In You Only Live Once, an obscure Flash platformer designed by raitendo, you control a bespectacled character named Jemaine. You start with five hearts. If you run out of those, you die. If you die and hit “continue,” your girlfriend, whom you were just in the process of rescuing from the clutches of Sir Giant Pink Lizard, discovers your body and calls 911. Hit “continue” again and an ambulance arrives on the scene: “well, there was nothing we could have done.” The game goes on like this. The guilty pseudo-Goomba is arrested. A local news obituary is given. A memorial is erected at the site of your death. Eventually, there’s no more “continue” option, and all you can do is refresh your page and watch the grass run riot on your burial plot.
Do we empathize with Jemaine?
The game functions chiefly as a parody, and a wry one. The title screen advertises fake prizes the game has won (“Pretentious Indie Game of the Week”), and the mechanics, design, and premise are all self-consciously derivative of Super Mario Bros. The central concept, however, invites us to scrutinize how we tend to think about how games that frame death as failure. The “Game Over” screen in a game like Pac-Man may halt your progress, but you can always restart. In You Only Live Once, “Game Over” means exactly that. You can’t play the game anymore.
Why does Braid lack features like hearts, lives, or HP? Is this part of the game’s wanting to be solved, its being “constructed with empathy,” as Liz Ryerson puts it? Under this interpretation, immortality is merely a symptom of Braid’s rewind mechanic. The feature eliminates the possibility of you making a mistake, so it in turn obviates the need for including any ramifications of making a mistake at all. But I think the fact that Tim can’t “die” in the game has, at the very least, just as much to do with inviting suspicion as eliciting empathy. Mario is a plumber, an everyman, and by embarking on his journey to rescue the princess he is putting his life (his lives) on the line. He’s the underdog. There are real stakes to his peril, and this augments his heroism. Tim has the name and all the trappings of an everyman, with the glaring exception of his ability to turn back time. The creatures that populate the world of Braid are less obstacles to Tim than they are objects he manipulates in his all-consuming quest to find the princess. His success isn’t unlikely, it’s inevitable. He can’t die because he can’t accept any possibility other than reclaiming what he believes belongs to him. The very structure of the game, in a sense, is the product of Tim’s own megalomania. He’s no hero at all. Braid may be “empathetic” in its forgiveness toward the player, but when it comes to its own protagonist, it’s downright condemnatory.
Can you win You Only Live Once? If you happen to make it to the end and jump on Sir Giant Pink Lizard’s head a handful of times without losing all your hearts, your girlfriend does come out to greet you. Not long after, however, the police show up and arrest you (your “girlfriend” tells the officer “we’re technically not really dating”). We see Sir Giant Pink Lizard carted off by an ambulance and eulogized by his pseudo-Goombas. We see his grave overrun with grass.
Do we empathize with Sir Giant Pink Lizard?
Works Cited
Braid. Steam, 2008.
Ryerson, Liz. “The other side of Braid.” Boing Boing, 30 July 2015. https://boingboing.net/2015/07/30/the-other-side-of-braid.html.
You Only Live Once. Kongregate, 2009. https://www.kongregate.com/games/raitendo/you- only-live-once