In Defense of Lives in Games
Lives in video games seem like a relic from a bygone era. An era where games were made difficult to pad them out. Or arcade games where some tested the limits of good game design in order to get more quarters.
Sonic Mania has sparked debate about lives again. The 2D platformer Shovel Knight doesn’t use lives, so surely now 2D platformers have no reason to use them still, right? Well, it’s not that simple. The developers of Shovel Knight knew that lives served a purpose beyond difficulty.
The way many older platformers work, lives gave players an incentive for exploring. You want as many lives as possible, so you would go out of your way, explore nooks and crannies to find them. Super Mario Bros rewarded players an extra life for collecting 100 coins. Many other platformers followed this example. Collecting enough of a certain thing would give you an extra life. This encourages players to not just blast through levels. Sometimes extra lives would require tricky platforming or even some minor puzzle solving. It gave the game an additional layer of challenge that doesn’t feel like the game is out to get the player.
Shovel Knight also gives the player incentive to explore. It does this by rewarding the player with money, new items, upgrades, etc. These things generally make the game a little easier, and some are just fun abilities, so it’s in your best interest to hunt them down. The developers didn’t just make a platformer without a lives system, they balanced other areas of the game in accordance with this. Dying also carries a penalty of losing your some of your money. You can get it back, but only if you can make it to where you died. If upgrades weren’t a thing or if money served no purpose, then it would feel totally superfluous.
Let’s go back to Sonic Mania. If you just took lives out of the game, then you’d have no reason to collect rings. Just get one and you’re set. The only incentive is needing a certain amount of rings to activate the bonus game, but even then that puts a hard limit on how many rings you need. With the lives system, you’re encouraged to hunt down every ring you can get your hands on. Even if you got 200 rings, you’ll still want more because maybe you can get 300. Getting an extra life is also pretty satisfying, and that would be gone to.
Sonic would require some re-tooling in order to have no lives. Sonic Mania was meant to be a celebration of classic Sonic games, so I don’t think that would’ve been a good idea for this game. I’m not against the idea though.
If I’m being honest, I do prefer the solution Shovel Knight has. It punishes the player only a little bit, while also rewards skillful players. I also think there are some older games where having a system similar to this would probably be for the best. However I think in most of those games, it’s not necessarily the lives system that’s the problem, but more unfairness in the game design.
Before you criticize a lives system, just think about these things beforehand. Does it serve some other purpose? Could the actual problem be something else? Is it actually that harsh of a punishment if you run out of lives? It’s important to remember context, and it’s important to remember you can’t usually rip a mechanic out of the game and expect the game to still work properly.
