One Chance

This one comes directly from my class coursework, so again feel free to play along. We'll be analyzing One Chance games - games that literally give you one chance to "beat" them - and looking at their gameplay mechanics as well as narrative elements to see how such an element affects the gamer differently than your MW3 kill-die-spawn-kill cycles that exist in nearly all traditional video games.
The games we will be playing are: You Only Live Once, One Chance, and Why Is Johnny in an Art Game? Go ahead and take a minute to play them now. They each less than five minutes to complete.

You Only Live Once is probably my favorite of the three. It plays more like a platformer than One Chance or other typical "Art" game (For another example of this, go back and look at our discussion on Before The Law).

I think I remember this one doing fairly well at Sundance...

The first thing you'll notice when playing YOLO, especially when compared to One Chance, is how very fun and lighthearted it is. The story is strikingly similar to Mario Bros...hell..so is the gameplay and...well everything about it. In terms of narrative there isn't a whole lot to analyze...YET. But it is obviously making a statement about gaming as a whole by aesthetically referencing such a monumental figure in gaming history.

If Nintendo had funded the Sistine Chapel...

So maybe we should take a step back and do a comparative analysis. What makes Mario different from Jermaine (Besides a much better voice actor and team of artists)? In terms of plot, they're fundamentally the same. But in terms of gameplay, they're radically different. In any Mario game, you are given plenty of opportunities for extra lives and power-ups to aid you in your quest.

He's got 99 problems, but dying isn't really one of them...

Even when you get a Game Over, you just load the last save state. there's really no negative recourse for failure so players take much bolder risks.

YOLO, on the other hand, tears all of that apart. You are given no power-ups and no extra lives, but same stage mechanics. There were times when I found myself trying to nab a few extra coins near spikes and I begin to ask myself "why the hell am I risking dying for this?" The coins don't give me extra lives, or even count toward any kind of score. The only thing that matters is survival. This goes back to our discussion on Operant Conditioning in gaming, so I'll move on. So what happens when you do actually make a misstep and die? Well you die. And then you get to see the aftermath.

This is partially a commentary on the Hero-centric universe where, if you die, the whole world just falls into absolute ruin and chaos and darkness fills the land and people forget what pie tastes like. It's awful. In reality, the world goes on without you and, as a result, you cannot continue to go on. Make sense? Play the game and get your chuckles. Any ending you get is filled with hilarity. If you are lucky enough to actually beat the game, you get a Braid-like twist on your heroic gallivanting and it once again re-emphasizes that your goals and aspirations aren't necessarily the "right" ones or the only ones.
If you didn't get that ending, feel free to view it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFHW2XzzFUc

Any time you choose to refresh your game, you get updated with your grave (which, over time, will grow grass and flowers over it...but you'll be no less dead because of it). As amusing as each ending is, we don't ever get to see any of the others without a community evolving out of it (or some small degree of dull-witted hacking). And herein lies another lesson that coincides with our discussion on Before The Law - that learning is experiential, and games do experiential very well. In this case, only by sharing our experiences with those around us can we learn about all the many paths we could have chosen and help other people make better choices than us, hopefully.

And now is the perfect time to segue into One Chance because it is full of Tough Ass Choices.

Also...a good deal of spoilers

Seriously...this game will make you hate yourself in a way that only the Persona series knows how. You are constantly being reminded that you only have one chance to save the world but, despite that, there are not a lot of factors you have control over. This is a perfect example of gameplay enhancing narrative. You go to work and sometimes just fail at saving the world. That's tough shit. Then you come home to your wife dead in the bathtub with blood everywhere. And then Brand New starts playing in the background and my face permanently froze in this position for the rest of my playthrough:

The patented "2 Girls, 1 Cup" face...

You are faced with some straight terrifying decisions. Should I try and save the world? Or should I spend my last few days on earth with my family? I went to work and tried saving the world, failed, and came home to my wife's limp corpse in a bathtub full of blood. If you aren't shaken by that in the slightest, you might want to call your therapist.

Same thing occurs here as with YOLO, but this one is far heavier thematically and has far less gameplay. You really just move right and use the spacebar to interact with things. Pretty boring mechanically. It's also kind of lame because, in reality, you just have to keep going to work every day to save the world (...and the lesson here is...pretty unoriginal). But the discussion that one chance games bring about are extremely interesting. What would happen if all video games were like this? MW3 would be all about camping, and we can see basic attempts at it done in their hardcore multiplayer modes.

Like hell I'm wandering out into the firefight.

Dark Souls sort of does this with its insane difficulty parameters bringing about the need for community interaction, but would a serious one chance game, built for a console, have any consumer appeal? What do the infinite retries say about us as a society...or as individual people?

One might argue that its escapism from the very thing we fear about the course of our life, and that games don't punish us the way that life does and, as such, acts as a sort of psychological safe haven from our trepidation. But perhaps these one chance games offer us something worth probing further into. A sort of latent fear of the unknown. In gameplay mechanics, not in content, they exist as true horror games.

Feel free to discuss =]
And I'd love to know what endings anyone got for YOLO. Mine was pretty amusing, but I won't spoil it yet.

P.S. - You may have noticed I ignored discussing Why Is Johnny in an Art Game, and if you play it I think you'll see why. 1) it pretty much recaps everything we just talked about in terms of analysis and 2) it's pretty awful as a game and a pun and...anything.