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One Life Or Many? How Long Should Players Survive In Your Game?
“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” American spy Nathan Hale famously said in 1776, just before his execution by the British after being captured while on an intelligence-gathering mission in New York City. Old Nate obviously wasn’t a video game character, or he might have had more than one life to lose. In fact, if he were a character in Super Mario Bros., he might have been able to finagle himself an infinite number of lives.
As anyone who has played Super Mario Bros. or just about any other video game knows, lives are a resource determining the number of times a player may catastrophically fail before a game session is terminated. Players can lose lives in games variously by losing in combat with an enemy, being the victim of a deadly trap, or running out of time. The player may keep on playing the game as long as he or she has a least one live left, providing the player with the continuous goal of surviving.
It can be said that all video games provide the player with at least one life, but game designers may choose to allow the players to have more, based on the experience they are trying to create for players.
One factor designers take into account when determining the number of lives to give to players is the game’s threat level. Threat is one of the domains described by Jason VandenBerghe in his landmark article The Five Domains Of Play: Mapping Psychology’s Five Factor Model to Game Design. Threat is the negative tone of the game that can evoke negative emotions in the player, such as addiction, anxiety, anger, or sadness. The fewer lives a game has, the greater the threat of the game. And when players believe that one of their lives, especially the last one, is at risk, the greater the feeling of anxiety for those players. Such feelings can make a player become more emotionally immersed in a game.
The number of lives granted to players can impact another of VandenBerghe’s domains: challenge. Challenge is the part of the game that requires the player to use self-discipline: overcoming obstacles, work, avoiding danger, and (literally) collecting achievements. When players have multiple lives, they can repeatedly attempt tackling a particular deadly situation in a game, eventually developing the skill and/or information necessary to overcome that challenge. A game with only one life available would require the player to start over again and progress all the way through the game until encountering that challenge and having the opportunity to try another tactic.
Another factor that a game designer takes into consideration when determining the number of lives to give to a player is how long he or she wants the game session length to be, providing there is no way to gain more lives during the game session. If the average game session is intended to be short (say, for a quarter-eating arcade game), the designer will give the player fewer lives than perhaps for a game intended to be played for a lengthy session at home.
By varying the number of lives given to players, the game designer can make significant changes to the overall game experience. However, there are other game elements that the designer can alter to modulate threat, challenge or game session length. The designer can lower the game’s difficulty by allowing the player’s avatar to accumulate damage before losing a life. Or, the designer can place pick-ups for the player to collect in the game level to replenish lost lives. Both of these elements also increase the game’s complexity, while a damage attribute additionally increases a game’s tension as players watch the damage level reach the point where their avatars are in danger of losing their lives.
A game designer can alternately make a game more difficult without adjusting the number of lives by adding more enemies or deadly traps, or by shortening time limits, which increases the game’s tension level as well.
So, one life or many? It all depends on the type of experience you want to create for your player.
The Barriers Of Entry To A Career In Game Design
“What are the barriers of entry to game design?” one hopeful video game designer asked me a few days ago. I had to look up the term to make sure I understood what he meant. “Barriers to entry: the existence of high startup costs or other obstacles that prevent new competitors from easily entering an industry or area of business.” That was helpful, because I immediately came up with three barriers to entry for a video game design job.
One barrier to a video game job is indeed competition: there are far more people wanting to be game designers, and think they have the skills to be game designers, then there are openings. To break into the field professionally, you need to have a portfolio of work demonstrating your game design skills, which begs the age-old question, “How do I get experience if I can’t get hired do to lack of experience?” The answer to that question is that you have to build up a portfolio on your own, perhaps as part of your schoolwork if you are pursuing a game design or development degree, or by volunteering for an indie team.
This is where the high startup cost comes into play, but not cost in terms of money. The cost is the acquisition of skills, another barrier of entry to a game design job. Being a successful game designer involves a cornucopia of skills. Coming up with a game design requires you not just to have experience playing games, but a deep understanding of what makes games engaging. Then the game needs to be designed in such a way that the development team can implement, so a game designer needs to have a fundamental understanding of programming, art, and audio principles. Explaining that design to the rest of the team also requires good written and spoken communication skills, as well as skills of persuasion to convince everyone to follow your vision. It also helps to have some knowledge of math, physics, history, mythology, storytelling, and other subjects, depending upon the type of game you’re making.
A third barrier is ignorance: many people who want to become game designers have little idea of what the work entails. Many think that it is about coming up with ideas, stories or art for games, when really it is mostly about tweaking the controls, difficulty, rules, systems and object properties over and over and over again based on playtesting feedback until the game is fun enough for players.
Even then, video game design is not an entry level position. Most game designers start off as programmers, artists, level designers, assistant producers testers, or some other development position. Then, if a game design opportunity opens and they’ve gained the trust of the hiring manager, they may move upward or laterally to a game design position.
While none of these barriers are insurmountable, they can be difficult and time-consuming to overcome. But if you’re very passionate about games, then you should already have acquired years of experience in overcoming difficult and time-consuming obstacles, right?
David Mullich 