Execution

By: Derek Yu

On: May 19th, 2008

Execution

Execution is a short, experimental game from Jesse Venbrux about the consequences of one’s actions. I’ll leave the discourse for the comments (don’t read them if you don’t want to be spoiled).

(Source: Jared, via Puppy Buckets)

Posted in Freeware, Social Impact, Windows | Tags: JesseVenbrux

Derek

The game doesn’t leave anything in your registry, so no worries.

Reminds me of how Hideo Kojima once said he wanted to make a game where the disc destroyed itself if you lost.
xerus

What the fuck…
basro

I lost of course!

I knew that doing that would make me loose, but I couldnt figure out what else I could do :P

>>Reminds me of how Hideo Kojima once said he wanted to make a game where the disc destroyed itself if you lost.

Someone should make a MMORPG that does that when you die ;O
Indian Gamer

I won.
Predictable.
Indian Gamer

Jesse Venbrux is a miserable pile of secrets.
trav

aww, I lost. Now I want to know how to re-start it. Deleting the exe didn’t work, it’s not in my registry, that leaves either something in memory, or something over the internets. Unless he’s cluttering up my file system, but surely he wouldn’t be doing that
This is slightly more of a spoiler than some other comments

Given the current climate in gaming, I think it’s fairly eloquent and commendable to encourage players to exercise their prerogative to quit.
trav

oop found it, yaaay
Zeno

I was honestly just pissed that his shadow doesn’t move with respect to your spotlight.
http://www.midgaardstudios.com/ George

That was a brilliant execution (har!) of a clever idea. I too would like to know what would’ve happened if I hadn’t given in to curiosity and lost.

Steel Battalion for the Xbox had an eject button, and if you didn’t press it in time, the destruction of your mecha-tank would wipe out your save file.

There’s a game on YoYo called Lab 14 that similarly rewards judicious quitting, among other “outside the box” puzzle-solving.
xerus

So, the only thing I tried was trying to shoot like the rope or something, but it seems if your crosshair is over any part of his body and you fire, then he dies, which kinda sucks.
Hostile

This game taught me that if I try to free a man who is tied up, hit detection will get the best of me and I will end up killing him(while also finding out that my sniper rifle was an automatic firearm of some kind).

I have learned a valuable lesson.
DoctorAnus

Courageous.
juv3nal

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?
http://www.sophiehoulden.com GirlFlash

I won first time!

but then I’m working on a game trying to trick the player into thinking the only solution to the game is to exit, so I kind of saw it coming, the choice is in playing on or not.

I do like the mechanic alot, and it says alot that it just doesent occour to alot of people that to try quitting before shooting.

also I like how it teaches people who tried to give freedom by shooting the ropes, the aim was right, but the method wont work. guns never made anyone free :)
shinygerbil

the guy looks like he has no feet.

why would you bury the feet?

NO FEET
Derek

@shinygerbil:

Because he was drawn by Rob Liefeld LOL.
Advenith

Somebody earlier mentioned an MMORPG where there’s real consequences for loss. Surprisingly, this has been done. Shaiya (one of those supported-through-item-sale games) deletes your character if you die on the highest difficulty. I haven’t really played too much, though. It’s a little too WOW-ish for my tastes.
Anarkex

The man stood in darkness, terrified. He had no idea how long it had been. He likely had been there forever. He saw motion in front of him, but it was probably just a tumbleweed. Tumbleweeds often rolled in from the darkness on his right into the darkness on his left. There was a time when he called out to them, thinking they could be someone coming to save him, but now he hardly noticed them. He remembered a time when he struggled against his restraints, the crude rope that dug into his pale skin, if only to catch a glimpse of the only other certainty in his world: the wall that rose up behind him like a god. Sometimes he could close his eyes and forget about everything, the ropes, the wall, the darkness…even the cold wind that blew constantly over his entire body, chilling him to the bone. But there was nothing else to occupy his mind. No memories, no dreams. Even sleep never would grace his tired body. And so he waited. Waited for the bullet that would finally take him away.

Even though I lost, and nothing can ever change that…

He won.
Pyabo

Where’s The Feet?!?

Sorry, meme from another site.

Meh. Calling this an “experimental game” is a bit of stretch.
difficultman

I’m not so sure that it was the right thing to let this guy rot in prison on the taxpayer’s dollar while contributing nothing to society for the rest of his life.
Shih Tzu

Hmm.

Actually, I think this is exactly the wrong approach to

OK, I just tried it again. That’s actually kind of neat, the consistency aspect. I was going to say that giving the player a choice and then slapping their hand when they do the thing you think is bad is the least persuasive kind of game design. It’s the equivalent of a game that goes, say, “Support national health care? Y/N” and then if you pick Yes it goes “OK, the country dies. Now do you understand why it is a bad idea?” When the designer inserts their own value judgment instead of letting the player explore the consequences of their actions within the defined ruleset of the game, it’s just didacticism, and because the designer controls all, it loses any meaning. It’s the equivalent of a soapbox novel where one character functions as the author’s mouthpiece, while all the other characters helpfully set up straw-man arguments for the mouthpiece to knock down for page after page.

I like the way the guy stays dead forever. I just think it would be a much, much more interesting game without all the authorial injections telling me whether I won or lost.
Erik

Shih Tzu: I agree

Now I will try this game on my friends…
Bezzy

I think that you probably ought to be beaten severely for not shooting the guy. That’s what’d happen in a real life firing squad situation.

Actually, no. In a real firing squad, there’s only 1 bullet and n blanks, and n+1 riflemen, so that you don’t know if it’s your bullet which hit.

Maybe the beat-up thing would only happen in one of those sandy places.

I almost agree with Shih Tzu – in an interactive medium, every player ought to be able to express their own opinion without being told up front “no you’re not allowed to kill the hostages: FISSION MAILED!”, however, how that opinion is dealt with IS the agency of the designer, so whether you get a damn good dressing down because of killing the hostages, or you become an outlaw, and the police are after YOU now, that’s up to the designer – there’s no way around that level of didactic response.

In the same way that you can never have truly objective television documentaries, games which try to portray real world systems are never going to be perfect without perfectly simulating existence, which isn’t possible. Therefore, these systems are always abstractions, and it’s the designer who is always going to have their own agendaic/didactic streak about how important different factors are – hence Chris Crawford allowing you to set the monetary worth of human life before you start a game of Balance of Power (I think?).

There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s implicit in any game.

But if you’re attacking the message itself (i.e. morality is subjective, and this is a very western/liberal form of morality being portrayed), then you’re well within your rights to.
Deepsleeper

The title of the game is “Execution”.

I’m an executioner.

I’m getting paid, presumably, to execute people.

Therefore, shooting this guy is not the losing move.
Prio

> Somebody earlier mentioned an MMORPG where thereâ€™s real consequences for loss. Surprisingly, this has been done. Shaiya (one of those supported-through-item-sale games) deletes your character if you die on the highest difficulty.

Does no one remember Diablo? :P The Diablo games resembled mmorpgs in many ways when played online (they were like the non-PvP sections of Guild Wars). When played in “hardcore” mode, death wiped your character, period dot. Most of the people who played hardcore, incidentally, were widely known for being very polite, friendly, intelligent, and mature. Rather unusual for an MMO.
Richard

)-: What’s wrong with my computer I can’t extract any of Jesse Venbrux’s games
KKairos

So if it’s not storing crap in my registry, where is it storing crap?

Of course I’d love to “win” but I also don’t like programs putting things on my computer that I don’t know how to erase, so it’d be really helpful if someone knew how to erase/undo whatever the heck this game did do, especially if it involved putting something in my system or giving some website information about my system or whatever (forgive my obvious lack of knowledge of whatever the heck it did.)
KKairos

Oh yeah, and the game is brilliant.
Anonybomb

Phew, this game is booooring. I wish games would stop trying to impact everyones lives with ridiculous messages, and just go back to being fun.
rndll

I lost even though I ended the suffering of that man. Weird game.
muku

Very interesting. I won the first time through.

Of course, then I went back and shot the poor bugger, just to see what it would be like.

I actually find this more compelling than Passage or that other game-as-art (whose name I can’t recall) by the same guy. The game mechanics are as stripped down as they can be, but it still has a certain Karoshi-like “think outside the box” feel to it.

Plus I found it hilarious that people thought they could save him by shooting the rope. Who are you, “Kevin” Hood? :D
http://www.venbrux.com Jesse

Hey everyone,

I did not expect this to show up at TIGsource really, still great though. :)

The “experiment” really is just the fact that your actions have staying consequences. I don’t see it as an “art game” personally, and I didn’t want to spread a message or anything, but it’s completely udnerstandable that players look for one. Maybe I did want to do that subconciously though :P

If you’re worried about it storing data, no worries. All I do is use standard built in GM functions; it stores as much as any other GM-made game…
Lurk

The problem is, there is not enough emotional involvement with the character to make the decision a valid one. For example, what if you knew the guy tied up to the post was a cannibalistic child molester-murderer who left 47 young ones (including your own daughter, the agonizing death of which he left on twenty 60 minutes tapes) buried under his house? What if he was’nt tied to a post, but walking out of court, where he was acquited because of his family’s ties to high-society? Then, the moral choice becomes a bit harder. But nameless footless guy (who does’nt move or plead, so you don’t even know if he’s alive, and his veins are linked with his ropes) has very little going for him in terms of guilt-inducing death.
If you want to look into your own moral sense, this
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/index2.html
is very interesting. And helpful to research, if you fill it correctly.
BigBossSNK

Win or loss have no meaning in this game.

If I kill the digital character, I “lose”. If I exit, I “win”.
Win or loss are empty, arbitrary notions here, with no consequences.
BigBossSNK

Forgot to mention, if you really want your executions to matter or not, play GTA4.
Chris

This isn’t very nice to curious people. I “won” the first time, but wanted to see the other ending, so I went back in and “lost”. Now I want to figure out how to reset it, not out of guilt, but because I want to know what he did. Very irritating.
raigan

i really liked the use of persistent state, it totally caught me off-guard, great idea!
josh g.

Non-violence FTW!
santa’s little elf

For those who believe in second chances;

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareGame MakerScores
UnexplainedDemonArm

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Which is how I understood Shadow of the Colossus.
BenH

I kept shooting him, eventually money started coming out of my computer!
Moose

I’m very glad I read this thread before downloading the game. Perhaps you could warn in the top post that this game installs secret data? I’m especially bothered that apparantly, deleting the .EXE file “doesn’t work”.
BigBossSNK

“I kept shooting him, eventually money started coming out of my computer!”

Then your PC got turned into a DS. You know, cause IT PRINTS MONEY!!!
idiotmeat

‘Iâ€™m very glad I read this thread before downloading the game. Perhaps you could warn in the top post that this game installs secret data? Iâ€™m especially bothered that apparantly, deleting the .EXE file â€œdoesnâ€™t workâ€.’

The game does not install secret data. It uses Game Maker’s registry entries. Games do it all the time.
Binderbender

I’m with BigBossSNK, win and lose are completely meaningless in this game. The only real choice you can make is to kill the man. Anything else is merely a stall. If you open the game again after you “win,” something should have changed.

Imagine if the man tied to the stake actually did something if you left him alive. The next time you turn on the game, he’s gone on and killed a guard. The next time, he’s defused a bomb. The next time, he’s getting married. The next time, he’s beating his kid. A mix of good and bad things, but you have the option to kill him at any time. You can decide if you don’t like what he’s doing, or what you think he might do. Or you can take a non-involved approach, and let him go about his business. You could even randomize his actions. Some people you see are horrible people, some are saints. Most do good and bad.

I think you could keep the idea of “actions have consequences” if you got a new person, say, every day. If you kill him, he’s dead til someone new shows up tomorrow. Or you can watch him for a day.

I think we can all agree that if we woke up one morning on a hillside with a rifle in our hands, our first thought would NOT be ‘shoot the man at the bottom of the hill.’ In this game, though, the only other option is to walk away, which ends the game just as quickly. Nothing ever changes unless you shoot the man. It’s like an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Moose

> The game does not install secret
> data. It uses Game Makerâ€™s registry
> entries. Games do it all the time.

I’m more concerned about the game preventing you from deleting it.
muku

“Iâ€™m more concerned about the game preventing you from deleting it.”

You miss the point. Every GM game that uses a highscore table will leave that kind of information on your PC, and I haven’t seen one that gives you the option to wipe that data. In fact, just about every Windows program stores data in the registry, and a lot don’t clean up after themselves properly even if you uninstall them. Just delete the key from HKEYCURRENTUSERSoftwareGame MakerScores and get over it already.
Charlie Mk III

At first, I thought this was a clever idea. And then I realized that I hated it. And I hate all you people who say it teaches the player anything, because it doesn’t. It’s not social commentary, either.

You have cross-hairs, and you have a prisoner. The game is called execution. The player is going to move the cross-hairs over the person and click. The structure of the game tells us to do that. So we lose. Alright. And we come back into the game and we’ve still lost. Okay. I can get behind that. But I didn’t learn anything. It doesn’t teach me that killing in games is wrong. If the person was to be hanged, and we could shoot the rope instead, maybe. But here the only option is to kill the person. And don’t tell me that quitting is an option, because it’s not. That’s not the game. The game is “shoot the prisoner” and by loading it up we agree that that’s what we are going to do.

And the message that this game is trying to get across is what, exactly? That shooting prisoners is wrong? There’s not even enough context to make that point, as the person could be any thing and anyone. Is it that video games have desensitized gamers? Maybe, but when I’m sitting in my pajamas at two in the morning and I’m told via visual clues that I am supposed to kill this person, I’m not going to ponder about video game philosophy. Doesn’t mean I’d kill someone in real life, either.

Or, to get to the obvious point, does it mean that things have consequences. That we can’t go back and re-do things. Hey. No shit. I don’t need a game to come around and tell me that every day I live is a day I don’t get back, and everything I do has repercussions far spread. This game doesn’t even show that well, as some people have mentioned. It’s man who dies. People die in real life to. I don’t need some dumbed-down murder simulator telling me that people don’t come back to life, nor do I need the hundreds of people patting themselves on the back about how clever and thought-provoking the game was.

If I wanted to play a game that evoked an emotional response, I’d play “Passage” again. But I don’t need to, because I get enough emotional response out of actually living.
muku

> You have cross-hairs, and you have a prisoner. The game is called execution. The player is going to move the cross-hairs over the person and click. The structure of the game tells us to do that. So we lose. Alright.

Really, what tells us to shoot the person is our video game conditioning. I mean, what percentage of games involves shooting at enemies in some form? I’d guess half of them would be a gross underestimate. In real life, being given a gun and being presented a tied-up person would certainly not lead you to shoot said person, no questions asked. I hope. Would it?

There are lots of people here who “won” the game, so obviously your statements aren’t universal and there *are* enough people who questioned what the game was seemingly telling them to do and looked for another way to deal with the situation. If you will, drop that entire morality concept and just see it as an interesting rejection of established game mechanics. To me, the game is a puzzle, and it gave me a certain satisfaction to see the “You won” screen.