On Being a Massive Coward

I like to think that I’d be a great NPC for a game like Skyrim. A coward of a person who asks the protagonist to go and fetch some insane item for them because there’s no way they’ll ever be able to obtain it themselves. Then, when danger rears its ugly head, I stand in a corner failing to hit it with my bow and arrows, then panic and run away. On the plus side, at least I’d pay you for your hard work. I’m a coward. I don’t like taking risks. I’ll let the strong ones deal with the army of Stormcloaks and bandits heading our way.

The problem is, I don’t like dying. Of course no one likes dying. I’m more talking about video games. I don’t like dying in video games almost as much as I don’t like dying in real life, simply because it reminds me that real life is a thing that exists. Which means I’ll go out of my way to avoid being killed.

A lot of this started when I first played Minecraft. The fact that dying meant losing all my stuff was WAY scarier than just losing a life. I worked hard for those two stacks of coal and a handful of gold ore blocks. I’m not going to let some Creeper bastard kill me and steal all my loot! Really though, the fear was more of dying and not being able to reclaim my stuff, than me actually dying. Having experience bars in Minecraft still seem inferior compared to losing a night’s worth of ores and coal.

There’s also a ton of blame to be had in Team Fortress 2. It’s probably the critical rockets killing you at 90+ percent Uber. When you decide you want to be a better Medic, you learn that you need to stay alive as long as possible. Your life is more important than that of your team mates. Of course, me being a coward deep down, this made Medic perfect for me. The problem was, I would always end up taking it too far. You reach a point where your cowardice is more detrimental than anything, and the inability to properly push kinda makes your staying alive moot. Heck, there’s actually downsides to outliving your team in competitive play, as you will just be picked off and your team will be forced to wait until you respawn.

In Warframe, death is incredibly temporary. Even if you’re playing solo, you still get four revives per mission, and the majority of missions are simple enough that you won’t need any of them. Still doesn’t stop me from avoiding death as much as I can though. But really, the issue is more trying to work out if it’s worth taking damage to revive a team mate or not. Multiple times, my whole team has been downed aside from me. There’s no point getting myself killed to save two team mates who were killed by a Sapping Osprey only to die myself.

The great thing is that Operators make reviving team mates incredibly easy. Operators while invisible are immune to almost anything, from one-hit-kill Bombards to Hyekka Master piles of ash to clouds of Mutalist Osprey fart gas. You can just zip out of your frame and revive your team mates and zip back, your Warframe unharmed. Sadly you can’t say the same about your companions.

Funnily enough though, Skyrim is the one game where dying really doesn’t feel particularly awful. You just reload and go back to your last save. The pain from dying in Skyrim comes from when you last saved, not how you died. Sure it’s frustrating to have nearly killed that Draugr Deathlord at the end of a dungeon, but it’s more frustrating realizing you’re going to have to do all of that again. Or maybe you’re going to have to do two hours’ worth of dungeons because the last time you saved was when you started playing.

The moral of the story here is to save often. That’s probably more important than trying not to die.

Still doesn’t excuse my cowardice though. It’s just a game.