I have put up a conference poster made in collaboration with Albert Dang and Kan Yang Li when I visited Design & Technology at Parson’s School of Design in the fall 0f 2006.
The poster documents an experiment in identifying a basic convention of video games, in this case that players always fight for their own survival, and exploring the ramifications of breaking the convention.
Albert Dang and Kan Yang Li built a two-player game in which the object of the players is to commit suicide by drinking poison and stabbing yourself.
Yes, it is somewhat uncomfortable and perhaps controversial, but we wanted to explore that space by way of a prototype and user testing. The poster was presented at the DiGRA conference in Tokyo September 2007.
Play the game here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/suicidegame/
Read the poster here: http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/suicidegame.pdf
From the poster:
Video games do not necessarily present the player with a positive role to play: The player character may be a villain, be morally corrupt. Yet it is almost universally the case that
video games make players fight for the survival of their character. In a discussion of tragedy in interactive media, Marie-Laure Ryan has noted the seeming impossibility of an
Anne Karenina game, a game where the player’s ultimate goal is to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a train:Interactors would have to be out of their mind-literally and metaphorically–to want to submit themselves to the fate of a heroine who commits suicide as the result of a love affair turned bad, like Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Any attempt to turn empathy, which relies on mental simulation, into first-person, genuinely felt emotion would in the vast majority of cases trespass the fragile boundary that separates pleasure from pain.
(Ryan 2001)While Ryan identifies a clear game convention of players fighting for the survival of their character, we know little about what would happen were this convention to be broken:
How would players perceive the controversial or uncomfortable game content in a game where the player had to seek self-destruction?
In games, I generally am really only afraid of death of agency. The thing is, usually the death of my character and the death of my player agency are closely correlated.
The life-agency connection you are stating makes a lot of sense. But completing a game is also generally tied to a loss of agency – the game is over, after all. So logically it would make more sense to die at the end of the game, wouldn’t it?
Well, the music helps make that game a little eerie, but otherwise it doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable or anything like that. It would probably be more unpleasant if there was some sort of story to it and the character had a face and an identity. As it stands, it’s almost exclusively gameplay, so it’s hard to feel bad about the inevitable demise of the protagonist.
So had none of the volunteers played Adult Swim’s webgame “5 Minutes to Kill Yourself”, which plays suicide for laughs? Funny self-destruction is more clearly a reward to the player, however.
http://www.adultswim.com/games/fiveMinutes/
Robin – thanks. “5 Minutes to Kill Yourself” looks like it came out in March 2007, and we conducted the tests in later 2006. As we say, “more research is needed” figuring out how players interpret the task (killing yourself) depending on the way it is set up.
Very interesting game :)
As “5 minute sto kill yourself” shows, if you get rewarded for the death of your character, I think the perception of self destruction is rather positive, and commiting virtual suicide can become a normal way of playing.
You can also find the ability to commit suicide in some fighting games. The most famous example I can think of is featured in the Tekken series : the character “Yoshimitsu” (the one dressed like a robot who fights with a katana) has a special move where he commit suicide in a “Hara-Kiri” way.
Perfoming this move will remove most of the lifebar of the player, but can kill the opponent if its avatar is close to the player when he commits suicide (if the opponent is hit by the sword which just went through the player). So actually you can win a round by commiting suicide.
Here is an example video from Soul Calibur 3 (watch a 0:34 for the hara-kiri move) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdD6lb2kxdM
Two words come to mind: Every extend!
I guess I could elaborate on that – I’m thinking that there are quite a few “suicidal” actions essential to the mechanics of existing games, including Every Extend, an interactive fiction piece which I won’t name for spoiling it, and The Suicide Bombing Game. If you give suicide (“blow self up”) a cheery frame, as in Every Extend, no one has a problem with it. And it seems like The Suicide Game here could be reskinned as a “pick up the four objects to make yourself into a golden god” game, which would not trouble players. So, I wonder if this issue of self-destruction really has anything to do with the rules and workings of a game.
I think the issue is basically the fictional representation/motivation of the concrete player task. In Every Extend, it is not “you” that is blowing up, you think?
Is there something like a seeking the “good death” style of play? I don’t mean just the grim heroics which lie something somewhere between a “stiff upper lip” and “gambatte” when your side of the screen fills with blocks in Tetris or you are overwhelmed with undead in Boxhead. I’m thinking here of the kind of play which is often pushed outside the circle of games, which is the stylized exploration and fiddling of “sandbox games” like the GTA series. The bliss of jumping a BMX off a overpass is not in spite of PC death but because of it, at least in part. Here I can’t help but think about Freud’s death drive by which “Everything living dies for internal reasons”. Why not game sessions, PC “lives” or durations of play? If the game and play are always finite and separate in someways from life might it be that to play them is to play with how we end this aberrant state, and return to the inorganic/preludic?
Plus, suicide by grenade in Halo is really fun.
I don’t really get the sense that my bomb in Every Extend is “me,” but here’s the “quick manual” to the game:
EveryExtend quick manual
Blow up self to involve enemies.
How to play
Arrow Key Move
‘Z’key Blow up self
You can play with game pad
We built a class-based shooter in GAMBIT with a suicide bomber character. However, the rapid respawning and ability to change the class (not to mention the character being a bunny with a molotov cocktail) takes much of the sting of “death” away. In fact, it’s a popular character for players who don’t enjoy aiming with mouselook, since all you need to do is get close to your opponent and blow yourself up.
Once you include ragdoll physics, the spectacle of painful death can be mesmerizing. You don’t technically “die” in Skate, for instance, but mess up a skateboard trick and your character will perform a graceful, complex ballet of pain, including faceplants, clotheslines, and the ever-popular stair-rail up your crotch. Not only can you customize your character to look a lot like your real self, you can record every spectacular spill and watch it in slow motion, from different angles.
Good point, Sam. I was thinking the same thing. Also, I find that in a situation when a gamer has to suddenly quit his game session (time to leave the house, interruption by friends, etc.), they tend to not simply switch off the console but instead (if possible) kill of their own avatar, as if it’s somehow “wrong” to quit a game without the avatar having died.
Atlus and Sting’s upcoming game titled “Baroque” came to mind while reading this. A remake to be released on the Wii and PS2, IGN has a a good preview up that discusses the mechanic in question. Sorry, but from where I type this I am unable to provide the link myself.
Just in case you are still curious you might want to check out
Karoshi at http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/27431 or http://www.venbrux.com/karoshi/karoshi.zip. Seems to be in the same general ballpark. Far more gamey, but still…
Here’s a little related article on Wired.com. The Ravaja paper sounds interesting. Anybody have a copy?
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2008/03/gamesfrontiers_0310
The Wired article links to it, but unfortunately you have to have a subscription to view it.