Made Out Of Meat: Health Systems In Video Games

hello uh can you hear me am I good all right uh I guess they wanted me to remind you that uh you got like things when you came in they scanned your thing and they went like feedback so feedback would be cool and also they told me to tell you something else say what yeah cell phones don't turn off yeah turn your cell phones off yeah uh hi uh I'm going to talk about meat specifically people as meat specifically specifically people as meat in video games uh I should probably back up hi I'm Tyreek nice to meet you I am pixel artist animator coder I guess currently working on a Rog likee platformer called catacomb kids which is not entirely relevant right now we'll get to that in

a bit but first I would like to pose to you a question which is when was the last time you played a game where you felt like you were inhabiting a human body not just controlling a collection of numbers and I also don't mean like like oh yeah this is a really well-written character like I feel I can empathize with them they feel like a person I mean like when was the last time you played a game where you felt breakable and not just breakable but consequentially so where you fear a failure because a failure is the beginning of something worse so human bodies are incredibly diverse in so many ways each of us unique with thoughts and feelings strengths and weaknesses of all all our own bodies coming in all different shapes sizes and colors but we have one thing in common and that's what we're made out of which is skin bone nerves blood meat breakable unless you're Bruce Willis but there are a lot of games that disproportionately feature Bruce Willis as a player character and don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with power

fantasies I like power uh but Power isn't a universally human quality moreover power isn't always interesting but being human I think is so some of you may have noticed that the title of this talk is taken from the famous short story by Terry Bisson called they're made out of meat which recounts a conversation between two aliens marveling over the fact that the dominant species of life on earth that is to say humans are made entirely out of meat and communicate by quote flapping their meat at each other and quote squirting air through their meat as I am doing right now so I read this story when I was like a little kid and it really enamored me not only with science fiction as a whole but the idea of the physicality of humans like we we think and we feel and we have like fears and strengths and loves and some of us are nervous wrecks but before any of that we are physical beings that have to exist in this world without falling apart so how does that work what physically is a person well we're a lot

of things we're 206 bones wrapped up in 640 muscles all like weaved through by 40 plus miles of nerves some 70 plus organs all held together by this weird sack that's constantly dying and replacing itself the point I'm trying to make is we're made out of Parts many different parts all working together a lot of them we need to stay alive but for many of them their damages and absences can be adapted to reckoned with the 206 bones 600 40 muscles all that usually that's usually what we are but things happen and we break which brings us to the other thing that we are as humans which is fragile there are so many things that can go wrong in the human body without much difficulty physical traumas are easy to come by everybody trips everybody falls manage to catch yourself wrong and you'll arm can take on a whole new shape as my brother once learned while he was skating don't catch yourself at all an ACC cussion might make you forget the entire concert you just came out of as I

once learned while coming out of a concert and I was fortunate if I had hit my head worse that could have been like the beginning of some very serious problems or an ending altogether and that's to say nothing of the effects of extreme heat cold infections diseases our irritating need to do things like eat and sleep and we live in a world filled with sharp things fast things hard things long drops so let's just not go anywhere or do anything cuz the world is terrifying but but even that can mess you up like everybody knows by now that like prolonged periods of sitting will like wreck a body over time just like Oh my legs are dying but also like the like damage can be like severe damage can be done in even shorter periods than that uh Dave Mustang the lead singer and guitarist from Megadeth fell asleep with his arm hanging over the back of a chair and woke up with severe nerve damage that took months to repair is like it was like a year before he picked up a

Guitar again but that brings me to my next point about what it's like being meat which is we do repair and we adapt Dave Mustang's arm nerves got right again my brother's arm got arm shaped again eventually I did remember that concert and our our physical forms are incredibly resilient but I just said we were fragile and now I'm saying we're resilient but of course we are we're all of these things for all of our breakable parts and glowing red weak points as we have uh we are robust resilient and capable of surviving extreme traumas yes we're made out of Parts but those and those parts can fail and be lost but the whole continues we're fragile and we break easily but we can be restored and what can't be restored can be adapted to so we're made out of Parts we're fragile and we're resilient and it's the combination of these three elements which I think comprises the core of the physical of the human physical experience take one away and you're left with either Superman or a robot or a glass fig figurine so we're at GDC

what's this got to do with video games well I don't know if you noticed but a lot of video games feature humans as player characters which is pretty neat humans are cool I like games let's put them together uh but while I've noticed there's been a push and justifiably so for making characters feel more human in games as far as like the WR writing them goes and like making them behave like people and be relatable on an emotional level but still I feel really fairly uncommon to see humans in games represented as truly physical beings as breakable as meat and I I think that as games are you know trying and making better progress and representing the emotion of The Human Experience in games like gone home and the beginner's guide and so on we as developers can't ignore the physical aspects of what it's like to be human and these bodies that we inhabit many parts fragile and resilient so how do we do this how can we better represent the vast range of human Vitality in games well the first thing first thing to do is uh realize the many ways that help has already been

represented in games so here's why I finally get to mention that game that I'm making so I've been working on catacomb kids for a while it's a platformer Rog likee with all the things you'd expect from a platformer Rog likee procedurally generated levels gen uh loot looting dungeon crawling you level up is Perma death is it is it not going no perade death uh it also has a fairly standard sort of Health System uh which is you have a certain amount of HP when you get hit that number goes down when it is zero you are dead this is video games if you were trying to represent a not video game but you want to make it seem very video games this is the thing that you do put some numbers or health bars overheads it's an easy way to detach events from reality so this is what I'm going to call the first most basic way of representing Health in games which is through abstraction people don't really have hit

points I'm sorry to disappoint you you can't defeat your rude neighbor by repeatedly slapping him in the shin until he explodes abstraction of Health can be convenient though it's easier to understand the cause and effect are immediate and and readable it lets players plan more effectively when they know that the boss's Fireball does three damage and they have eight health or when they know that like it takes Six Bullets to kill someone without body armor and abstraction doesn't always only take on the form of hit points abstraction can also be status effects in jrpg like oh no my strong dude got poisoned now a number is decreasing at regular intervals or a dang my ice cream buddy got blinded now the percentage chance of a thing that I want to happen happening is significantly diminished I don't actually play a lot of jpg sorry with those examples but the point still stands that abstractions of Health are basically those systems whereby players essentially lack all aspects of meates maybe aside from that death is possible they're not treated as a collection of Parts but as some inseparable whole where injury to any

part is an injury to all parts neither are they fragile or resilient because both of those require some manner of meaningful change to be fragile is to be breakable to be resilient is to be restored from Brokenness with abstracted Health Systems players are mechanic player characters are mechanically identical at both one Health and 100 or if there is some mechanical change it will have no resemblance to the actual actuality of Being Human Mario for instance in the 2D Mario games most of them you can get up to three hit points one for your outfit one for your bigness and the last one to kill you that doesn't sound remotely human one for your outfit one for your bigness and the last one to kill you like what is that that does do people shrink no that doesn't happen another way to look at it is this is this another way to look at it is this if you can represent the player character as a ball or some other abstract shape and still have the health system make just as much or just as little sense it's probably using an abstract representation of Health because there's not really an easy way

to convert back and forth between people and balls if you can it's hard to believe that anything resembling a human was part of the equation to begin with of course abstraction is far from the only way human physicality can and has been represented in games there are many games that have tried to employ more representative systems and one of those games that really opened my eyes to the possibilities was a Rog like called Ivan a few years ago I was working on catacomb kids and it was undergoing a major rewrite cuz you know solo Indie Game Dev I like redoing things uh and at the time I was playing quite a bit of Ivan which is sort of a comedic traditional uh Rog like it's got this weird banana theme going on it doesn't take itself very seriously at all but I was really taken by the health and damage system in the game so this is a screenshot of the game it's like you know looks like a Rog like it's got the tiles and the description at the bottom and over at the side you can see all your stats and uh up at the top there's like a little representation of your character and in Ivan the player's body is separated in seven different areas head body groin left and right arm left

and right leg Each of which has its own pool of HP and alongside this is a more you know common abstracted health system where you die if your total HP reaches zero but each limb like if if if your arm reaches zero zero Health it'll get cut off if your legs you can get your legs cut off and if your body takes too much damage then you'll die regardless of what your total remaining Health pool is uh same with your head and you're groin now it's not like I hadn't played games with locational damage before where you could enemies and blast off their arms and legs and heads but there are very few where I as a human character could undergo those same traumas the the meat feel wasn't relegated only to enemies but was applied to myself as well and Ivan and it was important for me to see that the player isn't represented as a robot or a Mech or anything else where it would make sense oh yeah you get your arm blown off you can just get a new one attached you know like they're represented as a human

character uh a person that can be destroyed bit by bit or all at once but like I said the game's got a com comedic vibe to it it's not realistic at all you don't have to worry about bleeding out or going into shock or anything you can get your arm looped off and you're like uhoh I should get away from whatever made that happen and it obviously lacks the complexities of trying to accurately represent the whole spectrum of human vitality and it doesn't try to it's simple so here we have another way of representing humans as meat in games which is a step above uh abstraction which is by simplifying simplification acknowledges that humans are more than just a hitbox that we can be damaged in many ways and that we have more at stake that than restarting at a checkpoint or loading your last save the cost now is change fighting and failing but surviving and emerging different playing Ivan maybe I still wasn't controlling anything quite resembling like a human totally but it was far less abstract and it

acknowledged what Humanity was and I liked it so I did what I tend to do when I see something that I like I stole it and stuffed it into my game so this is a a character in catacomb kids like when you pause the menu you get this little view of like your stats and your your the portrait of your character and uh this is what they look like when they're missing a leg so I added a limb system to catacomb kids where you can get your arms and legs chopped off by certain traps and enemies and it's nothing as in-depth as Ivan's where it's like oh you don't have to worry about the HP of your arm or your torso like getting critical hited and just destroying everything but if you're fighting a guy with a giant axe you might want to make sure you don't come out with it come out of the fight with like two fewer legs and there's also a boss in the game called The Reaper which is like you know death with giant scythe and it used to have a really annoying habit of chopping off all your arms and legs and then killing you by hitting them hitting you with them uh but that was kind of unfair

so now he just chops off your arms and turns them into lightning uh again I'm not really making a masterpiece of realism but after adding the ability to lose limbs something happened where there was a new fear in the game a new consequence and like a new complication to be thrown at the player where before your only goal in each fight was to not die now there's a whole new potential cost even upon Victory and moreover the cost is both meaningful and Lasting it changes you losing an arm removes your ability to equip off-hand items and if you're a shield user that can really screw you up because now you have to change the entire way you play the game you have to become more evasive now that you're not able to block attacks losing legs is even worse where you're forced to hop everywhere on your remaining leg or if you lose both legs you hop on your torso stump uh but it completely changes the feel of movement in the game and it makes a lot of Maneuvers like more difficult to pull off and it's super annoying probably not as bad as like

reversing the players controls but maybe like a couple notches below that but by introducing these lasting consequences to players's actions choices begin to have more weight decisions become more meaningful and the prices paid are more potent so even looking at the system and realizing its Simplicity that it exists at all adds a sense of metin to the players's failures and really this is the core of what simplification really this is the core of what simplification is when representing human physicality in games and acknowledgement that we're meat we're not monolithic beings but we break and we change but that's it just an acknowledgement and this is usually as far as games go when representing humans in games I mean how can it not be it's you we're not going to get like a simulation level of you know breaking the skin that sort of thing games will always only ever be able to present an extremely simplified version of humans as physical creatures we're too complex you got to draw the line

somewhere dwarves however maybe we can get a little further with them so Dwarf Fortress is the only real example that comes to mind of a game going well beyond a simplified representation of meat uh another game descended from The rogu likee evolutionary tree Dwarf Fortress does away with abstraction almost entirely and enters into the realm of simulation not only can your arms and legs be broken and severed as in catacomb kids and Ivan but you can like get your brain bruised your lungs can be pierced uh you can can have items lodged in your flesh and there are like pain values associated with certain certain types of injuries if your heart is punctured you don't die because your HP reaches zero you die because your blood loss becomes too great to sustain your life any further if you'll indulge me a quote from the D Fortress wiki page guts damage to guts causes great pain and nausea creatures will vomit and then ret repeatedly depending on how much damage is caused this slows the creature and can dehydrate them when guts are pierced they may spear spel out of the wound this causes a lot of bleeding and

exposes the guts themselves as a target for aimed attacks slicing off the exposed guts causes heavy bleeding and almost always death the cut off guts can then be picked up and used as a weapon so simulation goes above and beyond the expect above and beyond the expected representation of human physicality in games it strives to do more than just enhance a sense of metin more than just present fragility and resilience but it unifies your character with the laws of the world they inhabit the line is blurred between what's a part of them and what's a part of the world where does the self stop and the laws of The Wider Universe take over there is no line they are the same they're not only in the world but held together by it and torn apart by it and then they become it so this is what simulation means to me employing the nuances of our physical existence to blur the line between the player characters and the worlds they inhabit they both they're both existing within the world and are a world within unto themselves so abstraction simplification and

simulation each of these categories can and does mix and mingle with the others to a greater to Greater and lesser degrees games with largely abstract Health Systems supplemented by a suggestion of hit location like a lot of firstperson Shooters have with head shots and other sort of tertiary damage are games where the players are is represented as a breakable being a mutable collection of Parts working alongside a more familiar abstract system like with catacomb kids or games like the long and other recent survival Sims that skew towards the simulation side of Simplicity or cataclysm Dark Days Ahead which is another Rog likee which straddles the line between Simplicity and simulation all together while still having some abstracted aspects nothing is ever as cut and dry as just oh that's simulation or oh that's simplistic or oh that's abstract and so like this is some of I tried to map some I don't know if they're accurate but so far while I've mostly been talking about how damage is sustained in games there's a whole other side to this equation the aftermath how

we heal how we adapt once the damage is done and the dangerous passed what then well there's an old saying that time heals all wounds but rarely is the sentiment ever present in games you're always looking for a medkit or popping a healing potion or like calling a cleric to heal you and catacomb kids is guilty of this as well restoring your severed limbs is as simple as just drinking a potion of regeneration or casting the regenerate spell on yourself if you know it and your limbs come back a bit weaker than your original Limbs and and blue uh but they serve the per the you know the new limbs serve their purpose well enough if you become diseased or poisoned a health potion will make you right in an instant it's all very active healing so this is what active healing is a do thing get better what rarely is they're waiting I mean like maybe there's like a little animation for drinking a potion or like you might have to like sit still for a second while your Shields recharge uh but beyond that recovery is usually a

matter of fairly low consequence it's always like a good thing like you want to recover you want to heal in many Rogue likes you can like sit still and like spend a few turns uh sort of waiting for your health to replenish but the game the games are usually already so abstract that this doesn't really do a lot in the way of representing a human need it's just more of like a mechanical thing where oh if you stand still your health will go up it's just like barely on the cusp of Simplicity and abstraction but there's no like cleaning your wounds and bandaging them there's no uh like keeping to bed as you wait for the poison in you to run its course there's no actually going to a hospital like not a haunted hospital full of like demons and stuff just a normal functioning hospital I don't this seem kind of rare to me in games for some reason somehow games always seem to have medicine that makes time irrelevant and I get it like don't think I'm suggesting that like there like in shoot them ups and like Shooters you should like have have a Long Hospital stay after every

gunfight where you're just like sitting around playing crossword puzzles and like coding I mean maybe that would be interesting uh but for the time cost of of injury to be so ubiquitously absent in games is a curious thing and it's not like there haven't been time-sensitive games before there's like shenmo Major's mask and Harvest Moon games these all like run on a clock so like maybe in Harvest Moon you could like get kicked in the head by your horse and then like get knocked out and then you like spend a week in in the hospital waiting to recover and during that time your crops aren't getting taken care of and your horse is is like really sad because he's like I'm sorry guy I didn't mean to kick you uh but it would cost like the most valuable time the most valuable resource that you have in the game or that we have as existing beings which is time your crops won't wait like Majora's Mass the Falling Moon wouldn't wait if you like lost time as a failure and in

shenmu you'd like lose time and then you'd be like closer to you know not getting revenge and a lot of a lot of things can happen in the absence of of a person's unwellness and then there's coping accepting that whatever injuries you've sustained whatever scars you've received they're just a part of you now you adapt and recalibrate and learn to move forward through your new normal old familiar obstacles become new challenges maybe you learn to overcome them again or or with some Ingenuity or a different approach or maybe you don't and find a different New Path to take but humans I think are incredible and maybe I'm the only one but I'm like constantly Amazed by the fact that we live for as long as we do despite all the million little random things that could go wrong every second and we're still like tenacious enough to keep existing as meat uh I look at us and I feel like the aliens feel from Terry story like we're we're made out of meat

like really like and look what what the things that we can do uh and games games are as I have mentioned pretty cool I like them and they're I feel I feel like they're able to give us a unique perspective and let us act like as through the mind and body of another and in doing so perhaps let us come to a better understanding of some meat that isn't us some person that isn't us and so I've been speaking until now of people as meat our parts physical qualities on the most General scale because that does interest me and I do find it fascinating I want to play more games where I'm fearful and breakable and forced to live with the consequences of my failures and shortcomings but still somehow continue and grow Beyond them I want to play a game where I'm parts and I am fragile and I am resilient but obviously people are more than me people are hopes and loves and hates hurts friends memories not every story starts with all 100 or not all not all every story starts with all 206

bones and 640 muscles and not every story starts young and free of Prior consequence and not every story starts with Bruce Willis and so this is the other thing that I want from games is I want to know these stories I want to see these the different types of bodies represented in games and uh is like for all our glorious shape and all the Glorious shapes and sizes and and ages and meekness uh I've been Bruce Willis in games many times but I've never been you and that's the [Applause] [Music] end should I should I leave or oh questions if anybody yeah microphones there's microphones people want to ask things hello give me a second okay

hi um it's really loud okay um I this was actually going through my head the other day about the concept of how um damage and how people take it in video games works and I was thinking about a few games that have been time sensitive to those kinds of things like XCOM you get hurt enough they're gone for like weeks while everything is going down on Earth so I was wondering um do you think there will be a higher demand at some point in time for games to represent more risky mechanics when it comes to health or is that going always be like a niche thing I don't know I feel like it's uh on the r especially in like in game like like uh

survival games that have been coming out like uh Russ and like all these things are like oh you know You' got to like go out and make your way and survive and those sorts of games where it's becoming more more common for for I guess human effort to be introduced into the equation where it's like you make things but I still feel like uh the actual representation of the like physical health of characters is might might might continue being Niche I'm not sure I I I hope it I hope it becomes a more common thing because I want to play these games yeah I specifically remember someone talking about that on the Forum mistake number one on my part um when when they mentioned I I suggested that the that certain game should should um be a little more realistic and how you take D imag under just cuz I thought it was interesting and they reut rebutted with well then I got to sit through I don't know a loading screen for this long or just wait for my character to get up it's not going to well that's I feel like there are I can't really speak to every game

because every game is different you know but there I feel like there are ways of making these things still engaging uh without necessarily making them easy and just like oh you know oh I got hit and now I'm just like running away until I recover like 5 seconds later or however long uh I'm not sure how that would work with every game in catacomb kids it was fairly easy because it's kind of a cartoony game it's like oh I got my leg chopped off I can just hop on on my other leg forever you know like I don't get tired you know but but for more realistic games uh that would be a problem that they would have to solve uh in the design phase okay thank you so first thing uh I would point out Die Hard yes Nintendo Entertainment System there was a separate meter for Bruce Willis's feet so you are not exactly out Bruce willst okay uh second thing I wanted to

ask uh do you think that there is a kind of point of diminishing returns on uh you know how representative you should be of people's meekness in a game do you think that there's a point where it goes too far if so where would you draw the line like what factors would you take into consideration to where a specific game should draw the line I guess I should ask since it's kind of a case by case thing yeah I mean this is again like a matter of like a game like I feel like like you could make you could probably make an entire game just that revolves around the concept of a guy like making his way through the woods with a broken leg like if you could you could probably like make a game with that at its core so really it depends on what you're aiming to do in the game like if you're making a game that's like an adventure game and you want to be have be having like an Acy time and you're like trying to have fun then of course the you know your limits as far as far as npace would be different from

a game where you're trying to like accurately represent someone's survival or a game where you know you're just uh like running through arcadey stuff and just like oh I'm like you know I'm like losing bits left and right and then getting them back and that sort of thing uh I I don't I can't really say that there would be a hard line it it depends on what you're doing and what you're intention is with uh the implementation of increased meekness fair enough thank you uh hello hi um so uh once upon a time I saw you Tweeting about uh just you know random catacomb kids lore bits that don't necessarily exist in the game yet and uh something that I was really taken with is the fact that uh the grumbles the like Goblin like creatures in the game uh like overwhelmingly uh commonly give birth to twins yes and most grumbles are twins and the ones who aren't are like trained to be assassins yeah I think that's really cool and that's a that's an aspect of meat that

you don't uh see a lot in video games right it's like a um it's a representation of birth um it's like fertility um all that stuff and um I guess my question is how what are some qualities of these bits of meat flavor that you can insert in in a game because uh to some degree like actually portraying uh grumbles as uh you know creatures that can be pregnant and uh that eventually give birth to twins might not be the the most elegant way to to go about that in an actual game sense like um I'm not sure I understand the question yeah um so I I like that a tweet told me about this fact of the game but I'm not sure where in the game I would be able to glean this fact um in what way would uh this thing make it into the game uh probably just like reading the lore once I had it okay I

was wondering if there was some sort of mechanical way that you had I mean if if it were a mechanical thing it would might just be like grumbles coming in Paris or something like that I haven't okay I got to get there thats fine I just thought that was that's the end of my time so thank you thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you