Health: the lifeblood of videogames
What’s the most basic aspect of a videogame? It is not, as you might think, accomplishment or success, for not all games allow you to win, but failure and more often death, the cessation of your avatar’s existence. How a character goes about ‘dying’ is very much linked to the difficulty of the game you are playing, although with the loss of interest in limited lives and the advent of ‘save anywhere’ functions the role of dying has become less than an afterthought. It is the first hurdle games create for the player and always as a response to the question ‘what threat is the player facing?’ Once all is said and done what are all those villains and hordes of monsters trying to do, ultimately? They are all trying to kill you, and though some (or many) of them will succeed you can keep coming back for more.
If you go back to the origins of videogames you’ll find Pong and therein two paddles. These are Mario, Sonic and Captain Price’s ancient grand-parents, and they cannot die. Though you may lose the bout your avatar remains loyally intact, ready to swat away your opponent’s next frantic attempt. Then skip ahead a few years to Pac-Man who very regularly disappeared into videogame oblivion via a very distinctive buzzing and ‘blooping’. Notice that while neither game so far features an actual point of victory both involve failure, and the latter even death. Videogames, in terms of structure, haven’t advanced far beyond this golden structure of ‘enjoyment’ for in some way or another the aim has always been to stave off death long enough to achieve your goals. Whether they be pre-assigned via a compelling story or simply an open-ended game that insists upon just another 1000 points before you go to bed the motivation to achieve those goals has always been the reason we play videogames.
And so we come to ‘Health’, the compromise between instant death and perpetual life. It comes in many forms to fit many needs but it always serves the same purpose of allowing the player to dip their toes into the water without fearing a sudden and lethal electric shock. And even then the way the health system works is tied directly into the individuality of the game you are playing. Doom popularized persistent semi-static health that you must replenish by picking up health packs, but by 2001 we were experiencing Halo: Combat Evolved and an exciting new recharging health system, though the health packs remained and would be revisited later in ODST and Reach. Here was essentially a two-tier health gauge: the base health that determined when you died and the ‘shield’ that governed when your base health was in danger. This was soon adapted by essentially the entire FPS genre as one independent recharging health system, the likes of which is now incredibly hard to avoid for the average gamer. The beauty of this system is essentially the simple yet informative feedback and the action-orientated way it engages the player. Even in Call of Duty, with minimal HUD and definitely no visible health bar, it is easy to know when you are in danger of dying because of the blood on the screen and the slight dulling of the colours, and just as simple to know when you’re better because these effects have ceased. Ultimately this is an example of improved immersion, though Halo gets away with leaving a health/shield bar visible by incorporating it into the Chief’s visor.
But in this modern age, when plenty of games do fine without a health system is it still viable? Is it simply a relic of games gone by? When Halo: Reach returned to health packs it was hailed as a happy return to Halo at its best, but what exactly is wrong with recharging health? And what of realism and immersion? Limbo, one of the most atmospheric and well-realised games of the last decade, was a one-hit kill affair and was all the better for it. But Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, two highly immersive role-playing games, feature traditional, fourth-wall breaking health bars that gauge your condition based on a sliding scale. But therein lies the main problem with the health mechanic in general: the ‘alive/dead’ decision is based on an arbitrary scale that only comes into effect at zero. In real life your health is not static until dead, and in fact you suffer detrimental effects in your decline towards it (sorry for bringing the tone down), and yet no videogame has depicted a realistic version of this, though to be fair this is mostly due to the fact that it would be hard to implement and even harder to make for compelling gameplay (not to mention boring). But there must still be a better alternative to ‘>0=alive’, one which allows for a greater depth of challenge when your limbs start to fail you as you crawl to safety. Perhaps into recharging health, but who said mixing your gameplay mechanics was bad for you?
