Aging in Video Games: Immersive or Immersion Breaking

Aging in video games always seemed like a weird concept to me. Why would you include something so grounded in real life within your digital world that many use partly as an escapist fantasy. So many of us have experienced or observed the heavy toll that getting older has whether it’s just lower energy or a more serious decline in health. My thoughts after our brief conversation about aging in games has led me to rethink some of my thoughts around aging as well as its potential as an in-game mechanic.

A variety of games feature mechanics that suggest the passage of time. Simulation games such as the sims have been aging characters for a while now and while it isn’t exactly aging in real time the time jumps to different life points such as children becoming teens and teens adults offer a sense of immersion that many crave. Fortunately, for those looking for escapism, the aging mechanic can be turned off.

Other non-simulation games feature mechanics that allude to aging without full committing to the effects of it. Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3 both feature in game barber shops where the player can choose new hair and beard styles as well as a quick trim. To provide and extra feeling of immersion, the devs for both games implemented mechanics where the players head and facial hair grow overtime. This level of time passage only effects gameplay on an aesthetic level and just adds more customization features for your characters without effecting players looking for a less realistic time mechanic.

Recently I’ve begun playing Sifu, an indie game released in 2022 by Sloclap studios. The game puts you in the role of a young Kung Fu master seeking revenge for the murder of your father. This requires you to clear rooms full of henchmen with complex chains of attacks. What really makes the game unique is its really interesting use of aging within the game. The enemies in Sifu are challenging so it’s expected that you die a fair amount, fortunately your character has a magical pendent that resurrects them. The catch is that each of these deaths causes you character to grow older with the amount you age growing with each consecutive death. Dying to the same opponent repeatedly sees you character go from 22 to 23 to 25 to 28 etc… The aging Is more than just visual flair. As you grow older your character unlocks new powerful techniques due to the wisdom of aging which allows you to do more damage to your opponents. To balance the benefits of experience, your body becomes frailer, and you have a smaller health pool when fighting your enemies. The real kicker is that when your character ages into his 70s and 80s there is a chance he will die permanently, and the level will restart from the age you first began it at. It’s really cool having a permanent death mechanic that is actually reflective of how real aging works.

I find this a fascinating mechanic as it suggests a life outside of what we see in our gameplay. As our character ages they experience numerous trials and train to become stronger, but these experiences are all implied. I also love the lens through which they portray aging, having it be something positive for the player where they learn and grow but also keeping the harsher realities of getting older. Perhaps this proves that even the mundane and often sad parts of being human can inspire innovative and entertaining gameplay mechanics.

I would love to see someone take the concept even further with maybe a time sensitive aging mechanic that encourages you to beat levels as fast as possible while experiencing a variety of aging consequences in real time. Maybe could explore and do puzzles on other planets and have different rates of aging due to how time passes on other planets.

-Henry

Dave the Diver and Dredge: How Art Direction and Tone Can Separate Otherwise Similar Games

I have played video games for the majority of my life in varying quantities depending on how busy I am with other pursuits. Upon entering college several years ago, I found it harder to keep up with the year’s releases just due to the level of academic and extracurricular obligations that I prioritized. Despite having less time to game overall, our month-long breaks from class are where I do a lot of catching up on some of the year’s more prominent releases. I typically focus on indie games just because I find the gameplay styles a little more varied and the completion times are low enough where I don’t have to worry about not finishing. Oddly enough two of my favorites of the year ended up being fairly similar in terms of gameplay. Dave the Diver and Dredge are two fishing indie games released in the year 2023.

Dave the Diver (2023) and Dredge (2023)

While somewhat similar on the surface, I feel the two games offer a really interesting case study on how art direction and tone influence a game’s final product. Both revolve around fishing mechanics, both operate on a quest-based structure, both have risk v. reward elements for fishing at night, and both have a “catch them all” completion mechanic. Their execution of these elements is what separates the two. Dave the Diver is a beautifully pixel-art animated vibrant and comedic experience where you spend a large amount of time helping and forming bonds with the eccentric locals. In contrast, Dredge is a Lovecraftian influenced 3D cell shaded game with slightly more focus on exploration. Unlike Dave the Diver, Dredge’s NPCs are cold and anti-social characters who frequently lock themselves away from the player in service of the isolating madness the game instills in the user.

A comparison of the meter based real in mechanics used for catching fish. Dave the Diver (left) and Dredge (right)

This difference in tone is particularly apparent in the night expeditions available in both releases. In Dave the Diver the player has the option of venturing into the sea at night in order to obtain exclusive fish or to complete specific missions. This differs from the daytime gameplay in that the fish become much more aggressive and the player further risks their health and valuable time. While there are more threats during the nighttime, the actual tone of gameplay does not shift very much. Dredge has a far more dramatic shift during the night. In Dredge the player is incentivized to journey out at night with the chance of catching rare fish or completing special quests, much like Dave the Diver. The key difference is the drastic tonal shift of Dredge. At night, Dredge becomes a survival game as the player must navigate the rocky landscape while being actively hunted by giant menacing sea creatures. Much like the Lovecraftian fiction that it takes influence from, the fisherman in Dredge begins to go mad after the sun sets which leads to untrustworthy environments where rocks and other hazards spontaneously appear in front of the player, hidden within the thick fog that surrounds us.

A comparison of night time gameplay between the two games. Dave the Diver (left) and Dredge (right)

While there are obvious differences throughout, these nighttime journeys are what really separate the two games with one still being a mostly relaxing good times romp and the other drifting towards unsettling and genuinely scary moments. These two releases demonstrate how gameplay similarities are really not that important when trying to create a unique game. The more important aspect is how the tone and art direction of the game’s carve out a unique environment for this gameplay loop. While there are near infinite possibilities for new mechanics in video games, as developers cover more ground, I expect the tone and art style of games to be far more important for developing new experiences.

-Henry

Bioshock: 9 Years ago, 6 Years ago, and 2 Years ago – Growing Up with a Game

I, like so many others of the Zoomer generation, grew up on Let’s Plays, whether that be Pewdiepie playing through some rage-inducing platformer or SkyDoesMinecraft and his friends playing through “parkour maps” on Minecraft(basically a backseat gaming sitcom I watched and adored).

The typical SkyDoesMinecraft thumbnail

It was about 9 years ago when I first saw a “Let’s Play” of Bioshock, the first game of a series I had heard about through online forums, comments, and friends with some more lenient parents than mine when it came to playing violent games. This “Let’s Play” was distinct and different to me – there were no rambunctious comedians playing rage-inducing or community-based games. In fact, there wasn’t even a voice at all, just the darkness and liminality of a game that came out 7 years before I watched this video. I only remember watching the first ten minutes and being absolutely enraptured (pun intended) by an intense plane crash and this mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. By the time the player went down the lighthouse’s elevator and was introduced to the failed underwater utopia of Rapture – cryptic, corrupted, and captivating – I immediately turned the Youtube video off, telling myself  even at the young and naive age of 10: “I have to experience this myself.”

Descending into Rapture for the first time

Those ten minutes were the only exposure I had to the Bioshock series, but the introduction to the world of Rapture really stuck with me, and when I did my bi-monthly late-middle school Gamestop trip (a ritual I begged my mom to occur more often than every two months) , I , at the age of 13, bought Bioshock: The Collection for my PS4. Eager, I got home, played through it, and was honestly pretty frightened. Bioshock utilizes a lot of horror elements to world-build (or really, “world-deteriorate” since it shows the effects of time on an isolated dystopian society). In fact, it was scarier than most horror games I had played at the time because of all the societal implications of collectible audio logs and even torn propaganda posters on the tattered walls. I felt completely immersed with the new world around me, and like the playable protagonist Jack, spent hours discovering the buried secrets of Rapture. After I beat the game, I played it again immediately, which had never happened for any game before for me. After playing through the entire series, I spent weeks going online to forums, subreddits, Youtube videos, and analyses to further understand the worlds I so excitedly delved into. Needless to say, I was a little obsessed.

One of the many posters you can find in Rapture.

Jump to 2021. I’m a senior in high school in a bunch of APs, including AP Literature and Composition. Out of all the teachers I talked to after class, it was the humanities teachers who really took interest in discussing media with me (David Lynch, Stephen King, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, etc.), and while having an after-school analysis session with my Latin teacher Mr. Weganhart(we all called him Wego), he told me to look back at video games I’ve played and see how much classic literature has affected the themes of those games. While Wego’s side-quest he gave me focused on Roman influences on modern media, I immediately jumped back to Bioshock and decided to delve deeper into the non-Classical literary references. Instead of delving into Rapture with a PS4 controller, I delved into wikis about Objectivism(“the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”, quoted by philosopher/author Ayn Rand) and books written by Rand to further understand this game I loved so much when I was younger, and came to an incredible conclusion: I realized the game was actually satirizing the concept of Objectivism and the allusions to Ayn Rand were ample. Antagonist Andrew Ryan (of “Would you kindly…” fame) is a quasi-anagram of Rand’s name with the same initials. The entirety of Rapture, I found out, was based off of the Objectivist, hyper-capitalist society Rand outlines in her novel Atlas Shrugged, further emphasized with the final boss being a replicated statue of Rand’s book cover (see photo below). The game consistently blurs the line between emergence and progression game styles (as Juul outlines) with the moral system of killing or saving the Little Sisters, ultimately showing the futility of Objectivist ideals (no matter how much individuality or free will you may have, society can’t be perfect).

The cover of Atlas Shrugged and Atlas, the final boss of Bioshock

As I grew up and changed mindsets from a child seeking fantastical worlds to an adolescent seeking answers to a young adult seeking literary references and intertextuality, I realize how much this game has stuck around with me throughout my life. It’s pretty fantastic to say that a piece of media could take on so many different meanings to me throughout my life, on top of being a good nostalgia trip. If anyone has the chance, I would implore you to sink to Rapture in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 or fly to Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.

-Spencer

Sources:

Why Bioshock still has, and will always have, something to say , Ars Techina- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/bioshock-objectivism-philosophy-analysis/

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real.