The Death Penalty
Today in class I participated in a group project to analyze an extremely simple card game called Sissy Fight (based on an experiment from GDC, if I’m not mistaken, or possibly this little gem from Gamelab). Based on a simultaneous reveal mechanic, it’s a quick little game—the rules are simple, the moves basic, the tactics limited. All you do is pick another player each turn and choose whether to attack them solo, teamed, or simply defend. Solo hits for one, team for two per team player, and defend halves damage taken. Fight until there’s one left—or rather two, since once it becomes head-to-head decisions are meaningless and the conclusion inevitable.
Our challenge after the first play-through was to add a new mechanic and make the game better. Our group debated a number of options, many of them tired and worn, old gaming cliches like “dodge” and “reflect damage.” But then a team member piped up to say, “You know, it sucks for the people who get knocked out early. They have nothing to do but sit and wait until it’s over.” It was like flipping a switch.
The game design gears sprang into motion and we created a ghost mechanic: after you die, your action becomes that of a guardian angel. Every turn, designate a still-living player and reveal your choice during the simultaneous reveal. Your target gains a +1 to whatever action they’ve chosen for this turn. Then we played again. The results were startling. Not only did the ghost mechanic solve disillusionment and disinterest after death, but it served to offset a number of other flaws, among them: deepening the importance of diplomacy in the game and making a single winner possible. The team was very excited 
Thinking back now, however, I realize we were unwittingly addressing one of the most important, and overlooked, mechanics in game design: player death.
Artsy, conceptual games notwithstanding, player death is the single most integral part of a game after player victory: In order for someone to win, someone or something else must lose. As Greg Costikyan famously proposed, games must have a goal, and it must be possible to succeed or fail at it. And the easiest way to represent failure is death. I challenge you right now to name a game where players do not die, get knocked out, or are otherwise rendered impotent at some point. If you can name any, I am confident you can count the number on your fingers.
So what happens when you change the way players die? You change the entire game, of course. Our ghost rule didn’t change the fact that death equals failure—dead players cannot win the game—but it undid the forced abandonment of the game by the dead player… and in so doing, raised all kinds of interesting questions: What really separates death from failure in this new system? Is the separation significant or even effective? If a dead player cannot win, why do they care what happens next in the game? What motivation do they have to keep playing? What motivates the decisions they’ll make as a dead player? Once emotional investments like friendship and revenge are expended, does the rule become nothing more than a randomizer as each dead player ceases to care about their choices? Luckily, Sissy Fight is short enough that dead players continued to play and be engaged in the drama through to the end… but attrition of interest would be a real concern were this idea to be translated to a more complex system. Regardless of a player’s continued involvement death still represents failure at the macro level… unless they invent different victory criteria, and then the entire game changes again. Messing with death and failure really shakes things up.
I’d like to invite discussion and feedback here, since I really don’t yet have a conclusion to draw and would like to hear what people might say in answer to these questions. What do you all think?
Puerto Rico, Tigris and Euphrates, Carcassonne, Caylus, Bohnanza, Fairy Tale, Power Grid, Ra, Settlers of Cataan, Transamerica, Ticket to Ride, Hollywood Blockbuster.
The list above is limited to games I’ve played and could come up with in a few minutes. It would not be difficult to do some research on boardgamegeek.com and come up with a list of a hundred or more. Of course, a couple of things that the games on this list have in common is that they are all eurogames and have all been authored within the last 15 years.
If you are not familiar with eurogames, I highly encourage you to check them out. Boardgames have evolved a lot in the last 20 years, but very little of this evolution has reached the American mainstream.
Coincidentally, my group’s mechanic (revive a player as your one time zombie minion, who then is returned as a normal, though weakened, player in the game) was also based on our observation that the players killed - particularly within the first three turns - were definitely having the least fun with the game and needed some reason to still invest in the game.
Your ghost mechanic admittedly worked much better at this end than ours did, though, for several reasons. So Kudos!
I think it was interesting that our two groups had pretty similar added mechanics (dealing with keeping dead players a part of the game) and the other two groups essentially had the exact same dodge mechanic, although implemented slightly differently.
Touche! I am well familiar with Eurogames, having played half of those listed, and you are of course quite correct. What this makes me realize is that, when I wrote that challenge, I was thinking only of digital games. Our little version of Sissy Fight was intended to be a paper prototype of a digital game. I believe it remains true that virtually all digital games involve death or knock-out at some point. Often, of course, player death is synonymous with game over, so the death is hardly noticeable as an “in-game” element (unless you’re playing multiplayer). Nonetheless, it exists in the vast majority of video games.
“when I wrote that challenge, I was thinking only of digital games.”
Ahhh. Given the description of the game mechanics, I assumed this was a table game. I would have to agree that death is a prominent fixture in digital games. I’d even have to go so far as to so the majority of them are *about* combat and killing. In my opinion, we’ll eventually (and perhaps are beginning to) see a natural growth from this into more varied themes, in much the same way that eurogames evolved out of a boardgame market where war and combat were a favorite theme.