Permadeath

In most video games, you can save your progress so that if your character dies, you can restart at a savepoint. But in a few rare games, there’s permadeath: permanent, irrevocable death, with no ability to reload from the last save spot, no ability to “reincarnate” at the temple, nothing. The first time I encountered this concept was in Thomas Biskup’s “Ancient Domains of Mystery” (ADOM), a painfully difficult yet strangely addicting ASCII dungeon-crawler. I noticed that when I (S)aved in that game, it had the effect of closing the game. Ok, I thought, that’s a little weird, I launched the game and loaded my character back up… then got killed in some horrible manner, only to discover the save file was deleted! The way it works is that while the game is running, the character lives only in RAM. While the program is closed, he lives in ROM. Never in both places at once. This allows Biskup to ferry your character across the River Styx to the afterlife, never to be seen again, every time you die in the game.

At first, I didn’t like the idea of my characters being permanently buried. It was a step back in technology, to more primitive times, when we played games on the original Nintendo with no saving mechanism. Except this time, there were no extra life mushrooms hidden in floating question boxes. “Man, I’m never gonna beat this game!” I thought in frustration. Most the characters I generated– wizards, archers, warriors, whatever classes I picked– perished before even reaching the half-way point. And yet, there was something about the system which really brought the game to life. Decisions had consequences. It made me realize that a lot of modern RPGs are nothing but artificially elongated movies. Movies where you have to push the right buttons to proceed to the next scene, but don’t worry, if you get the buttons wrong you can try again and again and again. Much as I love a game like Final Fantasy VII or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, ADOM forced me to admit that there was no visceral thrill in the modern game, no cold sweat of panic when the party runs into an unexpected monster or runs out of potions. There’s nothing really at stake: just the minor inconvenience of starting over from the last time you saved, five minutes ago.

Think how it must look through the party’s eyes. Whenever you reload a savefile, the party’s memories are also set back to that point. “I don’t get it,” Cloud Strife must inevitably muse after yet another flawless run through some incredibly dangerous labyrinth. “It’s like some higher consciousness is intervening in our favor…” It’s a wonder more videogame heroes don’t descend into paralyzing nihilism. Eventually you’d think they’d become totally numb and jaded, bored of a life where nothing can ever go wrong. No wonder they feel no qualms at all about casually strolling into and looting random strangers’ houses in front of their very faces. Whatcha gonna do, fight back? I’ve got the reset button, biznitch!

So it got me thinking: noone forces us to use save points. Why not play through every game the Thomas Biskup way? If your party dies, you start over from scratch. Of course, there’s a big problem with that. Most games aren’t randomly generated every playthrough like ADOM is. If you played Parasite Eve with permadeath, you’d end up watching that sweet opera scene where everyone catches on fire, over and over again. Sure it’d be cool the first five times, but eventually it’d get really old. But then, noone’s forcing us to start over, either. What if we just threw the cart away the first time Mario plummeted off a strangely-located bottomless crevasse? Or better yet, we could ceremoniously bury it, right next to the Zelda II cartridge and the GTA:SA discs.

Face it, there are so many video games out there, you’re never gonna play through all the ones you want to if you do each one from start to finish. If you let your dead characters rest in peace, you’ll be able to play all the productions you always wanted to, and still have time to have a real life of your own. Not only that, but the games will offer a thrill you’ve never felt from gaming before. Imagine how much of an adrenaline rush fighting Hitler would’ve been in Wolfenstein if you knew you only had one chance. Beads of sweat forming on your brow as you carefully weigh the shopkeeper’s offer to sell you a potion for 150GP. Your girlfriend defensively clutching your arm every time Alice runs into an Umbrella Corporation zombie.

Of course, in the game of real life, there are no save points… or are there?

FURTHER READING

The Katamari Damacy Model of Growth
Lands of Aethar
51 Things That Won’t Matter After Death
10 Metaphors About Death