After the discussions about death prompted by my last blog entry, specifically those mentioning the Iron skull, and whether a gamer who dies even once in a level can be said to have accomplished anything, I thought I'd give the skull a serious try in Halo 3 for the first time.

There are some skulls I like playing with, to the extent that I nearly always enable them now when playing campaign, solo or coop: Catch, because more grenades equals more fun, Cowbell, because bigger explosions means bigger fun, Mythic and Thunderstorm, because Heroic with a few tweaks is more tolerable than Legendary, and Fog because it encourages battlefield awareness. Sometimes I also throw in Tough Luck, because it makes sticks tougher and therefore more satisfying.

I hardly ever touch Tilt. In combination with Mythic and Thunderstorm it simply makes killing certain enemies take too much time and ammunition (the return of bullet sponge brutes) and Iron, because I figure I'm going to die once in awhile.

I thought, though, that if I dropped from Heroic to Normal, I might add Iron for some extra bonus points, try to be careful, and see if it actually felt more like an accomplishment.

Hey guys, this is a song I made called Looking Back. It conveys pretty much what it says, kinda of a bitter sweet "remembrance" of the Halo Trilogy.
Hope you all like it!
I'll be posting up the sheet music in a bit.

[b]Medium:[/b] Piano
[b]Difficulty(1-5):[/b] 3

[b]Included files:[/b]
- mp3 performance [i](Looking Back.mp3)[/i]
- sheet music COMING SOON

[i][b]The file should appear below. (Remember, you must be registered to view and download attachments.)[/b][/i]

Game Over. Insert Coin.

The balance between carrot and stick, reward and punishment, in game design was so much simpler back in the arcade.

Take the gamer's money and give them a limited number of chances to progress, usually called "lives" since failure nearly always means death. When the player runs out of lives, they can pay to keep playing if they agree within a given time period. If not, the game resets itself to the start.

In some ways, it's a magnificently simple and beautiful state of affairs compared to what PC and console gaming has become, where the entire price of a game, hardware included, is bought and paid for in advance, and "pay for play" means online access fees and MMO subscriptions.

How, in an environment where you can't hit the gamer in the pocketbook for failing to demonstrate the requisite skills, can you punish them? Should you even try? Arcade games were designed to be "finished" only by the best of the best, but today's story-driven, cinematic AAA titles cost millions to make-- is it wise to reveal the entirety of one's design only to a select few? Might that not tempt designers to leave the ending out (I'm glancing in your direction, Halo 2, and yours, too, Indigo Prophecy) and focus energies on the beginning-- the part that most reviewers will see?

Is death in games supposed to be punitive, or is it there only to prevent the player from progressing through the game until they've demonstrated a certain minimum level of proficiency? If it is supposed to be punitive, what does it say about designers' opinions of their own game if the worst punishment they can come up with is playing the game more? Isn't the idea of dying, the message of failure, more important than the actual consequences? Or is it? Can a game design aspire to have replayability and still consider repeat play as a punishment for dying? What other punishments can there be? Should there be any punishments at all? Can any punishment be as useful or effective as requiring the player to insert another quarter, and if not, should gaming return to the arcade model, or should it abandon player punishment altogether?