Mr. Fix It: How Random Battles and Lives Systems are Like Balding Remedies

Dear Sazanami,

My friend just recommended what he called a great RPG to me. But I starting playing it and to my horror, it has random battles!

I spent good money on this game! Why would my friend do that to me?

-Quaff, a Hairy Middle-Aged Accountant from Wisconsin

My dear Quaff,

I have a friend who has been blessed with a natural affinity toward beauty. Without any effort, he has maintained a nicely muscular frame, avoided any nasty kind of facial blemish and been endowed with lovely, floppy hair whose default state is permanent sexy. He doesn't use skin products, work out or constantly fuss with his hair.

As if dragged by some beauty inertia, his careless handsomeness has led him to become as vain as the sorceress from the Gummi Bears, Lady Bane. About a year ago, nearing the last futile bleats of his roaring twenties, my friend found his hair was starting to thin. This caused a sense of crisis in him until the day he saw a tip on variety show that advised people to stand on their head a little each day. Doing so would increase circulation to the head, which is needed for healthy hair growth, so goes the traditional wisdom.

At this point, I imagine many who read this can be dragged into two categories. You could be the curious, open-minded type who is sometimes easily fooled, "Oh, does that help stave off balding?" Or you could be the type who scoffs at such things as if they were irrational nonsense, "Scientists have found no direct link between such silly remedies and hair growth."

However, like usual, I think the truth is in the middle somewhere. It would appear that the prevailing fact is that once hair follicles stop growing -- not simply falling out, as from brushing or cancer treatment -- that's it, there's no getting them back. Until evidence comes saying otherwise, that's what I think is the truth. On the other hand, as somebody who was pulled into endless bathroom sessions to confirm that yes, my friend's hair did seem to be thinning at an alarming rate, with no discernible sickness or malady causing it, and seeing how he looks now, I can confirm that his hair definitely made a recovery. Apparently, the trick has worked for others as well.

That may down to what they and my friend did though. He's never been the type who can stand on his head, or do cartwheels, but every morning, after introducing an exercise regimen of various push-ups, pull-ups and the like, he spent some time against the wall teaching himself to stand on his head. Now, he has become quite an acrobatic guy who can walk on his head and do some impressive body-bending tricks.

My hair will be victorious against the ravaging of time!

He also started to take in more minerals, cut down on snacks and eat more fruits and vegetables. He learned to become more flexible and changed his sedentary lifestyle to something a little more athletic and healthy.

I think what happened is a combination of good living habits made his remaining hair much thicker and staved off any additional hair loss. He perhaps realized that nobody stays beautiful forever without at least a little effort. Either way, the change has made him a healthier person. He still doesn't use balding creams or spend hours in the bathroom, but indulges in good habits to maintain the pride in his natural beauty.

This could be called a healthy kind of vanity: a kind that inspires movement in a better direction and does not make the person seem like a massive piece of dick lint. So elements that have passed out of favor in video games, like random battles and lives systems, are at their best when they are inspired by a healthy kind of vanity. I bet you thought I would compare them to balding because such old video game ideas were once considered normal and natural, and have now faded away, didn't you? Gotcha!

No, no. The truth is that some people go bald and others keep their hair. (Some games still use old ideas for their mechanics, others adapt the new ones.) There is a third category of person though. They try endless remedies, like tonics or implants and such, to regrow their hair. (Some game designers throw in old elements without thinking much, in a misguided attempt to recapture the old days.) In this third category, there is still another person like my friend who practices healthy vanity. (They continue to carry on the tradition of the old games by thinking about the reasons why they started to fade and adopting healthier practices to prevent them falling out of favor.)

There go the random battles of my youth.

There are many unhealthy practices that went on with lives systems and random battles that led to some gamers thinking these ideas are now obsolete.

Because it was easy to design, older RPGs would repeatedly vomit out easy battles and with little care, attention or thought, one could mop up the chunky brown monster goo by taping down their A button. There weren't many engaging ideas in the battles, but that's not because they were random. Another complaint was that, like a wannabe rapper interrupted by his mom yelling to come to dinner, it interrupts the flow of the game and happened too frequently, which isn't so much a complaint leveled at the mechanic as it is due to sloppy game design or an incompatible taste between the developer's intentions and the player's wants.

Likewise, now that we can save our games to hard media independent from the game itself, the consensus seems to be that nobody wants to replay the same portion of the game. If a game isn't much fun anymore under the duress of repeated play, how good could it have really been? Even if it's a game where the appeal comes in experiencing the interactions, like any good story, it should inspire another go eventually (any parent who gets a nighttime request for the same book for weeks on end can tell you this). Everyone has their personal level to which they like to repeat an experience. Which would be healthier: insist that the only modern ideal of game design should be to keep the player going forward as much as possible, at all times, or that there is a spectrum of different preferences that can be catered to by knowing your audience?

Random battles, as a design element, still have a lot of value.

They can be a boon to developers with scarce resources. Inventing a system for encounters where battle initiate through contact with a visible object involves animating, programming and designing a whole host of symbols or enemies to populate the world and then designing environments so that players can avoid them, but are fostered into enough battles to keep the difficulty curve in the desirable area. Doing this incorrectly makes the whole thing cascade into the same kind of frustrations that poorly implemented random battles used to cause; players can still get caught into a series of battles that cause tedium and frustration because of AI routines, enemy or area designs. Developers who want to focus on character growth, intricate tactics or other mechanics; they can skip implementing symbol encounter battles and focus on the mathematical equations and ratios that are much easier to tweak and change.

Random battles also allow for interesting and fantastic contradictions. You can have a knight crawling in a series of narrow pipes and fighting witches and ogres. Some may say that ruins immersion, but many will also say they don't care about that, and like the strange gap, and rightly so for both parties. Random battles also help less coordinated players who do not like to have to contend with any action elements. They're also great for preserving surprise and tension.

Similarly, leaving the concept of lives and continues to drown with the Titanic would seriously hurt the design scope of surviving games. Many have noted that modern Mario games are so easy that "it makes the concept of lives meaningless." I wouldn't go that far. For one thing, I still encounter younger children or less skilled players who play Mario levels and can't get through a level without running out of all their lives. "Exactly! That's why there shouldn't be any lives. Just replays!" Not so fast.

Many games adopt a difficulty structure where the challenges grow more complex as the game continues. If a player is having trouble completing a certain stage, one reason might be that they have not learned or perfected skills in earlier stages that would help them. Designing a lives system that punishes the player by requiring a play-through of earlier stages can be a great strength of the design. Players may be reminded of other ways to play, might strengthen skills that could help with further portions and encounter situations that may provide hints or new insights to their current problem. In real life, is it reasonable to say anyone should just their charge their horns into their problems without taking a breather, looking at it from a different angle, telling the intern to do it instead, or going back to an earlier step? I think most would agree, it's often not healthy to do it this way.

There are many benefits of a lives system such as bragging rights, infinite 1-up tricks, rewards for exploration or skill, pithy comments about getting a life and easy numerical comparisons of how much more skilled one player is to another. Anyone who has played modern Mario games know also that it can also be fun just to stop and find ways to generate lives.

There are all sorts of other mechanics that have come under fire by using hyperbolic statements that call them archaic, like turn-based battle systems, save points or indeed, even things like boss battles and boss rushes. These well-trodden, traditional game mechanics are much like works of art whose perceived quality fluctuates based on the cultural values of the people who view them (also because plebes point at them and say, "I don't understand it, therefore it has no value.")

Let's keep them around by involving a healthy amount of skepticism toward sketchy ways bad designers implement them, letting them wax and wane like the hairline of a recurring chemotherapy patient, and by indulging in healthy vanity to keep the tradition alive. 

Yours If You Want Me to Be,

Sazanami