# alternative end states

today i've opted for a markdown presentation. i can now use _italics_, *bold*, %%kamstring%%, and --strikethrough--, so watch out buddy!

-# anyway

Today I'm thinking about... well it's hard to sum this up, so as usually I'll tell it in the order it was given to me.

## Death and loss of control

In video games, it is very common for the game to end in death. You must kill the enemy, lest ye be killed yourself.
This is often presented as being very violent, but I think it is a very natural and straightforward conclusion for
games. It's the ultimate way to tell a player that a thing is gone or that they no longer have control.

Put the controller down, you are Dead, your inputs mean nothing. Blast the enemy to smithereens and it cannot
impact the game anymore. Sometimes in multiplayer games, this will happen to your teammates and then they will
come back later, having sat out for a time on the game's request. Boom, headshot, you die. Sit out the round,
and you can come play more later. Sometimes we "capture" things instead, or we are ourselves captured, in board
games in particular this will happen, and the piece will be sent off of the board. Still visible, but we are to
know that the piece is "captured", in jail, imprisoned. Now we don't need to abolish prison in the chess dimension,
this is just a matter of giving a way for players to maintain more and more control over the boardstate.

So I wondered if there is any other way to do this... We know that Death and Dying and Prison and Jail are effective
and direct ways to take control from players and enemies. But what else can we do? I considered when the player's
"health points" or whatever resource ran out, you might literally just take control away from the character.

I imagined a player model just suddenly stopping in its tracks and remaining motionless: maybe until some determined
"confirmed loss" point, like if after all the enemy turns, you dont end up with additional "health points" again
(maybe this makes more sense if your player is like, a solar powered robot, who can recharge in the sun if idle?)

Or then I imagined something more entropic, like having a dead player just start moving and behaving randomly,
rather than based on player input. This could be handled on a gradient, even, which is funny to think about.
as you run out of health, you lose effective control over your character, until you have none. This does have a
rather large crop of potential issues such as the built in death spiral, /increasing/ difficulty as the player
performs worse, punishing them heavily for their first mistake by making the game immediately harder. But that's
not a dealbreaker necessarily. Demon's' soul's gets away with halving the player's health on death, and everyoney
loved that shit probably...

Side note: in Asteroid, death just takes away the character's ability to score points and increase their records,
essentially putting the player in a sort of "Zen" mode. Doesn't take away player control, just makes their actions
lack permanent impact.

## Death and loss of resources

Another way that games take control away from characters with death is if they control some kind of unit, either
like a character in one of them turn based strategy games or like rpgmaker games or like a card game where you have
a monster or a pokemon or whomever out and doing attacks, just taking that character or unit out of the game.
Sometimes its banished to some discard pile or graveyard, sometimes it is taken out of comission for a while,
sometimes it really permanently dies and you just gotta live with that, which is often used for story appeal.
IDC about story. :middlefinger: no uh

I imagine the previous ideas make a bit more sense in these contexts, and in some games they are even often
employed, though i can't say i've seen a game specifically start taking random actions as a character as a punishment
directly for them losing their main "health" resource. Doesn't matter. We'll circle* back to that though.

When the player doesnt directly pilot a character, but moreso commands it temporarily, as in turn based games,
there is a lot of room to imagine punishments / penalties other than death. Maybe their attack value is lowered,
maybe they only can operate every other turn because theyre tired, maybe they arent as accurate, maybe they get
angry and now start targetting teammates, or directly ignore commands at times, maybe using them while they are
"exhausted" (instead of dead) you incur some financial penalty between Battles as a way of allowing the player to
act in urgent situations as an additional choice, rather than just stripping them of the resource of another unit
immediately. maybe the choice *is* between forcing them to fight on when downed, making them die from overexertion,
or to let them sit the battle out and heal up so they can be used later, and risk losing the specific battle.

(aside i dont know how to fit in here: sometimes ive seen in games situations where the opponent does directly
just snatch up your unit as their own unit... Yikes!)

*In terms of the resource used up, it doesn't necessarily have to be health, and i dont mean that in a flavor
sort of way. You could very realistically track more than one resource at a time, between things like hunger,
sanity, stamina, money, and have a unit experience different penalties for being low on or out of these resources
individually. low stamina makes them move slower, low money makes them only able to access lower quality resources
or smaller amounts of them, low sanity being the "behaves randomly" trait or you can make them see fake enemies,
etcetc you know how it is.

Give the player different kinds of resources, and you have more things you can take away from them, and they could
even feed into eachother as with the less money -> less food type of thing. You could have a character who can see
their enemies future, and you can take away the accuracy of thier predictions, and maybe you could punish the player
in a different way for improperly parrying enemy attacks.

## Death and mode of play

I don't really have enough to say about this to warrant a whole section but essentially imagine youre playing a
multiplayer game and you die and now youre in spectator mode. Sometimes games still let you help in this stage,
as a ghost, with limited control. I also imagined in a singleplayer game dying and turning into a ghost, essentially
changing the way the game works. in Hylics i also know when you die you go to an *entirely necessarly* underworld,
but also it might not be necssary, but im pretty sure you need to go there to level up. I should play hylics.

#Hylics #gamedesign #game #design #whiningaboutasteroidagain #alternatives #death #prisonreform