Games of Death: The Topsy Turvy Worlds of Jesse Venbrux

Jesse Venbrux is a Dutch game designer who's carved out a niche for himself by the way he handles death. Of course, game death has been a central element of the medium since its inception. Almost all games are about a struggle for survival. Even with games that aren't about shooting or explosions or being caught by renegade ghosts, the concept of 'lives' and 'death' remains. The central tenet of gaming, in fact, is that failure = death.

None of this holds in Venbrux' world. His Karoshi games are platforming puzzles where the object is precisely to die. Each level requires the player to reason about how best to do himself in and then manipulate the environment to make it so, whether that entails getting crushed by crates or perforated by an obliging set of spikes. It's actually a lot of fun, and Karoshi struck a chord with gamers by turning the central tenet of gaming on its head. You survive until you can figure out how to die, and death = success. Venbrux' work gives a whole new meaning to the classic gamer lament, "I died!"

Now Venbrux has come up with a new game centered around digital mortality, fittingly titled Deaths. Here the object is to stay alive in a fairly straightforward platformer. (Although Venbrux has made games in other genres, he prefers the purity of platform games.) The twist in Deaths is that the game pulls down the locations where each of the last 50 players died and populates your level with their corpses.

The mechanic is far more than visual decoration. It's also a map that visualizes the most challenging traps and pitfalls in the game, indicated obviously, by the profusion of blood and bones heaped chaotically into slapstick piles of death.

Venbrux doesn't stop there. The mass graves of fellow gamers can also be climbed on, so each gamer death takes on a transcendent role—when you die, your death becomes part of the level design for the next player.

As fans of the game, like indie game blogger Auntie Pixelante, have noted, the mechanic opens up possibilities that aren't fully exploited by Venbrux' current beta version of Deaths:

i’d love to see the final game build on this more: what if the bodies of players who’ve died in a particularly difficult area stack to form a shortcut that allowing the next players to bypass that area? there could be a real collaborative effort in players throwing themselves at a seemingly impossible task, knowing that their remains will help the next player get that much farther.

It's easy to see the macabre sense of altruism such gameplay extensions might inspire. Imagine a level with a challenge that can only be surmounted once a certain number of players have donated their remains to the cause. The result would be an eerie sort of multiplayer experience. Though gamers experience each level in isolation, the cumulative effect of each individual adventure determines the success of the community over all.

Though Jesse Venbrux' games are hardly the polished work that gets celebrated at industry 'confabs' like E3, it's exactly work like his that drives the medium forward, albeit from below. In Venbrux' case, six feet below.

[via Auntie Pixelante]