Trigger Happy
while losing only an eighth of her “health.” Modern videogames, however, are so full of perilous situations that such a sliding scale, rather than simply being alive or dead, is crucial to the game’s playability.
Health is also the primary means of adjudication in beat-’em-up games, where each combatant has an “energy” meter that is depleted when the opponent lands a punch or a kick. The player whose energy is reduced to zero first is the loser. Of course this is unrealistic in that an ax blow to the head—in Soul Calibur, for instance—only takes off a fraction of your “health.” Yet it is a causally incoherent system as well: a punch to the face does the same damage as a kick to the shin, although in real life it would be debilitating in a completely different way. This is another obvious future application for developments in physical modeling, when the game will “know” automatically that a jolt to the head will affect vision and balance, whereas a leg trauma will affect locomotion and kicking ability.
The first steps toward this kind of more complex system have already been made in games like the fascinating Bushido Blade (1997), a more “serious” weapon-based game in which one well-aimed blow with a katana or sledgehammer will—naturally—kill
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