strong reason to go into details.