Have you ever had that moment when you just can't stand to get up in the morning? When you wish that you could just hit the off button and come back tomorrow? I'm not just talking about feeling reluctant, I'm talking about feeling drained. Feeling fatigued. Of course you have, everyone has. It's a universal feeling that everyone can relate to, which is why it can be powerful tool in story telling. "What? Having the main character be tired?" Yes, indeed. How many fight scenes have you seen in movies where the hero dusts up with a room chock-full of bad guys and tears through them without breaking a sweat? Did you relate to him? Did you worry for his safety? Now think of that scene in episode 2 of Netflix's 'Daredevil' wherein Matt Murdock takes down that entire hallway of thugs. (A must-watch scene if you haven't!) Think about how tired he gets, how they tired they get, and how it looks like he barely takes that last one down. Did he look like he was getting hurt?
Pain and fatigue are inexorable elements of our everyday lives, (Or at least they are until those Transhumanists get their way.) and so when we see these feelings represented in our fiction it makes it easier to realise that fictional world in our minds. Storytellers must always nail the fundamentals of their worlds before they can establish any of the fantastical elements, no matter how wild and imaginative that world is. When the story fails to make you believe in the world, you don't feel the need to care about it's inhabitants. That is why something as simple as showing your focal character stop to take a breather can build a whole depth onto your story.
Video games have also had their hand in demonstrating fatigue through one of the longest running traits in gaming: Stamina bars. This is the bar that is usually present in the Hub and will drain as you get damaged; once it is depleted, you character falls down dead. or just defeated, depending on your game's rating. (I know I likely don't need to explain the basics of a health bar to you, but remember, I'm a narcissist. So I will anyway.) Health bars were born out of the need to solve one of the most universal questions of game design: What is the player's motivation? When high scores don't matter anymore and the game has no sports-like win/lose conditions, the last carrot that developers have to dangle over our heads is the most potent one of all: Our very lives! And so the most enduring and widespread system in gaming was born.
Over the years, as development technology has become more and more robust, game developers have found all different ways to demonstrate the remaining health of the player. Some games have even gone so far as to remove the health bar altogether. (The monsters!) One of my personal favourite methods is the way in which player's wellness can be linked to that character's animations. In some third person games, as your character becomes more poorly (That's British slang for 'infirm' by-the-by.) they'll start to show it in their stature and gait; meaning that they'll start slumping over and hobbling about. You'll notice this in games like Resident Evil 2, Tomb Raider (2013), Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, Max Payne 3, Final Fantasy 7, Yakuza, Assassins Creed, oh and every single modern third person action adventure game ever made. It is a little silly how these characters can usually be seen clutching their sides after being riddled with enough lead to make them float, but I guess that the characters need to look like they can shake off their injuries. If they were going around vomiting up blood it might start giving players pause.Of course, that isn't the only alternative that Video game companies have come up with for representing the health bar. Afterall, how would first-person games pull it off, considering they are the games that started shedding traditional 'health bars' first? Well, Call of Duty started off something of a trend when they created the 'damage effects' that are now widespread in first-person games. This includes 'hit markers' (A small on screen indicator telling you from which direction you got hurt), blurred screen effects, and reddish overlays onto your vision. As your character is dragged ever closer to death your screen become more and more red until you die. This is supposed to represent an immersive way to display health without the use of ugly, HUD adorning, health bars. However, the side effect is that now players can recover from their injuries by merely waiting around and not being hit. You win some immersion and then you lose some.
Some games have very unique ways of showing of the players health that doesn't clutter up a HUD but is still built around the health bar formula. One of the most famous examples I can think of is the spine bar from Visceral's Dead Space. Dead Space was a horror game that was intent on integrating HUD elements into the world of the game, thus ensuring that players would never cut themselves off from the immersion by going into a menu. Inventory screens were handled through holographic projections emanating from the player's environment suit, ammo counts were shown through holographic displays on the guns themselves, and the health bar was prominently visible on the protagonist's back. One thing you instantly notice when you play Dead Space is the glowing blue tube up the players spine, and that is essentially your in-universe health bar which depletes as your take damage. Ingenious! Another game that tried a similar trick of integrating the HUD would be 1998's 'Trespasser'. A first-person Jurassic Park game that figured the best way to keep the audience aware of the main character's health was to feature a heart shaped tattoo on her left breast that would deplete with damage. Classy.
So far I've been following a very narrow subset of fatigue mechanics in how they pertain to gameplay, but there is another aspect to consider which is very important to crafting a memorable experience, how fatigue can relate to the story. I've already mentioned the way in which characters feel more real when they are pervious, but what I'm referring to here is more the way in which the character wears the strain of the adventure they've just been through. There's nothing quite as satisfying as seing your hero come through it all at the end of day covered in the bruises and scratches that represent the chaos that they just endured. A great example of this would be the Arkham games. (Which you might remember me mentioning a bit about not so long ago. Something about playing the demo for Arkham Asylum until it was seared into by subconscious.) We all know Batman. And we've all seen Batman roughed up; with the torn suit and the cuts and scratches. The Arkham took this one step further in that you lived through every bruise that Batman acquired throughout that night. That isn't to say that every counter you missed would result in a nasty welt a couple hours down the line, but rather that there were scripted encounters and sections which would result in 'wear and tear' for poor old Bruce Wayne. Moments like; the first air duct collapsing at the beginning of Arkham Asylum, deflecting Deathstroke's katana barrage at the end of his boss fight in Arkham Origins and surviving lungs full of potent fear toxin in Arkham Knight. All of these incidents left a 'scar' that last on your virtual avatar for the rest of the game; trophies of the battles that you fought.
Similar 'wear and tear' systems can be found in a few of the modern action adventure games of recent years. 2013's Tomb Raider had a system very similar to the Arkham games. As Lara travelled across Yamatai, she would go through scripted scenes in which she would go through some sort of trauma and come out with a fresh scratch. Yager Development's 'Spec Ops: The Line' had a more involved 'wear and tear' mechanic in which the protagonist would grow more and more haggard as the psychological toil of the player's actions began to weigh on him with increasing severity. And Lionhead's 'Fable 3' had a literal 'scarring system' wherein the Hero had the possibility of attaining a scar every time that they got defeated by an enemy. Some of those examples are more transformative to the narrative than others, but they all serve to reflect the mortality of their subjects.
Storytelling is a multifaceted beast that can be tackled in so many hundreds of ways. The grounding of characters is just one step on a long road to crafting a clear and cohesive narrative, but it can be an important one depending on the tale you are trying to tell. I'm willing to bet that at least one the examples I mentioned today went almost completely ignored by some gamers out there; but as Mister Plinkett likes to say "You might not have noticed it, but your brain did." Personally I'm a sucker for all these little details, just as I'm a sucker for the big 'showstopper' features. Maybe I'm a just a huge nerd who can't see the forest for the trees or maybe I'm subconsciously taking note of all these little things in hope that I can write my own story/game one day. Or maybe I just enjoy seeing something that I feel daily mirrored by the coolest characters in fiction: The need to take a break.
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