On the Death of the Hero

The invention of 'lives' in gaming wasn't because video games had some morbid sense of accomplishment or denial. It was to make you spend quarters. Arcades being the first invention in electronic gaming had to have some way to keep you in the poor house, so 'lives' were created to give you three chances to resurrect yourself and complete your task.

But as games got older and moved away from spaceships and centipedes, people were introduced as the main characters and gave the meaning of 'life' a whole new purpose in games. They took on a resemblance of a cat's nine lives.

Man jumps. Falls in pit and dies. Tries again.

Before games were created, comics flourished as superheros wildly took over the imagination of children and adults everywhere. Virtually invincible heros that fight crime and save the world. Bullets riccochet. Punches glance. Danger is averted.

As the gaming picked up on the whole hero idea, gamers got to save princesses of imaginary worlds and stop evil from ruling the land. There were normal heroes; humans charged with super hero-like duties to save princesses from evil dinosaurs or returning the land from the creeping darkness of evil pigs. But there were also these superhero characters, still fighting their longtime battles from their comic book worlds, transported into digital form for us to experience with our two, human, mortal thumbs.

So why still have lives for these unbeatable heroes? Why should characters who span generations of our lives live any different in a video game.

To my knowledge, Superman Returns was the first game to address this issue. When it came out last November, Superman was indestructible. The mechanic of 'life' was removed. The paradigm was shifted. No matter what I did, nor what anyone else did, I was an indestructible superhero. Unbeatable. But then I realized what Superman Returns had done. It had gone and made things much more difficult.

Supes' objective was still the same: save the world. But this time, he had to save everyone else too. As destruction and evil rampaged across the map, Superman had to make sure that damage to the city and the lives of the people didn't reach epic proportions. Now, instead of a health meter for Superman, there's a health meter for the world.

As Halo 3 denies people everywhere the right to read books and go outdoors, again we are charged with the duty of controlling a hero. A super-human soldier. Not the virtually indestructible Superman we've come to know and love, but the protagonist of a story that inevitably will finish the fight and save humanity. Does dying as this character create a challenge is the game or does it take away from the experience we are meant to experience as the developers have intended?

Halo 3 is a short game, yet complex in it's story. Only on the easiest difficulty setting do most gamers get to experience the story as it was meant to be. But as gamers, we want a challenge. We want to be tested, yet we do not want to fail. We want to experience the hardships of our beloved Master Chief and still be protected by his armor and super abilities. We don't want to die.

So instead of creating immense levels and filling them with wave after wave of enemies armed to the teeth, is there some other way to test the mettle? To prove that I am capable of being a hero without suffering the mortal's death?

What Superman Returns did was just that. It created other factors to consider when fighting the generic enemy. You were faced with life altering changes that weren't meant for you, but for others. Choices that superheros make every day.

But maybe it's easier to program the destruction of your life than it is to create scenarios of lives to save or puzzles to solve or missions to complete in timely manners. With superhero games already having superhero-sized budgets, it could be too much to ask for every role playing game to have "next generation" ideas in gaming along with those "next generation" graphics and "next generation" prices.