Fuck everything. I wrote a post long enough to cover two screens before I just deleted everything. So let's try doing this again, but shorter. The article was confusing enough that I thought I hated the writer, but in truth I agree with him on some things. My mind kept ping-ponging between "he doesn't understand shit, how can he be so dense?" and "fuck me, he understands after all, time to delete 4 paragraphs".
First off you use the Wikipedia definition of permadeath for some incomprehensible reason (not wanting to make horribly offensive statements? what?
hard to explain without all the videogame baggage? I wonder why? Could be because it's a videogame term, hmm!).
And you use this wikipedia definition, but it's not appropriate because it's
FUCKING WRONG for this context.
In role-playing video games (RPGs), permanent death (sometimes permadeath or PD) is a situation in which player characters (PCs) die permanently and are removed from the game.[1] … This is in contrast to games in which characters who are killed (or incapacitated) can be restored to life (or full health), often at some minor cost to the character.
That ^ is not what permadeath is about in roguelikes at all, and I'm surprised you could make such an obvious mistake. Permadeath is when the game ends and the save is deleted. DONE.
In the first draft I ranted on and on about you claiming that Tetris has permadeath. Let's put it shorter: it doesn't. Games are played, and then they end. Whether it's short games (Tetris), slightly longer games (Nethack) or long games (Xenogears). The player will reach the game-over or credits screen, and then the game is done.
The writer doesn't "get" why people like/dislike permadeath in singleplayer games, because not having permadeath cancels out your actions having any meaning in the face of player persistance. The article is confusing as fuck, with improper use of the term "permadeath" just about everywhere, but I agree with this statement! Not having permadeath cancels out your actions having any meaning in the face of player persistance!
He claims that this mandates permadeath though;
[...]you should understand that if you’re dismissing permadeath, you’re dismissing the single-player strategy game altogether.
I'm not sure how to feel about that, because it's not always true.
[this is the only important bit, really. sorry]I divide games into four categories, personally:
A)Yes, you could grind to ultimate power in a singleplayer RPG like oblivion, quickloading at every setback...
But when you kill the final boss the credits roll all the same. You can choose not to end the game by playing like it's a sandbox game (read: masturbation-type gaming). But whether you end the game at level 1 or 100 is the player's choice; the road he travels. The game that he plays, his way. And that's a freedom that the player should have, probably. This is a modern type of videogame where players are offered a variety of experiences to take in prior to ending the game at their choice.
B)A game like Half-life lets you control fate just like Oblivion, except that here your resources are finite. It's not a sandbox this time around, and the only way to progress is forward. This is exactly the same as above, except that the experience is more tightly controlled by the designer. Also a relatively modern form of gaming.
C)REAL games like Tetris/Pac-man/Touhou/Rogue put you in a situation where not giving any input (or in the case of roguelikes giving a repeated input of one step north, one step south) will have you reach the GAME OVER scenario. The game is actively trying to end the game-state one way, whereas the player is actively trying to reach the other game-over state (ie the credits rolling instead of the game over screen). The oldest form of gaming, and arguable the only true form of videogame.
D)Games where the only progress is forward, barring decisions (if at all possible) by the player to actively move backwards. Examples are MMORPGS and Facebook style games. The game has no ending, no credits will ever roll. The game is over when the player stops playing. Disclaimer: these are not actually games, they're masturbation.
Permadeath works in category C because active participation is needed to avoid the negative game-end state and the objective is the journey from start to either endgame-state. Deleting your save is fine, since it's not about your "character" or the wealth you accumulated in a previous playsession, it's about what you'll DO in THIS play-session.
For games in categories A and B permadeath won't work. They're not DESIGNED from the GROUND UP to AIM towards giving the player a GAME OVER. If you walk in a circle in oblivion nothing happens. You're SUPPOSED to go through the scripted story, all the way to the final instance, and then receive your credit roll. Getting a game over is simply the result of the player allowing himself to get in a situation where that is possible. The goal of such games is to get the player to the end. Everything between start and end is padding with the sole purpose of tricking the player into thinking he had "fun" with it so he doesn't ask for his money back from the people who just wasted hours of his life. You could argue that the hours he "wasted" could be entire replaced by a book or a movie, seeing as how his input was really not necessary, the entire game being about as meaningfull as playing a game of Simon Says, outside of the emotional impact it had on the player. But that's really a different sort of conversation, no?
That roguelikes are a category C game is amazing and probably entirely thanks to procedural generation.
If a roguelike had static terrain it would suck, with or without permadeath. This has been said several times on this forum.
[/this is the only important bit, really. sorry] So, when I hear that a game has “permadeath”, I feel like the speaker doesn’t really understand what’s going on there. Like, no one would say that Tetris has permadeath, and not just because of the theme. To people, it’s obvious that Tetris with persistence would be pretty silly. It’s also obvious to most (if a decreasing amount of) developers that adding persistence to multiplayer competitive games is a bad idea.
I hope that this article will push the conversation forward, where we can understand what permadeath is in a more holistic way. If we do, we can realize a lot of stuff, and make better single-player strategy games than the world has ever seen.
Multiplayer competitive games fall outside of the scope of the entire article. By default they're designed around single play-sessions if they're NOT persistent. If you add persistent elements that impact gameplay to multiplayer games you automatically default on the competitive element.
For all my talk of disliking modern games, I'm suddenly becoming aware that the more deterministic a game is, the less it is a game and more of an exercise in tedium. Would playing Pac-man over and over with the same sequence of inputs not give the same result? Is Pac-man then not a game? I love Touhou, but if I used the same sequence of inputs the result would be identical. Is my enjoyment of the games now less valid? (yes)
Could it be that roguelikes and games that provide randomized fields/challenges are the only true games?
HOW RANDOM DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO ESCAPE DETERMINISM?
FFFFFUCK.The more unpredictable a category C game is, the closer it is to being a true game? But can it be quantifiiiiiiiieeeeeeeed?
Fuck this, I'm out before I have a nervous breakdown.
Ed: Oh great, I'm not the only one cresting the event horizon. The article's comments section also shows what happens to people when they decide to start deconstructing the very thoughtscape to it's most intimate components.
