Prince of Persia's Elika redefines "dying" in a videogame

Ubisoft's new "Prince of Persia" introduces a metaphysical question we don't think about very often: What does it mean to die in a videogame?

"Prince of Persia" is the rare action/adventure videogame in which the main character simply can't die (maybe the first that doesn't involve time control or "experience points" that can be lost?). Nobody really dies in most videogames in the strictest sense of the word, since they always re-appear a few seconds later (or a few minutes in the case of "Too Human," but I digress). But by the rules of the in-game narrative, they have died, and then essentially time re-starts at the last checkpoint.

In "Prince of Persia," the rules are different. The eponymous hero has a partner, Elika, a princess who's essentially a bohemian hipster with magic powers (I imagine that if she wasn't a princess, she'd sell handmade jewelry in an open-air market, volunteer at a community garden, and organize Kucinich phone banks). Every time the Prince makes a potentially fatal mistake by falling, or getting his ass kicked in a fight, she saves him, essentially doing everything we're used to in a checkpoint system except rewinding time and interrupting the narrative.

Some critics think this makes the game too easy. "Prince of Persia is one of the least frustrating games ever, because you can't die," Chris Kohler wrote in Wired. "[The designers] have eliminated the lows, but also the highs. It is free of frustration, but it is also free of joy."

As others have noted, though, Elika is really just a new reset mechanic. And the fact that it's easy (I agree with Kohler about that, but it didn't really bother me, for reasons explained in my review) is not inherent to the mechanic. There's no reason Elika couldn't drop the Prince off at a smaller number of checkpoints, spaced further apart, than the most recent spot where he stood still. In fights, she could easily restore more health to the enemy when saving the Prince from his imminent doom.

Narratively speaking, Elika solves a major problem inherent to most videogames: They don't explain how characters come back to life after dying. Why is it that Master Chief and Marcus and Nathan Hale are reborn, and time rewinds, after they die? When I was playing "Left 4 Dead" last night, how is it that I re-appeared in a closet a few minutes after getting clawed to death by zombies? Is there some kind of Hindu reincarnation thing going on? Perhaps Tim from "Braid" has been secretly controlling time in every videogame?

We don't ask, because we accept that the gameplay convenience is more important than narrative consistency. When the "Gears of War" movie comes out, I doubt we'll see any characters die and then the plot re-start at a checkpoint a few minutes earlier in the film. We wouldn't accept that because, of course, narrative consistency is of paramount importance in that medium (unless Michael Bay is directing).

"Prince of Persia" takes videogames pushes the art form by confronting this issue and presenting an elegant solution. But in doing so, it introduces a new problem: In order for Elika to be able to save the Prince from situations where he can't save himself, she needs to be more powerful than him. Which forces players to ask two questions: If she can do all this stuff, why is the Prince -- and I, as the person controlling him -- bothering to try so hard? And why does Elika even need him in the first place?

Most of "Prince of Persia" is spent running, swinging, jumping, etc. through environments to collect "light seeds" and/or get to the boss character. But if Elika can fly anywhere at anytime (go ahead and die 20 times in a row; she doesn't even get winded), it seems like she could just fly him there and save the us all the headache of running along walls and shimmying up and down those poles.

Combat is a bit more problematic. The implications in the game seems to be that Elika needs the Prince to help fight the baddies. But that's hard to buy. Many of the Prince's most powerful moves involve Elika jumping in with some magic. And, just as with him falling, she never seems to run out of power to push the enemy off the Prince and restore his health when he's about to get the whipping that, as anyone who has listened to his lame quips knows, he kinda deserves. I have a feeling that with a little more confidence, Elika could have handled every challenge in "Prince of Persia" on her own.

Of course then the game would have been called "Elika," not "Prince of Persia," and I doubt Ubisoft would have given it the greenlight.

But it leaves me asking: Is it possible to have a "dying" mechanic in a videogame that doesn't introduce as many narrative problems as it solves?