I hear what you’re saying, and certainly don’t think that the shorthand of medkits and such should be banished from the realm of game design. That would prove ruinous to many of the forms of gameplay we currently enjoy. But if you want to make games with true human drama, I don’t see how you can do so if you break the player’s expectations of what is reality. And I believe those expectations are forgiving and elastic, but there are limits. BioShock is a shooter, but many of us appreciated it for its dramatic power. As a shooter, the game is fine and you don’t need to change a thing. But as a drama, those conventions diminish the potency. For example, I felt that game’s reality was weakened with every bullet, and there were many, that pierced my body without killing or seriously injuring me. That’s pretty standard fair in a shooter, but each hit reminded me that I was not an actual human being trying to protect his fragile body in a brutal environment. Each hit reminded me I was playing a “game.”

Maybe the issue isn’t changing what games are now, because games now are predominantly about the physical activities that take place in between the story elements. And that’s fine, because we’re still stumbling around trying to get better at this interactive storytelling thing. But if you want to make a game that could be considered a great character piece, well, maybe you have to drop the 30 hours of combat with 15 modifiable weapons. Maybe getting shot or stabbed is the rare, catastrophic event that you hope never happens to you. Like in real life.

Hmm, that would make for nice, dramatic stopping point, but I do still want to comment on Assassin’s Creed. I like what I’m hearing about the game’s setup. The memory blocks are a good way of controlling where the player can go and when. I also like that you don’t preserve your health so much as your connection with the virtual world. I appreciate when a game’s world is cohesive from top to bottom. That said, I do have concerns about game designers being forced to create “clever” explanations of the realities presented in their game spaces. It feels like they are making consolations for our medium’s limitations. The genetic memories angle works great, but what if you want to make a cohesive game that actually does take place in the past? I guess you can’t because now it doesn’t make sense if you artificially limit where the player can go. Now death should mean the story ends. It’s a difficult problem to tackle if you want to build something that is just that little bit more than a “game” (it strikes me as unfortunate that we don’t have a different but similar term for games with slightly higher aspirations, not unlike the commonly accepted distinction between a “film” and a “movie”).

To me, the cure is worse than disease in that game – the pseudoscience goofiness ended up distracting me even more than a health bar would have. Look at the different assumptions you have to make for each to “work”:

Health/alignment bar:
Assume that someone is aware of his health and can roughly quantify it.
Accept the conceit that it can be visible as a bar across the screen.

Sync bar:
Assume that memories can be stored in DNA.
Assume that there is a way to access these.
Assume that these memories can be interacted with in real time.
Assume that the identity of a random bartender is discovered as the descendant of a particular figure.
Assume that this figure held some information which is of use to some organization.
Assume that this organization is still active in the present day.
Assume that the quality of a memory, or indeed which memories can be unearthed from the DNA, is dependent on the mind(even though it’s buried in the DNA chemically if at all – why need a brain?).
Assume that the level of attachment that a mind interacting with a memory has to the memory itself can be quantified and represented as a bar.

It’s crazy! You -still- need a “health bar”, only now it’s a “bar that tracks synchronization with the genetic memory of a coincidental ancestor thanks to this fancy machine that was invented somehow”; you still need a ’stage select’, only instead of “hey boss, give me this mission” it’s “hey DNA, give us a memory, but not too significant a one or I won’t be able to handle it”.

I would have been enthralled by this game if I could have seen my wounds with blood and fabric tears on the model(or with a health bar, even!), if I could have seen my adherence to the Code with some abstract measure like “How far my hood has slipped off”, if I could have wandered around the headquarters or to the mailbox and picked up information organically. But after the tutorial and its misty sci-fi swooshiness I haven’t been able to pick it up again.

Maybe I’m just incompatible with this particular sci-fi approach – but I found it so off-putting.

It’s too big a pill to swallow for a disease I didn’t find that irksome to begin with.