Seeing Red

Games have a lot of traditions that have been hard to shake. We're finally getting away from Vancian magic (thank Mystra!); games with limited lives/continues have finally found a quiet corner for masochists to enjoy; and we no longer have to collect barrels of nitrous oxide in serious games. Then there are things that make no sense, but developers keep including them in our games. The one I hate most is the heal system.

In almost any modern game, a character can take a finite amount of damage before dying. Of course that damage doesn't persist, and there are numerous ways to get rid of your wounds.

• Health potions/scrolls
• First aid kits
• Eating a bag of chips [Yes, eating chips apparently cures what ails you. Where's the lawsuit for this one, Jack Thompson?]
• Speacial weapons and abilities, i.e. the soldier shooting his teammates in Borderlands, or a D&D warrior smashing an enemy using a special attack
• Walking it off
• Magic Spells

The thing that makes sense about none of these is what health actually represents. Is it actually one's physical well being? Is it a measure of their stamina and lesser insuries, with each new punch or bullet making them more likely to take a fatal blow?

It just boggles the mind. Case in point - I finally got to play my PS3 last night, so I decided to try beating Uncharted 2. In one section, I'm literally being harried by a tank. A tank, with bullets and explosions. At one point I'm stuck on a rooftop, and there is an RPG in an area across from me, but I have no way to get to it without being shot up by the tank. I'm walking all around the roof, with the tank's shell's occasionally exploding on the wall behind me and knocking me down, and I just can't find a path to the rockets.

I decided to Google the level and see if there was something obvious I was missing. The first walkthrough I found basically said "Jump down and run. You'll take a bit of damage from the tank but you'll be fine." What?! I'm playing a game that's more-or-less rooted in our world, and I have to just say "Okay, I can probably take about 5 bullets and 1 tank shell before I go down. Let's do this." And it wasn't one of those things where the tank kept shooting everything around me - I did take a bit of damage from the tank, but I was fine.

Of course once I got behind some cover I crouched down for a few seconds and I was fine. This situation made me shake my head in exasperation - all these years of watching health bars or seeing my screen take on a red hue had finally caught up with me. Being damaged in a game, whether it's D&D, Warmachine, Magic, or a video game, is the most enigmatic thing that we as gamers have ever accepted.

What do heart containers in Legend of Zelda actually do? What function does body armor serve if we can still take more hits when it's gone? Why can I take realistically-fatal amounts of damage and keep running until that one piece of damage beyond my health bar finally kills me? 

The problem with this, of course, is that there's really no alternative in magic-free games. Having damage stick with you until you collapse is fine for people who play hardcore survival games, but for someone like me who just wants to enjoy a game it can ruin the experience.

Perhaps the problem is simply in the naming. Most of us have participated in an intense activity (sports, rock climbing, a day at the fair with the kids) that left us on the verge of collapse. When I was in high school I climbed a rock wall at summer camp twice in a row. Halfway up my second trip my muscles were shaking from the effort, and at a certain point I could barely feel my limbs any more. If there was someone at the top of the wall that wanted to fight me, I guarantee I'd have curled up in the fetal position and cried until it was over. Changing "health" to "fatigue" might better explain how food or a few seconds of respite can get you back to normal.

Another idea is make it a "fate bar." While that sounds like an establishment owned by Match.com, I think it would make sense in many games. You can only be shot at so many times before you finally get hit. Why not make health bars a countdown to inevitability? 

I realize this is a niggling detail. What we call it doesn't really matter, but it's still something that pulls us away from the immersion offered by games. I can make meaningful decisions, create a character I care about, see items in the world follow physics, and then... I can take an entire country's supply of bullets to my head, as long as they're spread out over a long period of time. Huh?

What do you think? I'm I splitting hairs, or is this a holdover from previous generations that needs to be phased out? Is representing a depleting health bar with a red-tinged screen enough, or does the entire system need an overhaul? Let me know your thoughts!

See you tomorrow!

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