723 Health And Healing

The more I see it, and the more I think about it, the weirder it gets.

What is “healing” and the “health” meter in games? That isn’t analogous to almost anything in real life, so I’m curious where it came from.

So what is it really representing? In most games, it’s a representation of when you “die,” or lose. But why are dying and losing so tightly linked? As in, isn’t there something else that better represents this form of losing? A type of losing that is more casual, and is repeatable. Not the end-all-be-all of death.

Maybe if we didn’t use health/healing as our primary form of representing “proximity to losing,” our games wouldn’t be as likely to heavily feature things that specifically reduce health.

Like guns. And swords.

[ Today I Was Playing: nothing… ]

#game-opinion