Trigger Happy
104
which a fatal mistake need not be your last; branches of
a system can be multiply explored until all the lives are
used up. But when that happens, the downside is grim
indeed. The result in this final situation is not a simple
death, but a violent ejaculation from the safety of the
entire game universe. The
petit mort
of
Homo ludens:
Game Over.
Subsequent to this distribution of multiple “lives,”
videogames began to introduce another highly
unrealistic paradigm, again disguised in deceptively
ordinary language: that of “health.” Whereas in Space
Invaders or Asteroids the player’s ship is destroyed by
contact with one bomb, bullet or rock, later games
further subdivide a life with a colored bar representing
“health,” which is degraded (to use an ugly
latetwentieth- century military euphemism) by damage
to the player’s character. When the bar is completely
emptied, the life is gone. Applied to spacecraft or other
vehicles, this concept is understandable, as it could be
thought to measure the integrity of the craft’s hull or
other analog, flight-critical criteria. Yet from a
doggedly literal point of view, it approaches risibility
when applied to human characters. Lara Croft can take
several bullets in the torso, or get savaged by a tiger,
