Healthy Living

I was thinking the other day about how your character's health is represented in games. It's always been an imperfect mechanism, but if you're like me, you've played enough games to not really notice anymore. I came to this realization when I was upgrading my "hearts" in Henry Hatsworth. There's something about base-hearts but then you add silver-hearts? I don't know, it was kind of confusing. But why use hearts at all? Because Zelda did it ages ago? Don't get me wrong, the original Legend of Zelda is still my favorite game ever, but a bunch of hearts to represent how healthy Link is? Really? And if you hang out w/ a fairy by a pond you get more hearts? Thats...odd. But the other big franchises aren't any better. Sonic collects golden rings for some reason, and Mario eats strange magic mushrooms that make him bigger.

Should games strive for some sort of realistic representation of health? Doom did a decent job of this w/ a picture of your character's face that became more bloody and decrepit the more damage you took. But they also had the crutch of a 0-100 scale. Actually the ones that seem the most believable are the games with a sci-fi angle that introduce the concept of "shields." The sound of your shields recharghing in Halo is a very familiar and comforting sound. It's like "ah, now I can stop worrying about health and everything is aaaaaaall right." Dead Space attempted to make the health meter more realistic by showing it on the back of the suit with no accompanying 0-100 scale.

Lots of first person shooters now use an approach I first remember seeing in Gears of War, but who knows who actually had it first. Since you see through the characters eyes, the vision is obscured by blood as you take damage. Games like Braid and Prince of Persia take a unique approach where there's really no health meter. If you fall in a pit or touch an enemy you're dead, but no worries since you can just rewind time and go on your merry way. RPG's traditionally have hit points which is just a numeric variation on the 0-100 scale. I know I've seen an EKG meter in a game to indicate health, but it escapes me just what game that was. I'd guess that's the most realistic you're gonna get.

So you run low on health and you "die." Don't worry, if you've collected a few small versions of yourself or sometimes a crazy green mushroom, you can live again.