Health: an intrinsic feature of video games

We don’t often think about it, but lives and health seems to be an essential part of playing a videogame. No matter when the game was published, unless it’s a sports simulation game, you’ll probably find some representation of your character’s health on the screen. Mario has mushrooms, Link has hearts, and Master Chief has shields.

There are some exceptions to the rules, though. In some games, you are given infinite lives or continues in order to keep you engaged in the game, so that repeated failure won’t lead to frustration. There are even some videogames where it is impossible to die, like Xbox Live Arcade’s Braid. In this game, you “die” in one hit, but you are always allowed to reverse time and get a second chance to sort out whatever killed you.

Many of today’s bestselling games display your avatar’s health in a way that attempts to fully immerse you in the game. Both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Gears of War 2 show an increasing amount of blood spattering on the screen as you take more damage. Instead of using a simple 100-point number system to display your health, these games grab your attention by making it harder to see and move when your character is under fire.

The way health is displayed in videogames is of great interest to Alan Brooksby of the School of Medicine, Health Policy, and Practice at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. Brooksby recently published a study entitled “Exploring the Representation of Health in Videogames: A Content Analysis,” that seeks to gauge how health is displayed in games, using a specific set of measurements.

In essence, Brooksby aimed to “explore further ways in which the concept of health is represented in videogames beyond its most common usage in the interface.” When surveying gamers about the important of health displays, he found that “having a constant, onscreen representation of health was mentioned by the majority of players as an essential feature.”

Brooksby set out to measure how health was represented in a sample of 10 games, all released around 2005. He used five categories to measure health: mobility, ability, psychology, social, and pain. Mobility was any effect to your movement speed, such as a character getting shot and being forced to limp around. Ability meant that certain actions could not be performed if your character was too damaged. Psychological effects were changes in your character’s mood, be it happy or sad, based on its health. Social was measured in other non-player characters reacting to you in a different way based on your actions. Pain, which ended up being the most critical measurement, was defined as the expression of “pain behavior” such as wincing or grunting when the character was injured. Pain also included the display of red flashes or arrows pointing to wherever the avatar was being shot at from.

After playing each game for 2 hours, Brooksby filmed 15 minutes of gameplay and rated it based on these categories of health. Interestingly, these five categories are often used to rate “health-related quality of life” in many real-life patients. Brooksby’s results showed that pain was the most common representation of health in games, with 9 of the 10 games displaying it often. He noted that the games tried to give the player a sense of the “interruptive nature” of pain as they played the game. Brooksby noticed that “the representation of pain is used to halt the flow of the game, with flashes of red, cries of pain from the avatar, or the appearance of directional indicators that target the player’s attention to an in-game threat of danger or attack.” I found it interesting that only The Sims 2 showed any sign of Psychological health.

It’s interesting to discover that the representation of pain has become such a fundamental part of health in videogames. Perhaps we feel more connected to our avatar when they cry out in pain, and we want to prevent further harm from befalling our character. Brooksby notes at the end of his article that the study may have had some limitations, and the test itself was done on a very small scale. “Health is a complex concept,” Brooksby writes, “and [it] encompasses a broader range of behaviors than these five categories.” Still, his study is an interesting glimpse at one of the ways in which videogames try to pull us in and immerse us in a different world.

Overview of the current state of video games

The videogame industry now rivals the movie industry as one of the biggest entertainment businesses. The Entertainment Software Association valued the videogame industry at $22 billion in 2008. Gaming has gone from a niche market during the ‘80s to a mainstream source of huge revenue, and it seems to pervade many aspects of our daily lives. For some, it even seems like gaming is a way of life.

Think about how often we encounter videogames in our normal routines. While checking social networking sites like Facebook, users flock to a wide variety of games to play with their friends. One of the best examples of gaming on Facebook, FarmVille, has over 81 million active users at the time of this writing.

Traditional games made with big budgets are available for both the PC and gaming consoles. The three powerhouse consoles of this generation are Nintendo’s Wii, Sony’s Playstation 3, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. All these consoles represent the efforts of companies that proved their worth in the console wars, and as technology progresses, next-generation consoles are always eagerly-awaited.

The Wii is especially significant, for having captured a demographic that was previously unheard of playing videogames. Not only do kids love the console, but their parents and grandparents seem to enjoy the system as well. This is thanks to the motion-sensing controller used to play the Wii, which represented a big risk for Nintendo that ultimately paid off. The ability to control a game by mimicking real-life motions is a huge leap from the simple controllers from two decades ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2DuW-ZQxZo

There is also a market for handheld-gaming, currently dominated by the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Again, these systems have widespread appeal with a broad range of age groups, giving anyone the ability to enjoy a videogame on a plane or bus.

But you don’t need to own a stand-alone system to enjoy gaming on the go. Mobile phones are cluttered with a massive amount of cheap games, all in the effort to hook the player and rake in the dough. In a recent article for The New York Times, Bob Tedeschi examined the emergence of the iPhone as a gaming platform.

Tedeschi explained that thanks to the increasingly-powerful processor in the iPhone, games can be made for the platform featuring impressive graphics for such a small system. He also mentioned the business model for mobile gaming, where companies can produce games cheaply and therefore sell them at a greatly reduced price. There are even games that cost next to nothing, reel the player in, and then charge them in “micro-transactions” for special items, gear, or food. Tedeschi dubbed this the “freemium” approach.

You can read Tedeschi’s article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/technology/personaltech/28smart.html

With gaming becoming such a widespread pastime, I’d like to use this blog to analyze and assess various aspects of the ever-growing industry. With technology moving at such a rapid pace, what lies in store for gamers of tomorrow? How is gaming affecting society? Can gaming be considered art? Hopefully, by the time you’re done reading this blog, I will have enlightened you on at least some small detail of videogames today.