by Joel Jordon
Save systems are given a lot of responsibility in modern game design. In the past, games were shorter and typically offered no save function. Arcade games were tough—they were meant to hand out game overs very liberally—because the objective of arcade operators was only to get players to keep on feeding machines with quarters in order to continue. But, over time, and with advances in technology on consoles, games got longer, and the punishment of having to start over from the beginning of these longer games would just be too cruel to impose on the player. The 1up lost its once-treasured place in game design because these new games didn’t have true game-ending game overs, and so the 1up could no longer really serve the function of protecting the player from punishment.[1]
The save system had risen up to the task of recording the player’s progress. Games started to ask the player to memorize (or, more likely, scramble for a pen and paper and write down) a code consisting of letters and numbers that could be typed in to recover progress when he or she came back to play later. The save system mechanic became so central to so many games that memory cards were developed exclusively for the purpose of accommodating it. Today there are hard drives, and save systems seem to be a major part of game design that’s here to stay.
Systems that Create Tension: Save Points and Quicksaving
The basic function of any save system is to give the player the ability to quit playing and then return to and continue playing from the point at which he or she left off. All progress that has been made up to any point at which a game has been saved can be restored so that the player doesn’t have to play through again the levels or challenges he or she has already completed once. None of the progress made after saving at one of these points and before saving at another point, however, can be restored.
Save systems, then, provide the framework for a very fundamental tension in most video games: the danger of losing or dying between two save points[2] and having to replay through a section of the game again as punishment. It can be pretty odd to regard a save system as only a part of metagame design—as merely functional and practical and as something that just has to be there on the back end—when their implementation has such huge consequences for the most fundamental feeling and experience of the gameplay. How a save system is implemented can totally change the difficulty of a game and the kind of tension regularly felt by the player. Whether a save system—so outside of the central game experience—should be given this key responsibility is a matter I’ll discuss a little later.
A lot of early implementations of save systems were pretty explicit about them: they sprinkled designated spots where you could save your game throughout the world. Resident Evil, for example, is known for its save typewriters. Metroid has save rooms. The issue with this sort of save system is that the amount of tension it creates at various points is often arbitrary. As the player moves from one save point to the next, he or she experiences very little tension at first and a lot of tension later on because the punishment for dying—the amount of the game that will have to be replayed—increases as the distance from the most recent save point increases. If the save points are spread out from one another quite conservatively—as they usually are in games that have this kind of save system—there’s a total lack of punishment for dying after just saving at a save point and a severe punishment for dying after playing up to just before another save point. This makes the player’s experience of tension very uneven.
Other early implementations of save systems that were especially common in PC games worked in a completely opposite way: they offered a system called “quicksaving,” which allows a game to be saved at any time just by pressing a key. This creates a totally different problem with the player experience of tension, which is that it can be almost completely eliminated. Most players who play through a tough game that allows quicksaving get into the habit of tapping the quicksave key every few seconds so that, upon death, they won’t have to replay through much of anything. This can eliminate all of the feeling of tension from the play experience.
In some games, quicksaving also undermines other game mechanics that could have otherwise made the player append more value to his or her actions. In System Shock 2, for example, there are chambers that the player can be revived in upon death, but because he or she has to pay a price to do so and is also sent back to those chambers, there’s no real reason not to just load a quicksave instead.
The game’s hacking mechanic is also undermined by quicksaving: the player has a certain percentage chance of succeeding at any attempted hack, depending on how high his or her hacking stat is, but because the game can be quicksaved before attempting to hack anything, there’s no reason to upgrade the hacking stat—it’s possible to just keep loading a quicksave before a hack, no matter how unlikely it is to succeed, because it can just be attempted over and over again until it works.
Other Ways of Creating Tension: Life Meters and Auto-Regenerating Health
I’d like to take a moment to go on a bit of a tangent to briefly discuss two other notable game mechanics—which are a large enough topic on their own that they could warrant a whole other article—that greatly influence the player’s experienced tension. These two mechanics are life meters and auto-regenerating health, and like save points and quicksaving, they have generally opposite effects on player tension.
Life meters, which give the player a certain amount of health that can be lost over time and then usually recovered only when certain items are found or used, are like save points in that they can make player tension arbitrary: tension is low when the player’s health is high, and tension is high when the player’s health is low.
But this mechanic doesn’t need to result in totally arbitrary tension, and I think Half-Life can serve as a good example of a game that’s designed well to take advantage of a life meter mechanic. In Half-Life, the player is led along a string from one tough enemy encounter to another—each tending to reduce his or her health to close to nothing—but health packs are sprinkled so precisely that the player usually finds them just when they’re needed. This generally makes for a game with a satisfying cycle of tension and relief.
Half-Life is a tightly designed game, although no game design can really be tight enough to eliminate all potential hiccups when a life meter is employed as a game mechanic. It’s possible for the player to lose an inordinate amount of health against enemies early on and then run up against more enemies that are made much harder to fight than they should be just because of the health lost earlier, causing a wild variation in tension.[3]
But if the life meter mechanic and the save point system share similar problems, then the auto-regenerating health mechanic—which has become increasingly common in recent games—has problems similar to those of quicksaving. With this mechanic, the player can only die if he or she receives a lot of damage in a short time, because after usually only a few seconds of not taking any damage the player’s health automatically regenerates to its maximum amount. This mechanic has the advantage of eliminating the occurrence of any arbitrary extreme highs or lows in tension, but like quicksaving, it can also greatly reduce tension overall, largely because the player’s well-being in the game is no longer tied to any long-term gameplay experience. In games with auto-regenerating health, it’s possible for the player to continuously jump carelessly into fights with enemies and defeat them while taking a large amount of damage and then retreating to recover all of his or her health. The player may experience some short-term tension in each of these encounters, but the repetition of this over the course of a game may not result in a satisfying experience on the whole.
The Problem
Returning to the discussion of save systems: the majority of modern games have largely done away with both save point and quicksaving systems and replaced them with mostly invisible, automatic, and fairly frequent saving. The best implementations of this system save a game between bite-sized chunks of action so that, when the player dies, he or she only has to replay a small portion of the game as punishment, a portion that is contained in such a way that it makes sense to play through it again and nothing more or less. If implemented well, this system can establish a pretty consistent and reasonable feeling of tension.
But this still isn’t ideal, and I don’t think that using save points to control the player’s experience of tension can ever really be ideal because forcing a player to lose his or her progress and replay through a portion of a game as punishment for dying is disruptive to a cohesive game experience. Death persists as a game mechanic because it creates tension, an important part of a game’s design, but as long as death and saving remain metagame mechanics—as long as each time the player dies, he or she must experience the strange rewind of time and the repetition of events—an inelegant suspension of disbelief will frequently be required of the player.
I think there are at least two ways, however, for games to create tension without relying on a save system, with all of its inherent flaws. One is to eliminate death entirely as a game mechanic and create tension in other ways. The other is to build the gameplay around death—make it a central game mechanic—so that player progress isn’t ever arbitrarily reset but death instead punishes the player in another way (and maybe at the same time opens up the opportunity for new rewards). Although these may sound like two solutions that are completely opposed to one another, they are actually almost the same thing. In both cases, tension seems to become more thoroughly a part of central gameplay, rather than to be created obscurely outside of it.
Solutions
I’m going to use the rest of this article to discuss a few games that in taking a unique approach to death as a game mechanic demonstrate potential solutions to the problem of creating tension in games.
There is no death in Wario Land 3. Instead, each enemy has a different effect on the player-avatar. Most of these effects are necessary to solve the game’s puzzles and proceed through its stages, but they can also just slow Wario down, depending on the context. For example, touching a zombie enemy turns Wario into a zombie, which allows him to break through certain floors and get to areas below; but if the effect is activated where it isn’t needed for this purpose, the player just has to deal with only being able to move slowly until the effect wears off. The game creates tension not with the threat of death but instead more subtly: the player will want to avoid enemies that will cause Wario to experience frustrating slowing effects unnecessary to solving any puzzles in a certain context.
Punishment is not eliminated but instead manifests as something more coherent with the game than the disruptive experience of death would be. The same mechanic that has to be used by the player to solve puzzles is used to punish him or her in other circumstances, and this gives Wario Land 3 a more unified and logical design than many other games have.
Jason Rohrer takes another approach in Inside a Star-Filled Sky, providing a game with a keenly designed structure that has something like death but eliminates any forced repetition upon its occurrence. When the player dies in one of the stages of this game, he or she drops down to the previous stage, but it is randomly generated rather than the same level as was passed through before. The stage the player died in, however, is not randomly generated the next time the player gets to it—it will remain the same as it was when he or she died in it.
What all this means is that it’s possible for the player to proceed backward through the game to find new randomly generated stages, where he or she can find the power-ups needed to get through the later, more difficult stages that will not be generated anew until the player gets through each of them once. Rather than forcing the player to repeat long portions of the game as punishment, death is more thoroughly incorporated into the game’s core mechanics. Despite the unusual game design, this structure still allows for the experience of tension: the player still cares about avoiding death because dying in one stage after another could mean being quickly propelled backward many stages.
Inside a Star-Filled Sky uniquely challenges many typical game mechanics in this way. But it goes even further than that, questioning the cycles of reward and punishment in games altogether with one very simple fact of its design: the game is nearly infinitely long. Without any tangible goals in sight, a reason for the player to try to advance at all is not built into the game. Players can, however, set their own goals, choosing which level they want to try to get to, and the game then ultimately and uniquely allows for player-defined reward and punishment.
Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, on the other hand, are designed to tightly control when and how players are punished and rewarded, largely through being basically built from the ground up around a player death mechanic. In these challenging games, the player is expected to die often, but rather than only require him or her to play through a portion of a stage again, death has other consequences. Upon death, all of the the souls the player was carrying (souls are the game’s currency, used to buy any items and upgrade stats) are dropped at the point of death. The player is then forced to face the danger of what killed him or her again, if he or she is to attempt to pick up the souls again—and if the player dies again before succeeding to pick them up, they’re lost forever. Because of this, the player’s choices throughout the game tend to be far riskier than they are in most other games, and this gives the overall experience much more tension.
Balancing out these games’ severe punishment for death, however, are certain rewards inherent mainly in the level design. The worlds are Metroid-like in that there are a lot of secret paths and shortcuts that can be found and opened up to connect one area to another. My experience of playing through many sections over again after dying, which would in most games simply be nothing more than repetitious punishment, was actually to discover a wide variety of secret areas that I might not have otherwise found. These two games are designed so thoroughly around the mechanic of death that rather than just be a punishment, it provides the opportunity to discover more rewards.[4]
In Dark Souls, the player can even find shortcuts far out in the world that connect right back to the very first area of the game (after the tutorial). Because the player, out there in the wild, is at constant risk of dying and being dealt the severe punishment of losing all the souls he or she is carrying, this reward of returning to the safe zone of the first area of the game—and being able now to use this uncovered shortcut to skip all the dangerous areas that have previously been traversed—is enormous. Ultimately these games maintain a constant cycling between tension and relief that makes for a hugely satisfying experience.
Conclusion
Many game mechanics seem to have only established their acceptability above and beyond any other mechanics through having been repetitively employed in one game after another. I believe the above examples show that these usual mechanics can be ignored in order not only to solve the design problems they present but also to create completely new gameplay opportunities.
I think it should also be noted that in much of the above, I often took for granted the fact that games are about physical violence. I used terms like lives, health, and death that have taken on almost universal game-specific definitions because so many games use violence as their metaphor for conflict. But, in fact, the best way to escape the difficulties presented by these mechanics would likely be to design games that are not about violence at all. This current constraint in subject matter cause constraints in game design that necessitate incorporating imperfect mechanics like death. Until designers attempt to create more games that are about other subjects, it is unlikely that we will begin to see new kinds of game mechanics for new kinds of games.
1 The Mario series, oddly enough, for all of the innovations it has brought to game design over the years, is one game series that lingers in the past with regard to its lives system. 1ups abound in the latest Mario games, even though dying in a stage just once makes the player have to start it over anyway, which is basically the same thing that happens when a player loses all of his or her lives and gets a game over. Super Mario Galaxy doesn’t even transfer the number of lives accumulated between play sessions—a console reset always brings a player’s life count back to five—so that there is effectively not much reason to collect 1ups. Super Mario 3D Land, on the other hand, does transfer accumulated lives between play sessions, but it is so generous in granting extra lives that many players should have no trouble earning upward of one hundred of them by the end of the game, which just nulls the threat of game over that a lives system is intended to create. In both cases, extra lives serve no significant gameplay purpose—although they might still be satisfying to collect. [Back]
2 Some games also use checkpoints—points at which the player can’t save the game but from which he or she will nonetheless be able to continue playing after dying. For the sake of ease, I’m going to use the term save points to refer to both actual save points and checkpoints throughout this article. [Back]
3 Half-Life also uses a quicksaving system, and paired with the life meter mechanic, much worse issues can arise. For example, it’s possible for a player to quicksave the game right before a difficult enemy encounter that could be made just about impossible if the player’s health is very low at the time the save is made. The player then usually has to load an earlier save in order to be able to advance. [Back]
4 This game series has another unique mechanic that helps in discovering these rewards: an online messaging system that allows players to leave anonymous notes throughout the game world, including notes with advice about where to look for secrets. Without a mechanic like this, many secrets might go undiscovered by most players—its inclusion seems to serve the purpose of better ensuring that players regularly experience rewards, offsetting the games’ frequent threats of punishment. [Back]
Games as Music: The Emotion of Rhythm
by Joel Jordon
Much has been made recently about how games may be less like narrative mediums like films and books and may more closely resemble music or poetry in form. A certain quality of well-designed games makes the comparison to music feel logical to me, and that quality might be best described as rhythm.[1] Games that exhibit this rhythmic quality best do so because player input results in consistent audiovisual feedback at fairly regular intervals. Music might serve as the best metaphor for these games, and this metaphor might help broaden our understanding of games and explain why some games offer more satisfying play experiences than others.
Rhythm
Music games of course provide the most obvious example of this rhythmic quality. Many games in this genre play like a musical Simon says, with the player being required to press the correct buttons (or stomp on them with his or her feet, as the case may be) in time with music. The player is judged for how well his or her button presses conform to the rhythm of the song and the game’s concurrent visual cues.
Music games that venture from this established formula are few and far between, and that may be because this kind of gameplay represents the most precise possible relationship between player input and game feedback. Dance Dance Revolution has been criticized for how its play in no way resembles real dancing, but I think that misses the point of the game: real dancing can come in so many styles and can even be improvised on the fly, but played correctly, DDR asks the player to move his or her feet in what is basically one way only. Always keeping track of just how rhythmically accurate the player’s stomps are, the game consistently notifies him or her of the accuracy of each stomp with words like perfect, great, good, and boo that appear on-screen along with a combo counter indicating how many stomps have been made without any misses.
The satisfaction of playing the game comes not from dancing inventively but from hitting all the buttons at all the right times and seeing a string of perfects appear with a high combo number.[2]
Games in other genres can have a rhythm to them, too, though it may be more subtle. Many platformers provide apt examples. Mario has always been fast and has always responded immediately to an A-button press with a jump and a sound. When the player runs along and makes a succession of good jumps from platform to platform, a rhythmic flow of button presses is accompanied by satisfying audiovisual feedback.
Particularly rhythmic platforming can be found in Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, a game that is actually played with a set of bongo drums—a controller that, perhaps unsurprisingly, was originally intended for use with a music game. Unlike most other platformers, DKJB uniquely employs a combo system, with a multiplier that increases with each new kind of jump the player performs without touching the ground (the first instances of, for example, a wall jump or a jump from a vine in a combo sequence result in multiplier increases).
Because the multiplier resets when the player lands on plain ground and stops jumping from one thing to the next, the combo system encourages the player to keep up a consistent jumping rhythm.[3] Many of the stages are designed like tracks that allow the player to maintain a rhythmic flow of jumps, and good rhythmic play results in high multipliers and larger numbers of collected bananas—satisfying game feedback similar to DDR‘s perfects and combo numbers.
Games in other genres can be rhythmic in more subtle ways, and they can show how rhythm as it manifests in games isn’t always fast but also sometimes slow. A slow rhythm doesn’t necessarily make a game less satisfying to play—what ultimately matters to this end is not the speed of the rhythm but whether or not it’s consistent.
Resident Evil 4 is a third-person action game whose rhythm is slow but consistently paced. Unlike in many other games with guns, the player cannot move while aiming, and both turning and aiming are slowly accomplished. To accommodate this and give the player a chance to fight them off, most enemies also move slowly. Action typically takes the form of crowd control: the player must carefully shoot at each enemy or group of enemies, first warding off the ones that are getting closest and then the ones that are farther away. Every shot counts, and the good player falls into a rhythm of moving the aiming reticule from enemy to enemy, shooting, reloading, aiming, shooting, and reloading.
Use of the shotgun particularly illustrates this rhythm, as it shoots more slowly than other weapons because it has to reload after every shot but it also exerts a powerful force that can knock whole groups of enemies down. The process of sweeping from one group of enemies to another and knocking each down in turn can quickly develop into a rhythm that offers the consistent satisfying feedback of a loud, steadily beaten percussion instrument. Bad aim and missed shots can mean disrupting that pleasing rhythm, especially because when enemies get too close to the player it becomes almost impossible to shoot at them, leaving him or her totally vulnerable to their attacks.
The game is slowed down still more by its elaborate inventory system, which can only be managed in a menu screen that pauses the game’s action. Some light criticism has been aimed at the game for how this inventory system disrupts the gameplay, but I think it actually adds even more rhythm to the overall experience. Inventory management requires making careful adjustments to the placement of items on a grid, and each movement the player makes with his or her cursor on that grid without an item selected result in a soft, squishy sound, while each movement of an item after selecting it results in a clicking sound. It’s subtle, but these sounds in sequence can create simple rhythms that help make inventory management enjoyable.
Resident Evil 4 was a major influence on many forthcoming third-person shooters, like Gears of War and Uncharted, but these newer shooters ratchet up the speed of gameplay. Shooters now that seem to play as slowly as RE4 does are typically criticized for their lack of speed compared with other modern shooters. But I maintain that it’s not the tempo that matters so much as it is the rhythm.[4]
Emotion
A game many are taking notice of at the moment for having been a big 2D platformer release in 2011 is Rayman Origins. Considering the rhythmic qualities that can be found in its gameplay, maybe it should come as no surprise that the Rayman series has always seemed concerned with music. The original Rayman includes a whole world made up mostly of musical notation, and Rayman Origins includes a world clearly inspired by that one made up mostly of musical instruments.
But it’s the rhythm in the gameplay that lends Rayman Origins the kind of flow similar to that found in Mario: the player is given the speed to run through levels and the responsive controls to jump at precisely the right moments to avoid pits and enemies. Music is even brought literally to the experience of movement in the game when the player jumps to collect a row of what are called lums and a melodic series of sounds elicits from them.
But although Rayman Origins is a good example of what it means for a game to be rhythmic, it is oddly enough also a good example of what it means for a game to be arrhythmic. That’s because when there’s a lapse in a consistent rhythm, it’s noticeable. There are big lums in the game that, when collected, cause all nearby lums to turn red and dance and sing, indicating that they’re worth double their normal amount; most of these red lums are placed in a row and are meant to be picked up by the player quickly before a timer runs out and the lums turn yellow again and become worth their original value. Successfully collecting the lums while they’re still red requires quick, precise, rhythmic maneuvering. Faltering rhythmically here can mean failure.
Even more rhythmically precarious situations arise out of the game’s chase sequences. Because the screen scrolls automatically to the right in these sequences and the player is constantly placed in near-death positions, he or she must perform all jumps with almost flawless timing or else die.
Missing a bunch of red lums or dying in these situations can be frustrating largely because it means failing to play the game with rhythmic precision; but collecting all the red lums or surviving can be satisfying because it means playing the game with rhythmic near-perfection. The experience of playing Rayman Origins often wavers between satisfaction and frustration in this way. The difference between the two is the difference between hearing a song that plays to its conclusion without missing a beat and hearing a song that skips and fumbles through different tempos.
The way in which satisfaction and frustration can be felt along this bumpy road of rhythm might be extrapolated logically and lead to the conclusion that other emotions—like happiness and disappointment—can be felt over a longer play experience. If this rhythmic quality of games can be understood as creating emotions in the player in the same way that music does, it could open up the definition of games as art to include many more games that wouldn’t fit it by other metrics (such as whether a game explores meaningful ideas in its narrative or has good visual aesthetics).
But this range of emotions that rhythmic games can create in the player is currently very limited compared with that which music is able to elicit in the listener. Few games seem to have been successfully designed to cause players to feel more complex emotions, and going forward, this might be a worthwhile goal for game designers to aim for. If satisfaction and happiness are the main emotions this rhythmic quality can currently create, it could indicate that—right now at least—this quality is capable of delivering little more than aesthetic pleasure. This calls to mind the timeworn debate between whether art should aim to provide only aesthetic pleasure or whether it should also provide moral insight. While on the one hand an understanding of the rhythm of games could help to broaden the spectrum of which games are considered art, it could also restrict the design of games that aim at other kinds of artistic expression.
1 Rhythm is well-defined and explored as a characteristic of games in this excellent article. [Back]
2 There is a challenging way of playing the game called “freestyle,” in which players attempt to put on something more like a dance performance while still hitting all the buttons correctly. But since not many people play the game in this way, I think the best way to eliminate criticism of how playing it fails to resemble real dancing would be to rename it Stomp Stomp Revolution. [Back]
3 I would argue that Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is an almost perfect platformer in a literal sense because it accomplishes exactly what all platformers should set out to do in definition: the game’s combo system compels the player to be in the air—to jump—as often as possible. [Back]
4 Resident Evil 5, for example, might have played better if only it kept the slow, methodical rhythm of its predecessor. Instead, in an apparent attempt to modernize, it sped up enemies and other parts of the gameplay (like the inventory, which is simplified and must be managed in real time) while leaving others (like many aspects of the controls as well as the player-avatar’s animations) as slow as before. These halfway changes left in their wake a game marred by rhythmic imprecision. [Back]
The Anticapitalism Allegory of No More Heroes
by Joel Jordon
“Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
He got an ice pick
That made his ears burn.”
— The Stranglers, “No More Heroes”
No More Heroes is commonly interpreted as a parody and critique of video games, but I think the game has something to say on a whole other level: it also seems to be a critique of the capitalist system. The game’s anticapitalism allegory is apparent in all aspects of its design, including in its narrative, game mechanics, self-aware aesthetics, and the way it portrays its protagonist. I’ve broken this essay into four sections in order to discuss each of these aspects in turn and demonstrate how No More Heroes serves as a rare example of a game whose many parts all work together to express the same message. The cohesiveness of all of the game’s parts allows it to effectively communicate a message to the player that is both political and emotional.
Narrative
The narrative of No More Heroes is patently absurd, but it’s familiar video game fare. Travis Touchdown, the protagonist, takes a job from Sylvia Christel, an agent with the United Assassins Association (UAA). After Travis kills the eleventh-ranked assassin, he is entered into the rankings, and the rest of the game is about how he works his way through the top ten by killing each assassin ranked above him in order.
The story can be easily interpreted as an extrapolation and parody of video game logic, which allows for violence and murder to occur for no purpose other than to advance in some abstract way. But rising through the ranks in No More Heroes can also be interpreted as a representation of advancing within the capitalist system, especially as Travis earns prize money for each assassination. Travis obtains wealth and rises to the top of the allegorical society by murdering other people, effectively critiquing capitalism as a system in which social mobility is allowed only at the expense of others’ misfortunes.
The game portrays Sylvia, who orchestrates all of the fights between the assassins, as exceedingly wealthy and carefree. One of the game’s running gags is that every time Sylvia calls Travis to tell him where his next ranked fight will be, the player can see that she’s out enjoying some recreational activity, whether she’s shopping, lying at the beach, or getting an oil rub. Travis is made to do all of the dirty work while Sylvia gets to enjoy the luxuries her wealth makes her privy to. At the end of the game, the player finds out that everything was a scam, the UAA doesn’t exist, and Sylvia just pocketed all of the entrance fees Travis paid to her in order to enter each fight. All this can be viewed as an allegory for and critique of how, in a capitalist system, the rich can reap all of the benefits of the poor’s gruesome work.
But the game doesn’t stop at just critiquing how the rich steal from the poor—it also demonstrates how compelling the capitalist system’s promises of upward mobility and wealth are and how this makes people buy into it and then become trapped by it. The first ranked assassin Travis fights against is very wealthy—he’s a count who lives in a luxurious mansion on a tropical paradise—and during the fight, Travis gives a monologue, the beginning of which is all too revealing of his intentions:
This count… I feel as if I’m looking at my future self. Mega bucks, big-ass house, fast cars… Dining in style with a world-class chef and a trusty nutritionist counting every calorie. A team of hot yoga instructors to keep me in shape. Nurses to attend to my body… Maids and loyal servants at my beck and call. On the weekends, tanned babes knocking on my door every two hours. Every day full of excitement and luxury. That’d be the life. Everything in its right place. It’s the perfect life. It’s the life for winners. That’ll be my life!
Travis is only killing all of the assassins ranked above him in order to obtain wealth and the luxuries and sexual pleasures that come with it—Sylvia promises to sleep with him if he kills the first-ranked assassin. He buys in to the capitalist’s dream. But he also seems to be aware that he’s stuck in this capitalist system and that his pursuits within it will never actually satisfy him. Here’s the end of his monologue:
I realize there’s really nothing here for me. But what else can I do but keep going? Maybe I should have been a little more careful before I jumped in. Gotta find the exit. Gotta find that exit to Paradise. But, I can’t see it. Can’t see anything. There’s this sense of doom running down my spine, like it’s… like it’s trying to suck the life out of me. I need to get rid of it before I bail. Something deeper… deeper than my instincts is taunting me. Can’t find the exit. Can’t find the exit. Can’t find the exit. Can’t find the exit. Can’t find the exit.
This is the first of many of the game’s suggestions that the capitalist system traps all those who participate in it. When Travis asks Sylvia what would happen if he refuses to continue killing and advancing in rank, she says that he has no choice because he’s become a target of lower-ranked assassins. Once he’s in it, he can’t get out.
Sylvia also frequently contradicts herself and acts unexpectedly, which could furthermore represent the confusing and ensnaring nature of capitalism. One second she might be overwhelmingly supportive of Travis and the next she’ll tell him how certain she is that he’s going to die in his next fight. Her inexplicable contradictions are especially clear in this piece of dialogue from when she calls Travis right before the final fight:
I never thought you’d make it this far. But I am sorry… I cannot see you anymore. I want to fly to your side, right now. I want to be in your arms. I want to be with you. I want to share my life with you… no matter the cost. Meeting you… I’ve felt truly alive for the first time. I mean that. But feelings and reality are two different things. Life is not that simple, yes? Now be honest. Did you really think I would let you do me if you hit number one? You really are an idiot, aren’t you, Travis? Come back to reality! I mean, look at yourself! You are a dopy, otaku assassin. The bottom of the barrel. No woman would be caught dead with you… unless she was a desperate bitch! Where in the world could you find a woman who could fall in love with someone like you? Well… one is right here. It was fun, Travis. I love you. Now… don’t forget to use the restroom. Trust your Force… And head for the Garden of Madness!
Her sudden shifts of emotion make her motives completely unclear, which allows her to really pull all of the strings and manipulate Travis. It adds to the allegory, showing how the people who wield power in a capitalist system can manipulate their victims.
Sylvia ends many of her conversations with Travis by telling him to go to the “Garden of Madness.” The “Garden of Madness” might be interpreted as the only goal anyone can hope to end up at when working his or her way upward in a capitalist system—it evokes the peaceful nature of a garden that’s been corrupted by all the madness that was required to pursue it. And as No More Heroes approaches its end, things do get more and more mad, as the narrative seems to search desperately for some meaning and purpose it can ascribe to Travis’s actions and their consequences.
Near the end of the game, an assassin with a Darth Vader–ish mask and voice parodies Star Wars by claiming to be Travis’s father; following this is a series of real plot twists in which Travis learns that one assassin he’s fighting is his sister and another his twin brother. Travis suddenly has a flashback and remembers that the reason he started rising through the ranks was because his sister, Jeane, killed their parents and he wanted to get to her and get revenge. She explains the reason she killed their parents, but the game fast-forwards over her dialogue, which is all anyone really needs to realize that it’s all quite obviously meant to be a joke and parody of dramatic climaxes and none of the details of it are important. All of these plot twists just come off as suddenly invented excuses for all of the violence that has been committed thus far. Consider the following exchange:
Travis: “I don’t have a father, at least not anymore. You killed him, didn’t you?”
Jeane: “Yes. And that’s why you became an assassin to kill me.”
Travis: “Now I get it. All those fights… It was for this!”
But it wasn’t, really. The player hasn’t been fighting for this reason—he or she has just now been made aware of this purpose for the first time—and Travis didn’t remember this reason and said, at the beginning of the game, that he was fighting for wealth and luxury and to sleep with Sylvia. These inexplicable pieces of plot don’t actually explain anyone’s initial motives because the game designers don’t reveal them until after all of the bloody deeds have been done. Allegorically, then, these plot twists represent the desperate excuses invented after the fact to justify terrible actions committed within the capitalist system.
The game ends with Travis and his twin brother, Henry, running along the street stupidly, their swords held against each other the whole time. They share the following dialogue:
Henry: “How do you plan to put an end to all of this?”
Travis: “Wait a sec. You want me to tie up all these loose ends? I don’t think so.”
Henry: “You’re the protagonist. I’m just a cool, handsome foil who happens to be your twin brother. Hate to say it, but it’s your job.”
Travis: “I want to bail, but where the hell’s the exit? There’s no way out, is there? No getting out… Right, bro?”
Henry: “That’s right. All we can do is keep running.”
Travis: “Then let’s find that exit they call Paradise.”
They then jump away from each other for a moment, exclaim “let’s go!” in unison, and clash again in mid-air; the game freezes on that image and the credits roll.
Travis and Henry both seem to recognize the absurdity of the situation they’re in—they go so far as to note that they’re a part of an arbitrary fictional narrative that will have no proper conclusion—and yet they don’t try to fight it. Instead, they just keep running and doing what they’ve been doing. Travis ends with saying that they have to find the “exit to Paradise,” which was something he mentioned he couldn’t find all the way back in his first fight with a ranked assassin. It was in committing to that first fight that he submitted to the capitalist system and sealed his fate—that of the Garden of Madness, not Paradise.
After the credits roll, the game pans out and reveals that the frozen frame of Travis and Henry clashing in mid-air is a painting in a museum. Travis’s struggle within the capitalist system is forever.
Game Mechanics
All of the above deals only with the plot of No More Heroes. In this section, I will discuss how the game mechanics enhance the anticapitalist allegory by adding on additional layers of meaning.
Money plays a very fundamental role in the game’s structure. Each time Travis kills an enemy, not just blood but also coins spray exaggeratedly out of his or her corpse; each time he kills a ranked assassin, he earns prize money. Travis must use the money he earns to pay entrance fees to Sylvia in order to participate in ranked fights. Money makes the game’s world go round—Travis is constantly earning money and then putting it back into the system in higher and higher amounts (as the entrance fees grow), and Sylvia is profiting more and more throughout the game. This could be viewed as a representation of a capitalist system in which someone rich profits off of someone else’s hard work.
The player can choose to purchase some things with money, too. There’s a clothing store where the player can buy purely cosmetic items for Travis to wear, and there’s a video store from which he or she can rent videos. The former is a representation of engaging in consumerism for the sake of luxury and increasing one’s attractiveness, and the latter is a representation of media consumption. It’s certainly no coincidence that the game is saved by having Travis defecate—he’s literally relieving himself of everything that he’s consumed.
The anticapitalist allegory is even more explicit in other ways, though. Between ranked fights, the player has the option of earning money by doing some killing missions on the side and also by participating in “side jobs.” These side jobs are not glamorous—in fact, a lot of them, like lawn-mowing, garbage collection, and working at a gas station, resemble low-paying jobs in real life. The gameplay of these side jobs consists of often tedious minigames. For the gas station side job, for example, the player just has to correctly time pressing the B button to fill up cars over and over again. These boring minigames allude to the tedium experienced by someone who’s barely scraping by with a minimum-wage job.
Tedium is expressed in other aspects of the gameplay. There are also, for example, balls strewn throughout the game world that the player can find and bring to someone in order to learn wrestling moves. The balls have no apparent practical use to the man the player gives them to and can thus be interpreted as parodies of collectibles in video games, but the experience of finding them also evokes the same tedium of repetitious and unenjoyable work as the side jobs.
Moving through Santa Destroy—the setting of No More Heroes—and looking for those balls, the player might be struck by the emptiness of the game world. It’s a parody of sandbox settings like in the Grand Theft Auto games, which put the player in a city and give him or her a lot of choices—the whole name of the game is freedom. But the parody sandbox setting of No More Heroes gives the player only the illusion of freedom, as there isn’t actually much to do in it and its lack of technical polish is distracting and inhibiting. In this world, you can look for the balls, take on a few side missions and jobs, and visit a few different shops, but that’s about it—much of the world is just streets and buildings that serve no gameplay purpose. As far as its technical qualities go, there’s some bad collision detection—you can collide with invisible walls when driving Travis’s motorcycle—and there’s a limited draw distance that results in a lot of objects not appearing until you get close to them. Moving cars have thick windows you can’t see through, as if no one’s actually driving them, and in the rare instances that you see anyone walking along the street, you have no way of truly interacting with them. You can actually walk into them and push them around without their protesting, which totally breaks any illusion that they might be real and clearly delineates their identities as video game objects.
In Grand Theft Auto, the whole point is that you’re able to interact with people, choosing to beat them to a pulp or steal their cars if you want to, and the world is polished technically so that you’ll never run into problems with bad collision detection or short draw distances. Grand Theft Auto’s microcosm of an American city is all yours and you can live out your fantasies in it. No More Heroes strips away all of that freedom and emphasizes the artificiality and lack of technical polish of its world, as if to reveal that our ability to make choices and truly fulfill our desires can only be an illusion when working within the capitalist system. You have no choice when it comes to having to kill others in order to advance in rank. All you really ever get to decide is which tedious missions you choose to take on to earn money and which clothing you choose to buy and which videos you choose to rent with that money—all of your choices are restricted by how much money you have and what options are available to you as a consumer. And making these small, meaningless choices will never distract from the truth: this is an empty, artificial world, and no one on the streets ever notices you.
Self-aware Aesthetics
Aesthetics and gameplay are intertwined in No More Heroes, building off of one another to create meaning. It’s in the thick of gameplay—during fights—that the game’s self-aware aesthetics are most prominent.
During gameplay, No More Heroes frequently reappropriates recognizable video game aesthetics and, through exaggeration, turns them into parody. Every time the player kills an enemy, numerous things happen in a pattern that repeats itself throughout the game, each step of the pattern loudly proclaiming “this is a video game.” Just before the player kills an enemy, the game indicates, with big arrows in the center of the screen, the direction that the player needs to move his or her Wii remote in to finish off the enemy. After performing this movement and killing the enemy, an exaggerated amount of blood and coins spray from his or her sliced-up body. And after this, a slot machine automatically runs; if the slots happen to land on three-in-a-row of anything, the player gets a “dark side” ability. Among these abilities is one that puts a targeting reticule on the screen and allows the player to aim and shoot at other enemies, turning the game, briefly, into a parody of another video game genre. The graphics for the quick-time event arrows and the slot machine are made up of big square dots, calling to mind pixelation, an aesthetic very common to old video games. If the player finishes off an enemy with a wrestling move, there will even be icons representing the Wii remote and nunchuk next to the arrows, breaking down the fourth wall still more by blatantly acknowledging that the player has to control this scene with a video game controller. Basically, the pattern of events that occur as the player kills an enemy uses big, unrealistic, gamey, self-referential graphics that preclude any possibility of suspending one’s disbelief and remind the player over and over again that he or she is playing a video game.
Patterns that proclaim No More Heroes’s status as a video game occur elsewhere. The structure of the game as a whole, for one, is perfectly formulaic: there are individual stages, each with a ranked assassin who acts as a boss. Beyond that, every time the player beats one of these bosses and advances in rank, a series of events happen without fail: Travis moves up on a high score list—which has graphics and sound that could have been ripped straight from a classic arcade game—and then he returns to his room and listens to a message left by the video store about a video he hasn’t returned. Old games tend to follow formulas like this, with things broken into stages with bosses and high score lists, but as games have become technically capable of being more realistic, these unrealistic formulas have largely become relics. No More Heroes could only be bringing them back for the sake of deliberately parodying video game aesthetics.
So what do these self-aware video game aesthetics have to do with the game’s anticapitalist allegory? Well, in ensuring you’re always made aware that you’re playing a video game, the game might also be hoping that you’ll recognize that this No More Heroes you’re consuming is a piece of media and a product. On a meta level, the game may be acknowledging that you most likely had to engage with the capitalist system in order to play this game—whether you purchased it or rented it—and that the act of playing it is an act of consumption. The game has in this way associated you with Travis Touchdown, the protagonist trapped in the capitalist system whose consumption of products and media often distance him from real life.
Media is layered on top of media throughout the game. One ranked assassin whom Travis fights, Shinobu, is a samurai, and the fight takes place in a Japanese-style room. They have the following exchange:
Shinobu: “You will pay with your life! At last, I have my chance. I will now avenge my father!”
Travis: “Something tells me you watch too many samurai movies, little girl!”
The setting, Shinobu herself, and the invented scenario—in which Shinobu is claiming to seek revenge even though Travis never killed her father—are clearly parodying samurai movies, and layered on top of that is Travis’s claim that she watches too many samurai movies. This whole scene is so thickly layered in fictional media that it has almost no connection with real life at all. After the fight, Shinobu continues to say that Travis killed her father, Master Jacobs, and Travis says, “I watched Master Jacobs’ teachings on video over and over till the fuckin’ tape wore out. We’ve never met in person.” Travis absurdly states that he got all of his training through media rather than through real-life practice, adding yet another layer of consumption between him and real life.
Media finds its way into No More Heroes in all kinds of different ways. A ranked battle with a superhero, for example, takes place in a movie studio. Santa Destroy—the open-world setting of No More Heroes—parodies American consumption stereotypes with buildings like Suplex Pizza and Burger Suplex, the latter of which has a giant cheeseburger cupola. Travis’s room is filled with products and media. This constant presence of consumption is what divides Travis from real life and really traps him in the capitalist system.
Portrayal of the Protagonist
No More Heroes’s message is not just political. The game has a tragedy at its center: the protagonist’s participation in the capitalist system leads him to seek pleasure in consumption alone and become disconnected from other people.
Travis Touchdown is in many ways intended to be a parody of the stereotypical video game player, otaku, and geek. He gets a very vulgar and pathetic enjoyment out of violence and sex—he often seems only to be killing all these people because Sylvia promises to sleep with him when he hits number one—and he charges his sword by moving it up and down in a motion that obviously alludes to masturbation. He consumes tons of media and products—his room is filled with everything from toys to posters to wrestling masks. On a meta level, his portrayal might be interpreted as a critique of the player, who might share some of his consumerist compulsions and enjoyment of violence and sex. After all, a lot of players certainly bought and consumed No More Heroes just because it looked like an exciting, ultraviolent game, not realizing that it might be critical of them for doing this.
But the game is more than just critical—it really does seem to want to show just how tragic Travis’s (and maybe the player’s) situation is. The capitalist system seems to have ensnared Travis and led him away from discovering the things that can really make him happy; he’s substituted the pleasure he gets from consumer products and visceral thrills for relationships with real people. Throughout the game, he only interacts with a few different people: Sylvia, other assassins before he kills them, and people working behind counters from whom he either purchases products or receives job offers. When he does speak with these people, he frequently expresses a love of violence, and when he speaks with females he’s exceedingly sexist toward them.
But there’s one character with whom Travis seems to establish a genuine emotional connection: Holly Summers, the rank-six assassin. The first dialogue they share reaffirms Travis’s obsession with violence:
Holly: “Do you like fighting?”
Travis: “Yup.”
Holly: “Do you like killing?”
Travis: “Live for it.”
But then Holly tells him he’s immature for enjoying violence and not considering the consequences of his actions:
Holly: “Do you accept death?”
Travis: “Death? Never crossed my mind.”
Holly: “Death is the only truth. You are still a mere bud.”
But Travis doesn’t let any of her moralizing have any effect on him, responding with “that’s not a good thing, you know… seeking meaning in everything. Especially killing. That’s a bad habit among smart little girls these days.” Holly then seems to suggest that he might have a better understanding if only he could be intimate with other people: “come closer and you will understand everything.” But Travis insists only on flirting with her and fighting her, sticking to his normal obsessions with sex and violence. He asks, “Are you in the mood yet?”—a double entendre—and then says, “Normal assassins don’t shoot the shit like this. They see their target… And kill them!” The fight begins and the game transitions from cutscene to gameplay.
After the fight, another cutscene begins with Travis standing over a prone Holly, his sword pointed in her face. It’s a clearly sexual stance that evokes Travis’s physical dominance over Holly after having won the fight. But he hesitates in this moment and won’t kill her. Holly, though, insists that “assassins must die when they lose” and shows Travis the consequences of his actions. After saying “the moment you hesitated… I felt your embrace,” she puts a grenade in her mouth and kills herself.
This is one of the only times in the whole game that Travis expresses any guilt and intimacy—absent of any violent or sexual sentiments—and it’s perhaps because Holly kept trying to pull some feeling out of him. He says, while holding her corpse, “Forgive me, Holly. I was late in saying this… But I love your soul. Rest in peace.” Almost exactly halfway through the game, in this one break from all of the consumption, on a beach where you can hear the tide and seagulls, Travis then drops Holly’s corpse into a grave. The camera switches to a position within the grave, looking up at the corpse falling down and landing with a thud and a black-out, as if to tragically signal that connecting with others in this violent system is impossible and Travis won’t attempt it again the rest of the game. The black screen then transitions to a high score list showing Travis move up to rank six as some triumphant video game music plays.
