Made World

What better way is there to better understand the world but to build a new one?

“We don’t want absolutely real situations in videogames. We can get that at home”

Steven Poole (Author Trigger Happy; The inner life of videogames 2000)

Games don’t have to be real, they just have to be consistent.

Enemies respawn, regenerate, you yourself as character get to retry. Isaac Clarke is torn limb from limb by a necromorph with spiked tits on its head, you just go back to the save point and watch it happen all over again. So really the only incentive you have for not letting the character die is progression of the game. Life on the other hand; has no reset button. Life in games is cheap because it’s not your own and it’s infinite. Games today don’t really have lives systems like Mario, no continues, you just keep going until it’s done. So the life of the avatar really means nothing, and even less so of the enemies as if you start the level again they just come back as if nothing happened.

Health bars are a division of real and unreal, real people don’t have health bars, if we get shot dependant on where we are hit we either die instantly or are severely injured. In most games regardless of where you’re hit usually the same amount of health is subtracted and this doesn't usually register in the characters movement or mannerisms but in the case of resident evil and some others upon reaching the limits of health the character may limp or something to that effect. Characters in games can go days without sleep, fall off cliffs with minor injuries, survive bullets to the head or use painkillers to treat death.

Soul calibur for instance as a fighting game is strange as the characters use weapons and a kick can register in the same amount of health lost as a strike from a sword.

Fallout 3 is quite a good evolution on this because you can get shot in the leg and limp or in the arm and it effects your aim or hit in the head and lose some sight or hearing. Although this is realistic, it still isn't real. I remember an Interview with Todd Howard the game director at Bethesda and he was talking about heads exploding when they were shot in Fallout he said something to the effect that when the heads explode the eyes get bigger and the idea is; it is gruesome but in a cartoony silly sort of way rather than an ‘I shot Marvin in the face’ pulp fiction kind of way. 

What he’s trying to say is that he understands that games have to have a separation of some sort from reality otherwise you could really be desensitizing people to actual violence.

I don’t imagine when games designers want to know what a head sounds or looks like when it explodes they go buy some cadavers and take them to the gun range. I don’t want to know what it actually looks or sounds or feels like to blow someone’s head off I just want to have fun without needing therapy after. This makes me think that games designers aren't necessarily trying to glorify violence, but moreover trying to make sense of it.

Part of that is just understanding that it is a game, if we went into a film under the pretence that everything that happened was real that could be really damaging; just knowing something isn’t real sets a barrier in our minds that protects us from mental harm.

The point I'm trying to make is the real and the unreal intersect in games but there’s always a line drawn, and we constantly draw back to that sense of what’s real and what isn't because otherwise we’d lose grasp of reality. Although games allow us to venture into the unreal we should always leave a trail of bread crumbs to find our way back.