by Reddit4Play
A lot of creative disciplines share a very important aspect, which is the management of space. Napoleon was known to say that strategy is about management of space and time (he was also known to have said he was more keen about the latter, since space could always be recovered), and in a lot of ways that's what creative design is about. I'm a lot more amateur at music than I am at games as a field, but one of the first things you learn in digital music creation is that you only have a few dimensions to work in and once they're filled you are just adding what amounts to useless white noise that makes your sound bad, especially in a song (other audio may vary).
Here's what I mean, and forgive the tangent into music but trust me it'll make sense in a minute. In music you have three spatial dimensions you can fill, basically, until your track is "full". You have the in-out direction, or volume, which represents how close something is to you (louder is closer). A special thing about volume is that in digital recordings (and to an extent in analog recordings unless you're willing to go the extra mile and invent custom formats for getting crazy with) once you hit a certain threshold of volume, you're completely done. Above +-0dB? Nobody's going to hear it unless they're listening in an audio workstation that has a higher bit depth; to the normal man listening to the .mp3 at home that's just going to clip completely off and be a bad sounding noise. So, you always have to consider the volume dimension. The left-right axis is represented by panning, which quite literally moves the sound more left or more right. The up down axis is a little metaphorical, because we say a sound is high or low in pitch, but it helps to think of it as a third dimensional axis to go with in-and-out and left-to-right.
Just like in film (I swear that although this gets farther a-field it'll come back to games) if you place any element at the same intersection of these three points in space the more difficult it will be to resolve to the senses, so the same for music - if you have an actor behind another actor relative to the camera, the other actor may as well not be there because he is effectively invisible since the first actor is in the way of the shot, and this also works for sounds in music that share the same pitch, panning, and relative volume (although usually two of the three is enough to make it kind of muddy). Basically what I'm saying here is that in film and music, you need to manage space to make sure each thing has its place, and also that, just like in volume, you can't overload something with too much stuff, otherwise it gets bad (in the case of music it clips, in the case of film... well... I'd imagine it'd be distracting, but I'm not even a hobbyist when it comes to films so I won't pretend to be able to talk there).
ANYWAY, back to games. You say you want a more realistic damage model? Great, so do I. For ages I've wanted to see a completely realistic implementation of modern body armor. You get shot? Does the armor catch the bullet? Broken rib at the worst; you're not going to be out of the fight if your life is at stake but you won't have a good couple weeks after that because of the bruising. You want evidence of that? Go check out the North Hollywood shootout, where the bank robbers were shot dozens of times in their body armor with nary a pause noted. Were they bruised to hell and back? Definitely yes. Did the body armor keep them in the fight? Also definitely yes (until the big guns arrived, at least). I'd give quite a lot of money to see a game that takes body armor beyond Counterstrike's primitive "damage ablater" model, but I am quite aware that this would end up a very niche game. Why?
Here's the connection you've read what is probably far too much text for me to get to. Just like in films and music, and even the strategy of war, in game design you need to manage space. Design space. That is to say, you need to manage the amount of crap in your game. Now I'm not just talking about budgetary and man-hour concerns, which are entirely valid meta-reasons to be concerned about how much stuff you put in your game to be fair, but that if you put too much stuff in a game it becomes a bad game.
Now I know /r/games is primarily devoted to digital games - ones that involve keyboards, mice, joysticks, CPUs, whatever, but this is actually a trend most evident in tabletop gaming. A lot of the biggest tabletop games, like war games or roleplaying games, generally tend to suffer from a condition known generally as "bloat", or perhaps "rules bloat", or "product bloat", or whatever is getting bloated but the point is it expands a lot. The single best example I know of this is in fact the archetypical Dungeons & Dragons, which beginning in its 2nd edition (a good clue here is that it even had two editions or more to begin with - you don't see Monopoly with more editions) began to release tooooooooooooooons of supplementary rules-based products. In part this was originally because the company that published the game, TSR, was going horribly horribly bankrupt and was clutching at straws at stay financially afloat (there's that meta-concern again!), ... but this process continued in the game's third edition (in fact the "d20 system" on which 3rd edition D&D was based became so prolific that it's hard to find a game that wasn't given an attempted conversion into d20, sort of like if somehow Crysis 3 would be a smash hit and everybody starts hopping on the CryEngine for their sequels instead of whatever engine they were using before) ... and the fourth edition ... and in fact is known to be such a problem that the game's designers are specifically trying to address "reducing rules bloat" in the fifth revision of the game all these years later.
So, what does this have to do with walking with a limp? Basically, walking with a limp takes space. Getting more damage when you're shot in the head takes space. More realistic damage models, by virtue of being more complicated, take more space. If you want to make a game that doesn't overflow into bloated land, and thus remains in the territory of "good", you need to cut other things to make space for this complex realism. This is why a game like ARMA II really doesn't appeal to most people, because even though it made some compromises (for instance its flight and vehicle models aren't particularly simulationist even compared to something like Battlefield 3, which is known to be an arcade style shooter not unlike Call of Duty, just with bigger maps and vehicles and some other fancy widgets tacked on) its core gameplay is still fairly dense and complicated because reality is fairly dense and complicated and that's what it is attempting to portray, a fictitious reality simulator.
Even in the realm of simulation games, then, there is no "everything simulator". There's a train simulator, there's a plane simulator, there's even a "mostly infantry combat with some vehicles and stuff thrown in there" simulator (the aforementioned ARMA II), but there's no "everything simulator" because there isn't enough room in a design paradigm to simulate everything.
So, and this is the end I promise, back to your question. Why are there no games that use injuries instead of a health system? Because stripping injuries from the game leaves the design space less cluttered and makes room for other more important core features that would be distracted (and thus after a fashion detracted) from if you included realistic injury models. Your given Call of Duty clone isn't concerned with the slow methodical gameplay that injury modelling is a large part of, and therefore they have no reason to clutter up their game by including it. They could, make no mistake. Call of Duty has an enormous budget and some of the most talented game designers on the planet working on it... which is precisely why they don't even though they could.
So, back to me. I, like you, would love to see a more realistic injury model in a game. I'd love "Realistic Body Armor: The Game". But... that's exactly what it would be, and make no mistake. The game would be about having realistic body armor because that eats so much of the design space, especially since it's ground nobody's really trod on before so it'd take more effort (thus opening us back up to those meta-concerns again). It wouldn't be about a lot of other things because, again, there's no space for that. In my head I'm having a hard time taking the concept beyond "well, it's like Counterstrike, but the guns are like in Receiver and the body armor is realistic". So, basically, the reason that more games don't have more realistic damage models, even though they could, is because it unnecessarily clutters a design space that has no use for such a mechanism. Unless those injuries further the archetype the game is trying to promote? Basically wasted space.
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