you can get specific per-game if you like
so like, what specifically does it represent? i think its quite mad in most cases to imagine a direct function of mortality—what kind of 90% dead person still has full faculties to fight or whatever? and is being alive something that can be measured in fractions or is it a 1/0 binary?
if you were to conceptualize a ‘health-bar’ for a real person, what would that measure?
It’s the red bar
It’s an abstraction of health, stamina, and luck. It has its roots in gamifying sword and sorcery fiction conventions, where characters get worn down with near-misses and blows that don’t do real damage but could have as a function of narrative tension, that a fight is hard and dangerous even if almost all the attacks are missing or getting parried, where a single real hit would be deadly. Put bluntly, it’s a narrative-ability-to-keep-going meter, that’s mechanically useful because it’s a single number (or a small number of single numbers) that gives a buffer between completely fine and restarting.
A real-life equivalent would probably be some meter of consciousness and mobility, where depletion isn’t immediate death but likely means serious injury. If you started getting paracausal measurements of “not actually being hit” as a tangible thing, it would incorporate that too.
i agree with both and i think the more “realistic” a game becomes the more resembling the second it is
A more realistic game is probably best off representing health loss in more abstract ways but that would also be hard to make work for the player. Trying to express pain in a readable way so you know how close you are to a fail state and trying to depict real pain as a game mechanic are a bit at odds. Pain is also just so many different things for so many different reasons that it’s hard to express. It’s such a basic and visceral thing that to put it across accurately would either require hurting the irl player or a game that isn’t fun. Some balance between the two leaning towards realism could be beat if implemented well and then it depends on what kind of game we’re talking.
Video games are just based on Tabletop RPG systems, with the computer serving as a mechanical dungeon master. Health bars are just a combo of hit points and the ability scores used for saving throws and such.
A more RPG focused game like Fallout NV I think actually calculates damage values and hit points as a function of those ability scores.
Because video games can’t come up with a narrative reason for every single possible situation where you might take damage, (eg. The bullet flies past your head, or the sword glaces off your armor, etc.) Like a DM would, it’s all just handled by a number because computers are good at that.
Or if you’re playing Ultrakill, it’s just how much literal blood you have in you because blood is fuel
It’s often specific per game. Some games get intricate and include where on your body you’ve been hurt. So some games will disable your legs or arms. Some will blind you if you’ve hurt your eyes. Some will give you a status effect simulating the symptoms of a disease or disability.
I like how the Uncharted devs explained it, where your health is a meter that represents how much you’ve tempted fate. Your meter goes down the more likely it is you’d suffer an instantly fatal wound. Every bullet fired at you is actually missing if it “hits” you, but if you stand around getting shot at then eventually one of those bullets will be lethal.
Duke Nukem’s is funny, his health is actually his Ego. Getting hurt just damages his ego.
I like some games that present health damage as incorrectly narrating a story. Like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is like that. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger too. The events of the game have already happened in the past, but the characters narrating make mistakes in how they tell it. I try not to think about that literally though, because that implies the narrator is saying “And then I misjudged the distance of a pit and got impaled by spikes and died…oh wait, no I didn’t. Actually I jumped over it correctly and kept going.”
I believe Half-Life’s health is supposed to represent how much physical pain Gordon is in. His hazmat suit is so advanced it keeps him moving around despite broken bones or open wounds. I guess the implication there is the suit is augmenting his physical abilities to the point he can’t be hindered by injuries unless it’s lethal. Morphine keeps the pain away, the suit protects against direct damage up to a point. Medical kits seem to replenish his morphine, antitoxin, and etc supply. I always imagined the suit must have some kind of advanced scifi blood coagulant too that can instantly seal wounds and supply blood transfusions. Low health also could represent the suit is low on medical supplies, or low on energy to do whatever it does, or that the wounds Gordon has sustained are simply too severe to be fixed.
Dwarf Fortress has some of the most intricate health systems I’ve ever seen. Nothing in the game has a direct health total represented by a number. Instead it’s more detailed. Every creature/dwarf has individual extremities, internal organs, a blood supply, things like that. Characters die when their organs fail, or they can’t breathe, or a disease is too progressed. It’s really lifelike and needlessly complex, but that’s Dwarf Fortress for you lol. It’s based on anatomy rather than some abstract score. Dwarves can lose a lung and keep going, but are hindered. They can lose a kidney too, but not a heart. A serious wound to the head is fatal in a way that same wound to the leg isn’t.
I like some games that present health damage as incorrectly narrating a story. Like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is like that. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger too. The events of the game have already happened in the past, but the characters narrating make mistakes in how they tell it. I try not to think about that literally though, because that implies the narrator is saying “And then I misjudged the distance of a pit and got impaled by spikes and died…oh wait, no I didn’t. Actually I jumped over it correctly and kept going.”
I like how assassin’s creed inherited that from prince of persia with their historical desync health
yeah, I think AC’s interpretation of health is one of my favorites. though obviously once you think about it, because if taking no damage = no historical mistakes, you’re basically being asked to believe that the assassin took no damage, outside of cutscenes I guess, for that playable portion of their life, which is a little strange.
To be fair I think Dwarf Fortress does have something health wise that directly correlates to a number and it’s the fact that living creatures with blood can bleed to death and they bleed to death when their internal blood loss number gets too high (or too low?).
This had a funny interaction in earlier versions when the rate of bleeding was the same for most creatures and smaller creatures would bleed out very quickly (due to having smaller blood mumbers) than larger creatures like megabeasts (who had big blood numbers)
That one is also cool though. I guess it’s a strict number value because I wouldn’t know how else to do it. Humans typically die when they’ve lost between 30 and 40% of their blood and that kinda resembles a real life health bar. If I remember right, DF takes into account how different wounds would produce different bleeding. Taking a hit on a major artery causes more bleeding than an injury to a hand, for instance. I think punctures cause more bleeding than blunt impact too.
I also remember in earlier versions blood loss was tracked in some funny ways, like if you had a bleeding leg you could fix the blood loss by removing the leg entirely. There were also weird things that wouldn’t heal from blood loss, like I remember a dwarf of mine somehow having bleeding bones in her knees. It was the minor blood loss effect rather than the serious one, but she still eventually died because the wound never healed because there isn’t a way to stitch up…bones. Just got drained of blood.
it’s my luck meter
when i run out and get shot i die immediately
This is unironically what the developers of the uncharted games say.
Two ways to look at it.
First is that it represents how many mistakes you are allowed by the devs to make. Many games used to demand perfection, which was a way of making you play the same content over and over to pad out the length, but this is far less common now.
Second is that it represents “plot armor”. In any media where characters fight, the protagonist will get hit many times in order to raise the tension as the audience fears for them. Health in a game is therefore the number of shots the developers feel you can take before it breaks immersion.
