If anyone has devised a more concise conversation-stopping phrase for dismissing a valid critique of his or her favourite title than “it’s just a game”, I’m hard pressed to think of it. Whether it’s a game’s politics, the tension between its story and its rules, or something else worthy of critical consideration, it’s almost inevitable that someone will drop the IJAG bomb rather than debate on the merits. So, until recently, this would have been my candidate for the Phrase I’d Most Like To See Retired From The Public Discourse... until I caught myself muttering it under my breath. 

What prompted this was a post at Michael Abbot’s thoughtful blog, The Brainy Gamer, titled ‘ODST and what might have been’. In it, he explained that he’d had a greater amount of anticipation for Halo 3: ODST than for previous Halo games, in part because the ODSTs are more vulnerable than the Master Chief. As Abbot put it: ‘Halo 3: ODST initially hooked me because it seemed to adroitly dodge the Superhero Conundrum. We must connect to our hero/avatar, but his very nature makes this nearly impossible to achieve via gameplay. His power, the thing that makes him fun, also makes him nearly invulnerable (by Halo 3 Master Chief is essentially a bipedal super-tank)’.

In the comments section, one of Abbot’s readers went on to add: ‘I enjoy the vulnerability gaming can bestow upon me as a gamer. Without it, there can be no tension. It’s something I’ve always felt Halo to be lacking since the first game (albeit the very end of that first game)’. To both sets of statements I thought: ‘Huh?’

Anyone who’s not feeling vulnerable enough in the Halo games should crank up the difficulty, because odds are that they’ll start feeling rather fragile shortly thereafter. And why would anyone look to an action-oriented shooter for sensations of vulnerability? Yes, Bungie itself attempted to instil this feeling in players by eliminating the regenerating shield of Halo 2 and 3 with a stamina and health pack system somewhat akin to the first Halo title. But to me, it felt more like a step backwards. Now that regenerating health has been adopted by a variety of shooters – many of them non-sci-fi – it has become a convention of the medium rather than an expression of the Halo universe’s logic. As a result, Bungie’s choice didn’t make me feel more vulnerable, only more frustrated.

At this point, I was prepared to dismiss the very notion of vulnerability in a medium that is all but premised on the idea that if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But then I started to reflect on games where I had felt endangered. Like Manhunt, where the enemies are stronger, faster and more numerous when confronted directly. Or Ico, where the camera distance between the undersized protagonist and its towering environments produced a vertiginous sensation when navigating the more precarious locations. If it’s just a game, if we can just try, try again, where does this sensation of vulnerability truly come from?

In my opinion, this feeling is really about time. As in, how much time did you ‘lose’ or ‘waste’ when you got killed? How much time will it take you to regain what you lost, whether it’s the number of items that you acquired or the amount of ground that you had covered? In the arcade era, of course, a death would have constituted a loss of both money and time, but in modern games, many of which are bidding to become accessible to wider audiences, the amount of time lost is declining, thanks to checkpoints and save-anywhere systems.

So when gamers criticised the Vita-Chambers in BioShock or Elika’s helpful hand in the recent Prince Of Persia, what they were really complaining about was their belief that these mechanics failed to provide enough of a time penalty for their mistakes. Other games, like Gears Of War and Left 4 Dead, cleverly avoid criticism by using their downed-but-not-out states to keep players on the precipice between life (time well spent) and death (time wasted) for longer, thereby dragging out that feeling of vulnerability. Equally deserving of kudos: Borderlands’ Fight For Your Life/Second Wind mechanic, where downed players can save themselves by killing a single enemy before they bleed to death.

But for people who derive the most pleasure from the pain of lost time, the PlayStation 3 RPG Demon’s Souls delivers in spades. The person who recommended it to me suggested that I consider my first ten hours spent playing the game as a tutorial, and he was correct. Not only is the game as tough as nails, but when you die you have to battle your way back to the bloodstain that you left at the site of your death, and if you don’t make it, you forfeit everything that you earned on your previous playthrough. Now that’s vulnerability. Unlearning all of the little carelessnesses that modern games tolerate has been a painful, arduous process, one that I’m perpetually one death away from abandoning. But just as I’m about to give up, I remind myself: it’s just a game. And I push on.

N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.