DD35: Lazarus and the Time Machine

The Unspoken Superpowers of the Average Player Character

Though Lazarus and the Time Machine sounds like a pairing straight from the Design-a-Tron, the next few Design-A-Days will be focused on two main metaphors: Time travel and resurrection.

And metaphors they are…most of the time. I’m not an academic, so you’ll have to live with my conjecture and the occasional link to Wikipedia to back up the loose history that comes next.

The Continue

I think it is a safe bet to assume that the original notion of the Continue was a simple revenue calculation. A player is more likely to pay another quarter to continue playing a game they have already invested time in rather than starting over from scratch. My quick search of the interweb hints at this, though I have found no direct confirmation.

Further, he conjectured, certain limitations inherent to the original arcade machine architecture would have limited the options for allowing the player to continue a game. Due primarily to the small amounts of RAM, if any, available (he pulled out of his assumptions) you would have been limited to either restarting the player from the point of death (no RAM, simply continuing in-situ), or restarting the player at the beginning of a level (saving only the level-start score, all other state restored from ROM).

But how do we continue a game from the point the player died? They’re dead, after all. Just drop their avatar back in the game, and let them go. Who’s going to question?

What about starting them back at the beginning of the level? Won’t that transition be jarring? Will they recognize that they have moved backwards in the game? It’s not that different than the jump-cut discontinuities of French New Wave Cinema; players will adapt.

And it was from these completely plausible and humble beginings that the two most powerful and successful metaphors of video game history were born: Resurrection and Time Travel.

In the intervening years, the hardware changed, moved into the home on consoles and on home computers. The abilities changed, the requirements and player expectations evolved, but the save and the continue still exert a powerful influence today. This column is going to focus primarily on the way things are generally done. The next two or three will look into directions to expand and play with the underlying mechanics.

The World Clock

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most saved games use the following model (yes, there are notable exceptions, and I plan to note them, give a fella a chance):

The avatar dies. The World Clock is rewound to a previous state, and the player resumes from this earlier time, but with an inexplicable (usually, in game terms) knowledge of future events.

There are many ways to embroider this basic mechanic. Marathon’s Pattern Buffer states this explicitly, most of the time it is just an unspoken superpower possessed by nanotechnologically enhanced super-agents down to lowly 1930’s cabbies alike. Sometimes the granularity is user controlled (Quick Save), other times doled out sparingly by the designer (Resident Evil PS’s Typewrite Ribbons).

The Danse Macabre

Platform games have evolved their own baroque traditions for bringing the player back into the game. The checkpoint is essentially a World Clock rollback. The checkpoint is usually where a player goes when he has run out of lives, triggering a continue. But before such drastic measures, the player must first lose a number of lives*. When a life is lost, the player respawns (resurrects) in place. In-game powerup or score triggers can increase either number of lives, or number of continues.

There are many games who break these conventions (to their great credit), like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time which allows the player not simple reset the world clock, but scrub the timeline (in a limited way). I will talk more about these exceptions next time, and explore some alternatives. Until then.

-game over-

* Another common model is lives lost return you to a checkpoint, a continue bounces you to the start of the level.

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.