Trigger Happy
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while losing only an eighth of her “health.” Modern
videogames, however, are so full of perilous situations
that such a sliding scale, rather than simply being alive
or dead, is crucial to the game’s playability.
Health is also the primary means of adjudication in
beat-’em-up games, where each combatant has an
“energy” meter that is depleted when the opponent
lands a punch or a kick. The player whose energy is
reduced to zero first is the loser. Of course this is
unrealistic in that an ax blow to the head—in Soul
Calibur, for instance—only takes off a fraction of your
“health.” Yet it is a causally incoherent system as well:
a punch to the face does the same damage as a kick to
the shin, although in real life it would be debilitating in
a completely different way. This is another obvious
future application for developments in physical
modeling, when the game will “know” automatically
that a jolt to the head will affect vision and balance,
whereas a leg trauma will affect locomotion and
kicking ability.
The first steps toward this kind of more complex
system have already been made in games like the
fascinating Bushido Blade (1997), a more “serious”
weapon-based game in which one well-aimed blow
with a katana or sledgehammer will—naturally—kill
