GAME OVER is a project by CJ Risman, a student at Brown studying Modern Culture & Media and American Studies. Read the entire article on HASTAC.
As video games continue to become more and more “lifelike,” they bring users closer to visual experiences of actual “death.” They desensitize us to the act of death, however, by having immediate rebirth as a procedural norm. This project responds to the procedural rhetoric of contemporary popular video games in addressing death. Most games found in the market today have some feature of numerous chances, several “lives,” and/or rebirth with little consequence. Through their pervasiveness, I fear how these games make light of death and refuse to acknowledge the ramifications of dying. Many theorists and intellectuals have studied and highlighted how the procedurally of video games can be affective and I do not think enough thought has been given to the effect of rebirth in so many games. Through this project, I work within the format of a video game to redefine the death of an avatar.
http://www.flowlab.io/game/play/161419
The first level of my game is meant to mirror “life,” with multiple paths the user can take, all with various “life events” that pop up as you go along. Each “life event” that a user activates, however, is followed with a user-directed question, mirroring the existential angst that often comes along with life. For example, a life event pop-up may read: “got a puppy” and be followed by: “do you feel less alone now?” The user has control to move at their own pace through this level, and can even go back to follow a different path and move through different “life events” if they are willing to put in the time (much like in life!).
There is no “winning” or “completing” the first level. There are however, spikes, which, if landed on, “kill” the user. As the user travels on a “life” path, the spikes increase in frequency over time, eventually becoming almost unavoidable. One of the last “life events” (which entails retiring and then asking what “you” will do with all the free time) evenrequires “dying” in order to be activated. If, however, the user does reach the “end” of the level, there is simple a wall, boxing them in, forcing them to stay where they are, consider turning back, or consider purposefully “dying.”
After this initial level, come three levels of questions. The first such level asks the user to state whether or not they are religious. The answer input does not matter; both answers take the user to the next level. Rather the level acclimates users to the new diegesis, in which they are asked to respond to serious questions with honest answers. The following level, and the second “question level” asks users to state whether or not they believe in rebirth. This is the real kicker. If users answer “yes,” they believe in rebirth, then they are brought back to the first level and allowed to “play again.” If the user answers “no,” however, they are led to the final question: “believe in afterlife?” Here, if the user answers “no,” they are “stuck;” they constantly restart this level over and over again in perpetuity. If the user answers “yes,” however, that they believe in afterlife, they are taken to the final level. The final level is a blue space filled with white, cloud-like objects. The user may somewhat jump from cloud to cloud but that is all. Using the gaps between clouds, the avatar will eventually fall out of the frame and not be followed, leaving the user with nothing to do other than stare at the static screen of a sky-like canvas. (See video to left for playthrough of game!)
Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
As a result of my own coding limitations, I created this game through a third party platform, Flowlab. In using this format, I was unable to create a game involving commonplace violence or gun action, which perhaps make up the most problematic games in which rebirth is a given and death is stripped of value. Nevertheless, the “death” that occurs in my game is treated with weight. I view the resulting product as a prototype. Flowlab has allowed me to create a functional game, playable by others, but it is a first attempt to approach the issue of death/rebirth in games through a game.
My prototype approach does have its own rhetorical advantages, however. For instance, in reminding us of the simplified origins of videogames, the product asks us to reconsider what we have come to “expect” from a “game.” Is the commonplace, vivid violence of so many modern games now a critical feature of gaming? Without this violence and “life-like” interaction, what does it even mean to “die” in my game?
By redefining more than one aspect of the popular modern game, my project seeks to approach these various questions. However, other limitations were also imposed by flowlab. My free subscription to the service allowed me to have only 5 levels in my game, for example, and therefore limited the number of question levels I could have. Nevertheless, the game serves its most basic purpose; through playing my game, users, ideally those with experience in other forms of gaming, have to reexamine their own gaming habits and the rhetoric they receive from other games. My game not only gives gravity back to virtual dying, connecting it back to that of the “actual” world, but it also further highlights the disconnect between death and “play” in most traditional or commonplace games…