61 Frames Per Second

While we were on break, Ludwig Kietzmann over at Joystiq raised an interesting question about the nature of games, elaborating on a point made earlier this month by Penny Arcade's Tycho here. The basic idea is that death in games is an outmoded convention that often makes games frustrating for no reason other than because that's the way it's always been done. Prince of Persia is the game that has raised these questions.

Basically, Prince of Persia provides you with a cute sidekick that rescues you when you're about to die. From what I understand, it's relatively easy to complete the game without dying. It's a seamless, spawnless jaunt through a wonderland begging to be discovered through your character's physics-defying acrobatics. So why are people complaining?

I'll start with Tycho's point, since he was first: 

Prince of Persia is incredibly easy, too easy in my opinion, but I don't think it's easy for the reasons people are saying. It's true that your mysterious witch friend Elika can save you from harm, either from a platforming misstep or from poor combat performance. They're both failure states, in any event, which is to say deaths: they just decided to automate the process of loading from save. This is similar to the philosophy behind Final Fantasy XII, as expressed by our own Gabriel: if all I'm going to do is select attack from a menu, why shouldn't it handle that part?  There are people this doesn't work for.  For example, there are players who demand a very clear, even brutal framework to establish a metrics of reward and disaster. I'll just type the words "corpse run," and leave it at that.

For those of you who don't know, a corpse run happens when your RPG avatar dies and you spend twenty minutes running through dungeons defenseless until you can find the loot your corpse dropped. It's a really silly mechanic when you think about it, and certainly doesn't add anything to the game.

Here's Ludwig:

The truth is, Toad doesn't lay down a wreath in front of that bottomless pit that swallowed Mario and forever concealed his body. Rather weirdly, nobody in the world seems to remember nor acknowledge when the main character meets his demise. To them, it never happened. Thanks to the omnipotent, extra-dimensional save and checkpoint gods, the hero's demise is erased from the timeline, his body safely deposited out of harm's way.

And the money quote: 

When examined in this way, Prince of Persia's life-saving companion character isn't particularly innovative -- she's a glorified checkpoint with a plunging neckline. 

Bingo. I agree completely. Game death, as it's usually handled, should have died along with coin-ops. Death was a way to make the player put more money into the machine. So why are games still operating on this premise, decades later? Ubisoft found a clever way to avoid hours of annoying repetition. Let the curmudgeonly oldies complain about Prince of Persia's ease of use. This is the future, and we're better off for it. 

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