Mar. 25, 2009 - Issue #701: Extinction Song

Infinite Lives: Simple, hot and deep

“ ... Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.”

“And what does Death need time for?”

“The answer is so simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in ... ” 

—William S Burroughs

 

Snowed in in Calgary. You’re no doubt tired of hearing weather-talk—but can you give me five seconds to vent? Beacause as soon as I take the tarp (five) off the patio furniture and start really feeling the sunbathing joy; when (four) I head into town for an event called “Spring Thaw,” that is (three) of course when the Sky Gods decide we need another two feet of (two) god damned snow and the highway ought to have one (one) more death-trap curtain call. (zero) Of course.

 

And so. Afternoon in a friend’s living room. I’ve mushed out through the snowpiles for coffee and Chinese breakfast-buns. I’ve played with the dog. My wife is upstairs watching Montgomery Clift get the chair for drowning Shelley Winters. My DS is dead (forgot the charger) so my dive into The World Ends With You, for which I traded all three iterations of MLB 09: The Show, will have to wait. Nothing to do but resume yesterday’s obsession, Bloody Fun Day (tinyurl.com/bloodyfun).

 

“Addictive.” We use this word a lot; it’s rivalled only by “fast-paced” in the lazy game writer’s toolkit of readymades. And addictive Bloody Fun Day, developed by Urban Squall and available on timewaster’s paradise Kongregate.com, certainly is. But what makes it so? What’s the alchemy of addiction that keeps me—for eight hours now, and counting on into the equinoctial night—clicking my little cartoon Grim Reaper around the same hexagonal grid, reaping the multicoloured souls of the same adorable whatsits, stranded in the terrifying limbo where research and procrastination meet?

 

Zoned out in the clicktrance, my mind goes back to what is probably the first piece of game-design theory I ever read. Sometime in the mid-’80s, entranced by Pinball Construction Set, Starflight, Archon, Seven Cities of Gold and pretty much every other EA-published game that could be had via birthday wishes or scrimped allowance money, my very serious teenaged self wrote a very serious letter to Electronic Arts, asking exactly what being a game designer entailed. To my surprise, I got a prompt response, from Trip Hawkins himself! He laid it all out: Electronic Arts, he said, was only interested in games possessing three virtues: they had to be “Simple, hot and deep.” This is as good a recipe for videogame addiction as any; let’s take a look!

 

Simple. Turn by turn, Bloody Fun Day requires you to answer a single question: where next does the Grim Reaper reap? There are six possible modifiers to this choice, in the form of “special powers” that enable your widdle Angel of Death to do things like kill at range, double the bounty of his (or her; you can select a very elegant she-Death) next soul-harvest, or convert said souls into the all-important Red Souls that sustain his/her unlife. It takes maybe 30 seconds to figure out how to make it go, and once you’ve got it the mechanics move from your brain to your mouse-hand. simplicity makes heat possible.

 

Hot. Bloody Fun Day progresses by turns, but it manages to create and maintain the panicked heat of a real-time game. A lot of this heat is more or less a special effect, a fire stoked by an unusually effective sonic environment; even when Death has things pretty easy, the lazy doot-de-doo earworm background music occasionally kicks things up metal-style to remind you of what you’ve got coming. What you’ve got coming is scarcity; you need those goddamned Red Souls, and thanks to a sidebar timeline, you know exactly how long you have ‘til you run out. You also know exactly how long you have until the eggs that litter the board—new life born from the spurting blood of your cuddly-wuddly victims—will hatch and maybe save your bony ass. Synchronizing your actions, click by click, with this relentless timeline is all-important. Heat makes depth possible.

Deep. Oh, God. In your constant quest for Red Souls, you’ll come up with all kinds of personal strategies and rules of thumb. Never click a red group that comprises fewer than four Cuties; let those clusters build! Never crush an unhatched egg! Or, actually go ahead and crush them if it means keeping that fat group of Black Souls in play! Whatever you tell yourself, the depth really hits when your Red Soul tank is running dry and the tense music is playing, and only a perfectly planned click-strategy is going to keep you alive (or, undead). And when it pays off, when one sweet strategy moves you from “Here comes the fucking tombstone” to being fat with 40 Red Souls? Shit; even after all these years of gaming, that rush still does its neurochemical work. Depth makes payoff possible. V 

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