idk why I feel so compelled to beat up on a 5-6 year old manifesto, it's a pretty poor use of my time, and honestly I'm in a poor mood, so this can safely be ignored.
BUT: "the modern video game ought to be a drastically different beast than the arcade game or the pen and paper RPG"
even a cursory glance around this place should be enough to illuminate how ridiculous this statement is: even a pen and paper RPG is a drastically different beast than the pen and paper RPG; the majority of TTRPGs have hitpoints, but nearly as many, thousands and thousands, do not.
likewise, the characterization of "lives" systems as bygone feels blinkered to me. the incredible wealth of indie games and retro games that have come out in the half decade since this was written have shown that "lives" as a concept in video games aren't going anywhere, and I for one am glad. I think they have a functional place in an extremely broad swathe of games and there are interesting things to be designed around them.
anyway this manifesto is generally borderline incoherent. it doesn't convince me that hitpoints suck, or illuminate for me why anyone should hate them. but more importantly it's just entirely unclear if you literally mean "hit points", as in a numeric meter that ticks down from "fine" to "dead", or if you mean damage systems and systematized character harm IN GENERAL, or if you even more broadly mean all forms of fail states and consequences, without which we would quite literally not have games.
I'm mostly going to be using your comment as a jumping off point do some vamping/complaining/doing a post mortem so you can likewise ignore as you see fit. I don't think I will even get around to addressing your points by the end so feel free to bail immediately, in fact.
I think the last place I mentioned this piece was when I was talking with someone on mastodon somewhere about health potions and I was like "oh yeah, I wrote about health in video games, I wonder what happened to that piece"and then remembered "oh yeah, it turns into a very adversarial comment section every time it Breaks Containment from the original context of a bunch of folks saying that skeletons shouldn't wear armor etc." I'm glad I wrote it using a throwaway, to be honest. Like I know you preface your comment with an apology of sorts, but no need: you are being extremely polite and generous compared to what I've read when this ended up on a TTRPG forum (where I think the duration from "posted by somebody" to "me, specifically, being called a slur" was like four posts) or on a LessWrong-a-verse subreddit (somehow) .
I mean, not for no reason, right, the piece is written intentionally tendentiously. I used these references in another comment somewhere (maybe they are even used in the overall jam description as well?) but I was thinking of the call to action in this piece similarly to something like a cross between the Dogme 95 manifesto or a (okay, hopefully way less fascist) Futurist manifesto: suggesting something rotten in the state of the world, and then introducing a set of constraints with the goal of making people think intentionally about what they are creating, which you then sign on to (maybe just for one game! Or for none!). Which means that the manifesto is not really about utility or aesthetics or a totalizing Theory of Games. To keep up with the Dogme example, it would be absolutely wild to say that there's no value to stationary cameras or non-diegetic music, or that a Dogme movie is an inherently more natural way of making a movie, or even that a Dogme movie is inherently aesthetically better than a non-Dogme one.
Which is also why I'm less bummed when people say that they aren't convinced. That's okay, it would be a very boring world if everybody followed the same motivations and constraints in making games, and a very facile one if people's attitudes towards games were so weakly held that a couple barely-edited paragraphs produced in a short period of time by a pseudonymous rando were enough to irrevocably alter them. But for me at least, I started seeing HP everywhere. It makes itself felt even in its absence. I was a little disappointed by the ways that HP can constrain how games are designed or played, and wondered what the full space of HP-free or HP-lite games would/could/should/does look like. I saw things like Halo 1 going from "HP bar + regenerating shield" to Halo 2's more pure regeneration as an example of designers hitting the limitations of tradition conceptions of HP as a concept and trying to work around it (how do we encourage players to avoid getting hit but not make them have to boringly backtrack to scrounge around finding medkits, say), with varying levels of success.
The rhetorical trick I play here, which you picked up on, is that I start small with a notion of what HP is and then intentionally grow it bigger. As you say, HP in this manifesto can be one or more of:
a) "HP as game over": a specific way of creating failure states (which I agree with you are pretty foundational to how we normally think of games, paceWittgenstein), although I don't think HP or HP-like failure states are the only way of creating failure states even within the confines of the piece: like solitaire is clearly a game but the failure state is when there are no more moves, which I don't think of as very HP-like (kind of interestingly, the thing that is most like HP, the number of cards left in the draw pile, is both progress to the goal but also a limiting factor in that as the number of cards decreases, so does the number of potential cards you can play).
b) "HP as a model": a system for modeling the world (like the damage points in stuff like Gygax/Arneson's "Don't Give Up the Ship" and the war games proceeding it that ended up in the DNA of D&D). I mention this in another comment but the nuance I'd add to this one is that just because game-relevant information is stored as a number somewhere doesn't inherently mean that it is communicated or conceptualized as a number to the player. I'm less jazzed about this analogy than when I wrote it, but I'll stick with "just because your computer shows things as pixels, it doesn't mean all graphics are pixel art."
c) "HP as carrot/stick": a general system for rewarding/punishing players by incrementing or decrementing abstract values (in which case even stuff like points in Tetris are kind of "HP-y", and certainly the stereotypical EuroGame victory points). As with b), the fact that, yeah, your game state is ultimately saved as numbers in the code somewhere is not really as strong of a "gotcha" as it could be. I think the call is to either explore other ways of communicating with players, or ways that are less abstract (and maybe even more visceral).
So the point of the manifesto is to think about what extent a)-c) are limiting, what extent they are somewhat corrosive to some humanistic goals (telling more "human stories", say, or encouraging people to treat each other better or less abstractly, in video games or just in general). This is all prefaced on the assumption that a)-c) aren't load-bearing in games, and by now there are lots of examples that I can draw on. I mean, the other point was for me to have fun, but, you know.
But I will say I wish I had done some things differently in this piece.
The first is that a couple people really got hung up on the background as though I were laying out a complete history of games, or suggesting that there was a single teleological historical line from arcade -> TTRPG -> video game, all of which inherently have HP, which is of course nonsense in several ways. I mean "playing house"/playing with dolls is a game (that maybe predates/transcends our species?) where people play roles and it doesn't have anything much like HP in it unless you count your sibling ruining your doll by drawing all over it with markers. And likewise I don't think Gygax and Arneson were thinking "ah ha, we'll make people have to insert quarters whenever their cleric dies but they want to play again, just like ski ball!" But my point in bringing those historical examples up was that HP in at least one the guises I laid out is baked into a lot of types of games, was baked into them early on, and has influences in how games are designed or played today that may not be immediately obvious. Even the absence of HP is often done with an intentionality to it (more on this later), due to how pervasive the concept is, especially in video game design. HP is a really influential concept, and is maybe inescapable to at least think about when designing games these days, even if the decision is ultimately not to include it. It's often a default or fallback. And I think there's an underestimation of the way that historical design decisions can calcify or negatively influence their successors. Like I could be convinced (I'm not currently) that there are games today doing interesting things with old-school lives systems (maybe Rogue Legacy, where each new life has a potential to cause you to switch play styles or otherwise? Or likewise Sifu, with the conceit of death = aging and so new move sets? Although I guess that's more about about doing interesting things with a game over rather than necessarily doing something interesting with having a discrete count of attempts after which you have to quit or restart), but I don't think you'll be able to convince me that, say, Mario 64's lives system is anything more than vestigial. It's not enough for stuff to be functional, I want it to be fun or at least interesting.
I also think I could have been more concrete in placing things in context to existing games (yes, yes, I know that's not very manifesto-y, but..).
Untitled Goose Game is one great example (to the extent that if it were around when I wrote this, I'd just have said "let's build a new, goose-driven era of gaming" or something and it would be more clear that I was Doing A Bit even without the context of the jam). No HP, just the fail state of being driven off and having objects replaced (with or without incremental progress to a goal). Lots of numbers somewhere (detection radii and so on), but there's not much that's very HP-like presented to the player.
Howling Dogs is another (frankly inexcusable) omission that came up when I was chatting about this on mastodon: things break down over the course of a story in a way that's connected to an internal numeric variable, but the last thing you'd be worried about I think is the HP of your trash chute. Porpentine (who was certainly on my mind during the writing of this piece so no idea why she's not directly called out) in general I think has games with tons of body horror, trauma, and emotional affect that, just by virtue of what she surfaces through Twine, are not very HP-like. In general I think IF gets short shrift in this piece. There are lots of good IF examples of ways of creating progress/feedback that aren't about incrementing or decrementing a number (I'm thinking of the Lucas Arts adventure game credo to not have fail states, and what kind of gameplay, for good or bad, that creates).
Back to TTRPGs, while of course you're right that there are lots and lots of TTRPGs that don't have HP (a murder mystery party! social deception games!), some examples that I would have included have been the spate of viral one-page RPGs (you know, stuff like "Trapped in a Cabin with Byron") that just throw a different adjective on their HP in a way that makes things less interesting. I think an HP-less RPG where the player is trapped with Byron would be a lot of fun (like maybe everybody has to actually try to write something with dedicated Scandalous Distractors, like a sort of gamefied writing jam), but often the admittedly engaging premises of some of these one-pagers boil down to "reading the humorous prompts once or twice, chuckling, but then just sort of ticking down boxes", because of how limiting the HP concept is, even if it's given a funny alternative title (this is not true of all one-pagers of course, some of which are quite RP/improv-heavy).
The lack of examples in the original piece also creates the temptation (as you did) to think "aha, look at all of these games without HP" as though it's a "gotcha." I don't think it's a "gotcha." I think it's an example of both how a designer sometimes needs to think creatively to pull the conceit of the manifesto off, but also how it's possible to create fun/exciting interesting/notable games without HP, which is more evidence against thinking of HP as a "default" or integral part of games. Like, the call to action of the piece is "remove HP from video games", so the response to "here are some fun games that don't have HP" is "good, great, that's what I wanted."
This is a pretty good example of how applying some of the most basic tools of philosophy can make an argument seem clever even when it's not actually that clever, and also of how finding the flaws in a thing is at best tangentially related to improvement. "X is objectionable in the following ways, and should therefore be done away with" is about as facile an argument as there is to be had, because doing away with X results in some other status quo which may (for all anyone knows, given the limits of the argument) be worse!
This is easily shown. Suppose I tell you that hands are bad. They constrain the ways in which we interact with the world. If only we didn't have hands, we might explore new and interesting ways of eating, or typing, or sexually stimulating one another. Think of how limited the world is, to those of us with hands! If we cannot manipulate a thing with our fingers, we scarcely think it is worth manipulating at all! And certainly it is true that people who lack hands approach the world differently, they have totally different qualia and sometimes see solutions to problems that handed people would never have noticed, solutions that even make the world a better place for handed people! Why, just think of the utopia we could inhabit, if only we got rid of hands.
Hopefully the problem is clear, here. On one hand (heh) there is clearly something to be gained from interrogating our priors, shifting our paradigm, whatever you want to call it. Recognizing those concepts that bind your thinking is potentially a step toward freeing your mind to think original thoughts. But as the pithy wooden-bladed ax meme communicates, just because you're original doesn't mean you're useful. This is related, I think, to Chesteron's Fence, but goes a bit beyond it. Not only should you understand the purpose of a thing before you tear it down, but the burden of proof on those who propose to tear things down is not merely to show that thing is unnecessary. Rather, they should be able to show how tearing things down constitutes an actual improvement. The standard label is "Pyrrhic Victory," I guess (or "baby with the bathwater?"), though that seems sufficiently broad that I want a more narrow label to identify cases where people identify legitimate problems but then fallaciously conclude that the solution is to burn something the ground. Canonical examples might be burning down your house to get rid of your bedbug problem, or injecting bleach into people to kill infectious microorganisms.
In the particular case of Hit Points, they really are just an instance of a score-keeping mechanism for certain arbitrary tasks in a gaming milieu. There are lots of great video and tabletop games that haven't got them, both today and in past decades. Are some game designers limited by HP thinking? Sure, probably. But anyone who claims the problem is universal in game design is mostly just exhibiting their ignorance of the history of gaming.
This was a essay written in a brief time window for a "Manifesto Jam" in which we were asked to generate utopian/dystopian/impossible provocations for video games rather than a complete philosophical program or categorical imperative (in fact I have no idea how anybody would have come across this without that context). Treat its universalizing language/imperatives the same way you'd treat "Dada Means Nothing" or "Vow of Chastity" in the Dada/Dogme 95 manifestos, or "Skeletons Should Not Wear Armor" or "Never Apologize" amongst the other cohorts in the Manifesto Jam. It's a potential (personal) project you sign on to, not an edict from on high.
In any event, I think the Chesterton's Fence reference is not quite the right one, since I don't think either you or I are really confused about what HP is for (if anything it seems like the extent to which we think it is a load-bearing concept in video games). I would think the response to the "imagine how limiting hands are" argument would be "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" which would lead you to, you know, hammers and axes and tools and writing implements and so on. In short, thinking beyond the limits of hands here would seem to be a good thing for design (and there's probably an aside here about how many curb-cutting inventions were made by or for people with physical disabilities to exactly overcome the problem of living in a world where we design things almost exclusively assuming everybody has two equally dextrous hands).
In the same way, I think encouraging people to think of ways of rewarding or punishing players beyond incrementing or decrementing their HP (or something very obviously analogous to HP, like "affection points" in a VN, say) could result in some more interesting ways of designing and thinking about games. And yes, I am aware that there are games where HP is barely there or absent; as mentioned, I think Portal is an example of a good "HP-lite" game. It's in the engine and it gets impacted by entities, but it's more a timer to force you out of turret fire than anything. I think DF/Rimworld-esque city/colony management games also do an interesting thing with the HP-like element of the number of colonists/pawns/workers, where you lose if you run out of people, but 1) the people are more interesting than just existing as a number 2) there are infrastructure and gameplay challenges to having more people, beyond just a number to hoard.
If this doesn't give you any solace, then take comfort in the fact that I have absolutely no authority, influence, or power in the video game community and so even if you think the program laid out in the manifesto is dangerous and ignorant, nobody is likely to do anything about it.
>Treat its universalizing language/imperatives the same way you'd treat "Dada Means Nothing"
In other words, it was purposedly overdramatized and made sound more radical than you really believe, right?
>In any event, I think the Chesterton's Fence reference is not quite the right one, since I don't think either you or I are really confused about what HP is for
The key part in this case is "Rather, they should be able to show how tearing things down constitutes an actual improvement." Not just "by not using X we would be forced to be more creative about how we do things". I think the person who would said that would need to show actual alternatives for X and that these alternatives are improvement over using X. Otherwise, it's like cutting budget of a film in hope that it will become better due to creators of the film being forced to become more creative with their more limited means.
Theoretically, it can indeed happen, but other outcomes are much more likely:
A) People use their limited means more creatively, but this doesn't make film better compared with alternative world where the budget wasn't cut.
B) People fail to be creative and just fallback on cheaper and more primitive techniques and make shorter, less polished, film
The problem is that HP are so universal construct, that it's very unlikely that there is possible equally universal construct that could replace HP AND be an improvement. At the very best you could show that in such and such specific scenarios a game is better without HP for such and such reasons. So you can't dismantle HP universally if you can't replace it universally.
>the response to the "imagine how limiting hands are" argument would be "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" which would lead you to, you know, hammers and axes and tools and writing implements and so on.
You provided quite ironic examples for alleged results of thinking outside "use-hands" worldview. Because they still need hands to useful, you still use your hands, just indirectly. So, say, sentient handless humanoid aliens wouldn't came up with idea of, say, hammer, at the least not in the form that humans invented, which shows that hammers created by humans weren't created outside of "use-hands" worldview.
I would rather extend "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" by adding "and if you fail to make an improvement, fall back to hands-using worldview". This way this turns into a creative procedure that won't make things worse (in the worst case) and can even make things better (in the best case). If we replace "hands" with arbitrary X, we can use this procedure in general to increase amount of originality in our projects.
> In other words, it was purposedly overdramatized and made sound more radical than you really believe, right?
I mean that it is a manifesto in a very specific genre sense, written like the other manifestos, (like the other ones in the jam, or historical examples that I mentioned earlier like the Dogme 95, Futurist, or Dada, Surrealist manifestos, etc.), where provocative statements are meant as a rallying cry to reimagine an existing artistic movement or define and codify an emerging one. If you don't like the manifesto, then don't sign on to it! It's really that simple. Like, you don't go to a Dadaist and say "I want you to make two versions of your Dadaist poem: one where it's made randomly from cut out words like you suggest, and one where the words are in order they were in the newspaper you took it from, and if the second poem is objectively better, then you'll give up your art movement, right?" It just seems to be a category error to me.
But I will admit some confusion here as to what your rhetorical goals are or which specific windmill you're tilting at.
I don't disagree with most of your points, although I do acknowledge that the mandate of this particular jam event thingy was very much "be bold" and not at all "explore practicable alternatives"
I agree that they are pervasive, but I would suggest that they're a necessary evil - ultimately, the underlying mechanics of games have to be based on numerical measures.
No matter how much abstraction you place on top, there is always a number (or set of numbers) ticking away to decide if a given character is dead yet, and by making that more obscure you risk frustrating the player because you're withholding information.
The short answer is "nope, not off the top of my head. Somebody smarter than I am is gonna have to figure that out."
The longer answer would be 1) think about paring down rather than building up 2) to look at reward structures in other mediums.
1) Super Meat Boy I think is an example of paring down. That game would just plain old suck if it had a lives system, and would probably suck also if it had a hitpoint system. Its gimmick is challenge+mastery (you either clear the stage or you don't, and you need to master gradually harder skills to clear later stages). So sure, there's some boolean value somewhere (you're either alive or dead), but it feels less hitpoint-y than, say, a Metroidvania. Heck, even Super Mario Brothers (lives system aside) does more interesting things with its trinary hit point system (big, small, dead): there are some routes through the level that are only possible if you've been hit. So I agree that hiding your hit point replacement behind a bunch of other complex factors would be too opaque and player-unfriendly, but that's not the only way forward. Not all numbers have to act like hit points. Not all hit points have to act like hit points! A metaphor that you may or may not find satisfying is that just because images on the screen are made up of pixels doesn't mean that every game has to be pixel art. We can build abstractions on top of internal numerical representations that are both expressive and usable.
2) Part of the reason why this is a manifesto rather than a design document is because it's utopian. I allude to it in the original essay, but I think we need to go spelunking for verbs from other places. Your question supposes that the player needs to die: that there needs to be something that ticks down that makes the game over. Books don't (usually) have that constraint. Neither do movies. The natural argument that I can come up with for why those media are different is that a game = winning/losing = win/loss condition = internal state= number related to internal state = something hit-pointy. Each of those logical links seem pretty strong, but I think if people push on them (or make explicit design constraints to go around them) there are plenty of non-conforming spaces there. There are twine games that keep track of internal states (player location/preferences/narrative progression) but have nothing that looks like a hit point. Portal is an example where you literally have hitpoints somewhere in the engine, but they have very little practical importance (they just determine how long you can withstand turret fire, say).
Bonus 3) I'm interested in how far I can push game design before I run into the "it's all gonna have to be numbers somewhere" limit while still making something fun. At the very least it would be a fun design exercise.
I apologize for writing the word "no" via several hundred words that were not "no."
No need to apologise; thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply! I realise now that my comment might have come across as a bit facetious (in the sense that it can be read as "games are programmed with numbers so of course you can't take away the numbers") - that wasn't my intention!
I definitely like the suggestion to make hitpoints more meaningful and less arbitrary. Super Mario Brothers is an excellent example of that which I'd never even considered before. One other that popped into my head was 'This War of Mine' in the way that they handle sickness, injury, and depression: The game deliberately makes these ambiguous by only having vague descriptors for each 'level' of a condition (e.g. 'slightly sick', 'sick', 'severely ill') which is particularly effective because it reinforces the game's overall mood of fear and uncertainty.
The recent 'Into the Breach' has a different but still interesting approach: it does use hitpoints but they act more as a resource to be spent, using your characters to block damage which would otherwise destroy an objective, for example.
I also agree that more games should experiment with different success / failure states than the traditional win and continue / die and restart (Portal is a good example). I think Pyre has an interesting approach on that one, too - failures don't hold the player back but instead have an emotional weight to them because of how they affect the characters / story.
I don't think all genres will be able to shake them off (MOBAs and competitive FPS, for example) but maybe even they can change.
This is super articulate and well written!!! I have never really thought about how pervasive hit points are in video games but you make a ton of great points!
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idk why I feel so compelled to beat up on a 5-6 year old manifesto, it's a pretty poor use of my time, and honestly I'm in a poor mood, so this can safely be ignored.
BUT: "the modern video game ought to be a drastically different beast than the arcade game or the pen and paper RPG"
even a cursory glance around this place should be enough to illuminate how ridiculous this statement is: even a pen and paper RPG is a drastically different beast than the pen and paper RPG; the majority of TTRPGs have hitpoints, but nearly as many, thousands and thousands, do not.
likewise, the characterization of "lives" systems as bygone feels blinkered to me. the incredible wealth of indie games and retro games that have come out in the half decade since this was written have shown that "lives" as a concept in video games aren't going anywhere, and I for one am glad. I think they have a functional place in an extremely broad swathe of games and there are interesting things to be designed around them.
anyway this manifesto is generally borderline incoherent. it doesn't convince me that hitpoints suck, or illuminate for me why anyone should hate them. but more importantly it's just entirely unclear if you literally mean "hit points", as in a numeric meter that ticks down from "fine" to "dead", or if you mean damage systems and systematized character harm IN GENERAL, or if you even more broadly mean all forms of fail states and consequences, without which we would quite literally not have games.
Hello, sorry you are/were in a bad mood.
I'm mostly going to be using your comment as a jumping off point do some vamping/complaining/doing a post mortem so you can likewise ignore as you see fit. I don't think I will even get around to addressing your points by the end so feel free to bail immediately, in fact.
I think the last place I mentioned this piece was when I was talking with someone on mastodon somewhere about health potions and I was like "oh yeah, I wrote about health in video games, I wonder what happened to that piece"and then remembered "oh yeah, it turns into a very adversarial comment section every time it Breaks Containment from the original context of a bunch of folks saying that skeletons shouldn't wear armor etc." I'm glad I wrote it using a throwaway, to be honest. Like I know you preface your comment with an apology of sorts, but no need: you are being extremely polite and generous compared to what I've read when this ended up on a TTRPG forum (where I think the duration from "posted by somebody" to "me, specifically, being called a slur" was like four posts) or on a LessWrong-a-verse subreddit (somehow) .
I mean, not for no reason, right, the piece is written intentionally tendentiously. I used these references in another comment somewhere (maybe they are even used in the overall jam description as well?) but I was thinking of the call to action in this piece similarly to something like a cross between the Dogme 95 manifesto or a (okay, hopefully way less fascist) Futurist manifesto: suggesting something rotten in the state of the world, and then introducing a set of constraints with the goal of making people think intentionally about what they are creating, which you then sign on to (maybe just for one game! Or for none!). Which means that the manifesto is not really about utility or aesthetics or a totalizing Theory of Games. To keep up with the Dogme example, it would be absolutely wild to say that there's no value to stationary cameras or non-diegetic music, or that a Dogme movie is an inherently more natural way of making a movie, or even that a Dogme movie is inherently aesthetically better than a non-Dogme one.
Which is also why I'm less bummed when people say that they aren't convinced. That's okay, it would be a very boring world if everybody followed the same motivations and constraints in making games, and a very facile one if people's attitudes towards games were so weakly held that a couple barely-edited paragraphs produced in a short period of time by a pseudonymous rando were enough to irrevocably alter them. But for me at least, I started seeing HP everywhere. It makes itself felt even in its absence. I was a little disappointed by the ways that HP can constrain how games are designed or played, and wondered what the full space of HP-free or HP-lite games would/could/should/does look like. I saw things like Halo 1 going from "HP bar + regenerating shield" to Halo 2's more pure regeneration as an example of designers hitting the limitations of tradition conceptions of HP as a concept and trying to work around it (how do we encourage players to avoid getting hit but not make them have to boringly backtrack to scrounge around finding medkits, say), with varying levels of success.
The rhetorical trick I play here, which you picked up on, is that I start small with a notion of what HP is and then intentionally grow it bigger. As you say, HP in this manifesto can be one or more of:
a) "HP as game over": a specific way of creating failure states (which I agree with you are pretty foundational to how we normally think of games, pace Wittgenstein), although I don't think HP or HP-like failure states are the only way of creating failure states even within the confines of the piece: like solitaire is clearly a game but the failure state is when there are no more moves, which I don't think of as very HP-like (kind of interestingly, the thing that is most like HP, the number of cards left in the draw pile, is both progress to the goal but also a limiting factor in that as the number of cards decreases, so does the number of potential cards you can play).
b) "HP as a model": a system for modeling the world (like the damage points in stuff like Gygax/Arneson's "Don't Give Up the Ship" and the war games proceeding it that ended up in the DNA of D&D). I mention this in another comment but the nuance I'd add to this one is that just because game-relevant information is stored as a number somewhere doesn't inherently mean that it is communicated or conceptualized as a number to the player. I'm less jazzed about this analogy than when I wrote it, but I'll stick with "just because your computer shows things as pixels, it doesn't mean all graphics are pixel art."
c) "HP as carrot/stick": a general system for rewarding/punishing players by incrementing or decrementing abstract values (in which case even stuff like points in Tetris are kind of "HP-y", and certainly the stereotypical EuroGame victory points). As with b), the fact that, yeah, your game state is ultimately saved as numbers in the code somewhere is not really as strong of a "gotcha" as it could be. I think the call is to either explore other ways of communicating with players, or ways that are less abstract (and maybe even more visceral).
So the point of the manifesto is to think about what extent a)-c) are limiting, what extent they are somewhat corrosive to some humanistic goals (telling more "human stories", say, or encouraging people to treat each other better or less abstractly, in video games or just in general). This is all prefaced on the assumption that a)-c) aren't load-bearing in games, and by now there are lots of examples that I can draw on. I mean, the other point was for me to have fun, but, you know.
But I will say I wish I had done some things differently in this piece.
The first is that a couple people really got hung up on the background as though I were laying out a complete history of games, or suggesting that there was a single teleological historical line from arcade -> TTRPG -> video game, all of which inherently have HP, which is of course nonsense in several ways. I mean "playing house"/playing with dolls is a game (that maybe predates/transcends our species?) where people play roles and it doesn't have anything much like HP in it unless you count your sibling ruining your doll by drawing all over it with markers. And likewise I don't think Gygax and Arneson were thinking "ah ha, we'll make people have to insert quarters whenever their cleric dies but they want to play again, just like ski ball!" But my point in bringing those historical examples up was that HP in at least one the guises I laid out is baked into a lot of types of games, was baked into them early on, and has influences in how games are designed or played today that may not be immediately obvious. Even the absence of HP is often done with an intentionality to it (more on this later), due to how pervasive the concept is, especially in video game design. HP is a really influential concept, and is maybe inescapable to at least think about when designing games these days, even if the decision is ultimately not to include it. It's often a default or fallback. And I think there's an underestimation of the way that historical design decisions can calcify or negatively influence their successors. Like I could be convinced (I'm not currently) that there are games today doing interesting things with old-school lives systems (maybe Rogue Legacy, where each new life has a potential to cause you to switch play styles or otherwise? Or likewise Sifu, with the conceit of death = aging and so new move sets? Although I guess that's more about about doing interesting things with a game over rather than necessarily doing something interesting with having a discrete count of attempts after which you have to quit or restart), but I don't think you'll be able to convince me that, say, Mario 64's lives system is anything more than vestigial. It's not enough for stuff to be functional, I want it to be fun or at least interesting.
I also think I could have been more concrete in placing things in context to existing games (yes, yes, I know that's not very manifesto-y, but..).
Untitled Goose Game is one great example (to the extent that if it were around when I wrote this, I'd just have said "let's build a new, goose-driven era of gaming" or something and it would be more clear that I was Doing A Bit even without the context of the jam). No HP, just the fail state of being driven off and having objects replaced (with or without incremental progress to a goal). Lots of numbers somewhere (detection radii and so on), but there's not much that's very HP-like presented to the player.
Howling Dogs is another (frankly inexcusable) omission that came up when I was chatting about this on mastodon: things break down over the course of a story in a way that's connected to an internal numeric variable, but the last thing you'd be worried about I think is the HP of your trash chute. Porpentine (who was certainly on my mind during the writing of this piece so no idea why she's not directly called out) in general I think has games with tons of body horror, trauma, and emotional affect that, just by virtue of what she surfaces through Twine, are not very HP-like. In general I think IF gets short shrift in this piece. There are lots of good IF examples of ways of creating progress/feedback that aren't about incrementing or decrementing a number (I'm thinking of the Lucas Arts adventure game credo to not have fail states, and what kind of gameplay, for good or bad, that creates).
Back to TTRPGs, while of course you're right that there are lots and lots of TTRPGs that don't have HP (a murder mystery party! social deception games!), some examples that I would have included have been the spate of viral one-page RPGs (you know, stuff like "Trapped in a Cabin with Byron") that just throw a different adjective on their HP in a way that makes things less interesting. I think an HP-less RPG where the player is trapped with Byron would be a lot of fun (like maybe everybody has to actually try to write something with dedicated Scandalous Distractors, like a sort of gamefied writing jam), but often the admittedly engaging premises of some of these one-pagers boil down to "reading the humorous prompts once or twice, chuckling, but then just sort of ticking down boxes", because of how limiting the HP concept is, even if it's given a funny alternative title (this is not true of all one-pagers of course, some of which are quite RP/improv-heavy).
The lack of examples in the original piece also creates the temptation (as you did) to think "aha, look at all of these games without HP" as though it's a "gotcha." I don't think it's a "gotcha." I think it's an example of both how a designer sometimes needs to think creatively to pull the conceit of the manifesto off, but also how it's possible to create fun/exciting interesting/notable games without HP, which is more evidence against thinking of HP as a "default" or integral part of games. Like, the call to action of the piece is "remove HP from video games", so the response to "here are some fun games that don't have HP" is "good, great, that's what I wanted."
This is a pretty good example of how applying some of the most basic tools of philosophy can make an argument seem clever even when it's not actually that clever, and also of how finding the flaws in a thing is at best tangentially related to improvement. "X is objectionable in the following ways, and should therefore be done away with" is about as facile an argument as there is to be had, because doing away with X results in some other status quo which may (for all anyone knows, given the limits of the argument) be worse!
This is easily shown. Suppose I tell you that hands are bad. They constrain the ways in which we interact with the world. If only we didn't have hands, we might explore new and interesting ways of eating, or typing, or sexually stimulating one another. Think of how limited the world is, to those of us with hands! If we cannot manipulate a thing with our fingers, we scarcely think it is worth manipulating at all! And certainly it is true that people who lack hands approach the world differently, they have totally different qualia and sometimes see solutions to problems that handed people would never have noticed, solutions that even make the world a better place for handed people! Why, just think of the utopia we could inhabit, if only we got rid of hands.
Hopefully the problem is clear, here. On one hand (heh) there is clearly something to be gained from interrogating our priors, shifting our paradigm, whatever you want to call it. Recognizing those concepts that bind your thinking is potentially a step toward freeing your mind to think original thoughts. But as the pithy wooden-bladed ax meme communicates, just because you're original doesn't mean you're useful. This is related, I think, to Chesteron's Fence, but goes a bit beyond it. Not only should you understand the purpose of a thing before you tear it down, but the burden of proof on those who propose to tear things down is not merely to show that thing is unnecessary. Rather, they should be able to show how tearing things down constitutes an actual improvement. The standard label is "Pyrrhic Victory," I guess (or "baby with the bathwater?"), though that seems sufficiently broad that I want a more narrow label to identify cases where people identify legitimate problems but then fallaciously conclude that the solution is to burn something the ground. Canonical examples might be burning down your house to get rid of your bedbug problem, or injecting bleach into people to kill infectious microorganisms.
In the particular case of Hit Points, they really are just an instance of a score-keeping mechanism for certain arbitrary tasks in a gaming milieu. There are lots of great video and tabletop games that haven't got them, both today and in past decades. Are some game designers limited by HP thinking? Sure, probably. But anyone who claims the problem is universal in game design is mostly just exhibiting their ignorance of the history of gaming.
This was a essay written in a brief time window for a "Manifesto Jam" in which we were asked to generate utopian/dystopian/impossible provocations for video games rather than a complete philosophical program or categorical imperative (in fact I have no idea how anybody would have come across this without that context). Treat its universalizing language/imperatives the same way you'd treat "Dada Means Nothing" or "Vow of Chastity" in the Dada/Dogme 95 manifestos, or "Skeletons Should Not Wear Armor" or "Never Apologize" amongst the other cohorts in the Manifesto Jam. It's a potential (personal) project you sign on to, not an edict from on high.
In any event, I think the Chesterton's Fence reference is not quite the right one, since I don't think either you or I are really confused about what HP is for (if anything it seems like the extent to which we think it is a load-bearing concept in video games). I would think the response to the "imagine how limiting hands are" argument would be "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" which would lead you to, you know, hammers and axes and tools and writing implements and so on. In short, thinking beyond the limits of hands here would seem to be a good thing for design (and there's probably an aside here about how many curb-cutting inventions were made by or for people with physical disabilities to exactly overcome the problem of living in a world where we design things almost exclusively assuming everybody has two equally dextrous hands).
In the same way, I think encouraging people to think of ways of rewarding or punishing players beyond incrementing or decrementing their HP (or something very obviously analogous to HP, like "affection points" in a VN, say) could result in some more interesting ways of designing and thinking about games. And yes, I am aware that there are games where HP is barely there or absent; as mentioned, I think Portal is an example of a good "HP-lite" game. It's in the engine and it gets impacted by entities, but it's more a timer to force you out of turret fire than anything. I think DF/Rimworld-esque city/colony management games also do an interesting thing with the HP-like element of the number of colonists/pawns/workers, where you lose if you run out of people, but 1) the people are more interesting than just existing as a number 2) there are infrastructure and gameplay challenges to having more people, beyond just a number to hoard.
If this doesn't give you any solace, then take comfort in the fact that I have absolutely no authority, influence, or power in the video game community and so even if you think the program laid out in the manifesto is dangerous and ignorant, nobody is likely to do anything about it.
>Treat its universalizing language/imperatives the same way you'd treat "Dada Means Nothing"
In other words, it was purposedly overdramatized and made sound more radical than you really believe, right?
>In any event, I think the Chesterton's Fence reference is not quite the right one, since I don't think either you or I are really confused about what HP is for
The key part in this case is "Rather, they should be able to show how tearing things down constitutes an actual improvement." Not just "by not using X we would be forced to be more creative about how we do things". I think the person who would said that would need to show actual alternatives for X and that these alternatives are improvement over using X. Otherwise, it's like cutting budget of a film in hope that it will become better due to creators of the film being forced to become more creative with their more limited means.
Theoretically, it can indeed happen, but other outcomes are much more likely:
A) People use their limited means more creatively, but this doesn't make film better compared with alternative world where the budget wasn't cut.
B) People fail to be creative and just fallback on cheaper and more primitive techniques and make shorter, less polished, film
The problem is that HP are so universal construct, that it's very unlikely that there is possible equally universal construct that could replace HP AND be an improvement. At the very best you could show that in such and such specific scenarios a game is better without HP for such and such reasons. So you can't dismantle HP universally if you can't replace it universally.
>the response to the "imagine how limiting hands are" argument would be "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" which would lead you to, you know, hammers and axes and tools and writing implements and so on.
You provided quite ironic examples for alleged results of thinking outside "use-hands" worldview. Because they still need hands to useful, you still use your hands, just indirectly. So, say, sentient handless humanoid aliens wouldn't came up with idea of, say, hammer, at the least not in the form that humans invented, which shows that hammers created by humans weren't created outside of "use-hands" worldview.
I would rather extend "imagine ways of interacting with the world that are not bound by what hands alone can do" by adding "and if you fail to make an improvement, fall back to hands-using worldview". This way this turns into a creative procedure that won't make things worse (in the worst case) and can even make things better (in the best case). If we replace "hands" with arbitrary X, we can use this procedure in general to increase amount of originality in our projects.
> In other words, it was purposedly overdramatized and made sound more radical than you really believe, right?
I mean that it is a manifesto in a very specific genre sense, written like the other manifestos, (like the other ones in the jam, or historical examples that I mentioned earlier like the Dogme 95, Futurist, or Dada, Surrealist manifestos, etc.), where provocative statements are meant as a rallying cry to reimagine an existing artistic movement or define and codify an emerging one. If you don't like the manifesto, then don't sign on to it! It's really that simple. Like, you don't go to a Dadaist and say "I want you to make two versions of your Dadaist poem: one where it's made randomly from cut out words like you suggest, and one where the words are in order they were in the newspaper you took it from, and if the second poem is objectively better, then you'll give up your art movement, right?" It just seems to be a category error to me.
But I will admit some confusion here as to what your rhetorical goals are or which specific windmill you're tilting at.
I don't disagree with most of your points, although I do acknowledge that the mandate of this particular jam event thingy was very much "be bold" and not at all "explore practicable alternatives"
Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?
I agree that they are pervasive, but I would suggest that they're a necessary evil - ultimately, the underlying mechanics of games have to be based on numerical measures.
No matter how much abstraction you place on top, there is always a number (or set of numbers) ticking away to decide if a given character is dead yet, and by making that more obscure you risk frustrating the player because you're withholding information.
The short answer is "nope, not off the top of my head. Somebody smarter than I am is gonna have to figure that out."
The longer answer would be 1) think about paring down rather than building up 2) to look at reward structures in other mediums.
1) Super Meat Boy I think is an example of paring down. That game would just plain old suck if it had a lives system, and would probably suck also if it had a hitpoint system. Its gimmick is challenge+mastery (you either clear the stage or you don't, and you need to master gradually harder skills to clear later stages). So sure, there's some boolean value somewhere (you're either alive or dead), but it feels less hitpoint-y than, say, a Metroidvania. Heck, even Super Mario Brothers (lives system aside) does more interesting things with its trinary hit point system (big, small, dead): there are some routes through the level that are only possible if you've been hit. So I agree that hiding your hit point replacement behind a bunch of other complex factors would be too opaque and player-unfriendly, but that's not the only way forward. Not all numbers have to act like hit points. Not all hit points have to act like hit points! A metaphor that you may or may not find satisfying is that just because images on the screen are made up of pixels doesn't mean that every game has to be pixel art. We can build abstractions on top of internal numerical representations that are both expressive and usable.
2) Part of the reason why this is a manifesto rather than a design document is because it's utopian. I allude to it in the original essay, but I think we need to go spelunking for verbs from other places. Your question supposes that the player needs to die: that there needs to be something that ticks down that makes the game over. Books don't (usually) have that constraint. Neither do movies. The natural argument that I can come up with for why those media are different is that a game = winning/losing = win/loss condition = internal state= number related to internal state = something hit-pointy. Each of those logical links seem pretty strong, but I think if people push on them (or make explicit design constraints to go around them) there are plenty of non-conforming spaces there. There are twine games that keep track of internal states (player location/preferences/narrative progression) but have nothing that looks like a hit point. Portal is an example where you literally have hitpoints somewhere in the engine, but they have very little practical importance (they just determine how long you can withstand turret fire, say).
Bonus 3) I'm interested in how far I can push game design before I run into the "it's all gonna have to be numbers somewhere" limit while still making something fun. At the very least it would be a fun design exercise.
I apologize for writing the word "no" via several hundred words that were not "no."
No need to apologise; thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply! I realise now that my comment might have come across as a bit facetious (in the sense that it can be read as "games are programmed with numbers so of course you can't take away the numbers") - that wasn't my intention!
I definitely like the suggestion to make hitpoints more meaningful and less arbitrary. Super Mario Brothers is an excellent example of that which I'd never even considered before. One other that popped into my head was 'This War of Mine' in the way that they handle sickness, injury, and depression: The game deliberately makes these ambiguous by only having vague descriptors for each 'level' of a condition (e.g. 'slightly sick', 'sick', 'severely ill') which is particularly effective because it reinforces the game's overall mood of fear and uncertainty.
The recent 'Into the Breach' has a different but still interesting approach: it does use hitpoints but they act more as a resource to be spent, using your characters to block damage which would otherwise destroy an objective, for example.
I also agree that more games should experiment with different success / failure states than the traditional win and continue / die and restart (Portal is a good example). I think Pyre has an interesting approach on that one, too - failures don't hold the player back but instead have an emotional weight to them because of how they affect the characters / story.
I don't think all genres will be able to shake them off (MOBAs and competitive FPS, for example) but maybe even they can change.
This is super articulate and well written!!! I have never really thought about how pervasive hit points are in video games but you make a ton of great points!
i also hate star rating systems for similar reasons
this is very good
Thank you! I am sorry that I wrote so Many Words.