Ik stam nog uit een tijdperk waar je genadeloos werd afgestraft als je dood ging, en je vervolgens weer helemaal van voren af aan kon beginnen. Want wat nou save en checkpoints?? Veel mensen van de oude garde (laten we ze OG's Original Gamers noemen) klagen dat de games van nu veel te makkelijk zijn, en dat de makers er van ons graag bij het handje nemen. Maar de kinderen van nu zijn dus verpest met deze manier van gamen, en daarom heeft de schrijver van dit artikel goed naar zijn eigen kinderen gekeken en kwam oa tot de volgende conclusie.

#5.They Don't Tolerate Losing, So Modern Games Just Let Them Win

et's face it, in the video game universe, death isn't what it used to be. I remember when save points were a thing, forgetting to use them for a couple of hours meant your death would erase everything you just spent half a work day accomplishing. In older MMOs, dying meant a loss of experience points or levels.

Go back a few years before that, and you find NES games that didn't even have the ability to save. You die, you're back at the menu screen. There are people in this world who have played the first level of Super Mario Bros literally 10,000 times.

Because of this (MMOs aside), I learned to pause my game frequently. If I had to take a piss, it got paused. Need a new Pepsi -- paused. Need 10 minutes to stalk the neighbor lady -- paused. Because if you didn't, you were absolutely guaranteed to come back to a corpse, and you'd spend the next hour trying to come up with a good story to explain the Nintendo-shaped hole in your bedroom wall.

In almost every modern game, death isn't shit. If you die in Fallout: New Vegas, you just pick up at your last auto-save, which happens every couple of minutes. Every time you enter or exit a building. Every new area. Every time you sleep. Because of that, death is not even something my kids take into consideration when running face-first into a herd of Radioactive Cock-Punching Punchcocks. I've seen them put down the controller and go swimming for an hour while their character stands, staring dumbfounded into the horizon.

Why Do They Do It?

I'll come back to Fallout: New Vegas again because it has a perfect example. Just outside of the very first town, there is a road adorned with signs that basically say, "If you go past these signs, you will fucking die. No, this isn't a fake warning." And of course, if you just assume that their "not a fake warning" line is actually a fake warning, you find out very quickly that you were in error.

My kids barrel-ass in without weapons or knowledge of the game whatsoever ... because why not? The only thing keeping me on the safe side of those signs is my memory of what video game death used to be like. I've been conditioned to respect the idea of virtual death, and the thought of falling to it is beyond what I can accept as a player.

What Does it Mean?

There is no price for failure. When you die, you're put right back where you left off, fully healed and ready to try again. That's a radical fucking change considering if you missed a single jump during the final boss battle of Super Mario Bros., you may have to start the entire game from scratch. It'd be like if a game today was set to delete your save if you failed at the end. It's unthinkable.

Now, I'm not saying we should go back to such a drastic style of play by any means. And it sounds ridiculous to groan on about how much harder games were "back in my day" because, you know, they're just fucking video games. But still ... those of you who grew up with the old-school games, have you felt anything like the horrible tension you felt when you knew that you were on that last life, on that last level and that dying meant everything you had accomplished would be wiped out?

The stakes were so high, and the feeling you got from winning was like you'd won the Super Bowl. Now, when I'm given a virtual God Mode from the very beginning as part of the game design, it just feels ... well, kind of wrong. But the new generation of gamers disagree with me, and the entire concept of getting stuck in a game is treated like a bug that gets squashed during play testing. So games have moved on to the "long interactive movie" concept, a progression from A to B where it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to win, and without any kind of real hardship along the way.