I’m presently working through a backlog of holiday titles that built up and I never got around to playing. I certainly have a lengthy list to get through. Looking back on the period, I don’t actually recall playing many games at the time. It seems like I spent most of my time reading, which as we all know is a poor substitute for more modern, visceral amusements. I’m not sure what I was thinking.

Anyway, first up on the docket has been the new Prince of Persia. The game is undoubtedly beautiful, as anyone who has merely glimpsed one of the trailers can tell you, and there’s little use in belaboring the point. It has fantastic artistic appeal, period. What’s more interesting is the game’s mechanism for death, which is to say that there isn’t one at all.

No, really. You can’t die. Any mistake that would otherwise be fatal (in PoP this basically means falling off a ledge) is met with a brief cinematic where your princess companion reaches down to grab your hand and magically whisks you back to the last solid ground you were standing on. If you get beaten down in a fight, you are saved and the enemy regains some life. The argument floating around the Intertubes is that this is bad, because the lack of any death penalty makes the game too easy.

I suppose it begs the question what the real, ludological function of death or failure is in a game. It’s all to easy for me to imagine the other end of the spectrum, wherein you have no recourse for failing a series of tricky jumping sequences other than to start over again from infrequently spaced save points or — even worse — running out of lives and having to start the game over again. Remember Battletoads? I never made it past the third level, and every three attempts or so I’d have to restart the entire damned game. I don’t think that’s a better model.

Without spiraling into a lengthy (and probably mostly inaccurate) dissertation on my take on game theory, I think that in most cases player death is intended to offer some penalty to the player for failing to meet the minimum skill bar, and conversely to increase the internal reward felt when successfully meeting or exceeding that same bar. If you want to look at it that way, then the penalty does indeed exist but it’s just very small. You don’t have to restart the whole level, just the last sequences of jumps you were doing. I think this was done intentionally, as it keeps the action flowing and the focus on the story and on navigating through the really skillfully constructed worlds. I also think it’s for the best: the game’s best moments are when you’re cruising rapidly through an area and it evokes that old sense of exhilaration that Sonic the Hedgehog games used to gave back when they were still any good.

At any rate I like the game, except for the way it encourages me to volunteer to listen to lots and lots of dialog on the off chance that I might get an achievement for listening to all of it. It makes me feel like they’re exploiting my being an achievement whore, casually tossing the gamerpoints on the floor and telling me to clean myself up before sauntering out of the room with a self-satisfied grin.

I should have Prince wrapped up tonight, and I have been hounded on all (or at least many) sides to give Call of Duty: World at War a shot next. Much like CoD4 this title appears to be showing a resurgence in popularity several months in release, and I’ve been warned that it may fully consume all of my free time. Gee, thanks for looking out for me, guys.