On Survival Games and the Balancing Act of Protagonist Babysitting

Tacked on hunger and thirst meters with no real tangible gameplay value are threatening the design and continuing success of games in the survival genre. In this post I attempt to show examples of good and bad implementation of the practice of so-called 'protagonist-babysitting', and discuss possible ways to continue improving on and innovating in an over-saturated survival game market. 

Not long ago, I watched an interesting video by Jim Sterling, an entertaining and unique YouTube game journalist with some fascinating insights into some of videogames’ most prevalent modern tropes. The video in question, a rant on the trend of ‘protagonist babystitting’, raised some interesting thoughts.

For the uninitiated, ‘protagonist babysitting’ is the practice of tracking a videogame character’s needs in arbitrary bars such as ‘hunger and ‘thirst’, and having such bars become essentially timers until the player is to feed himself. If you’re thinking about The Sims, you’re not far off the mark, except in a lot of modern games, particularly those where the themes are centred on survival, give you direct control over the character you are babysitting.

At its best, protagonist babysitting can reinforce an important theme of survival gameplay and could offer greater immersion into the gruelling nature of survival in a hostile environment. On the other hand, at its worst, it is a shameless example of unoriginal thinking as developers attempt to be on trend by pasting in hunger bars where they are not needed in the interest of simply having something that other popular games have.

While games like Minecraft and Don’t Starve can get away with their protagonist babysitting mechanics, thanks to their status as early trend-setters in the survival genre, I would say the implementation of the hunger bar is still a better implementation than some more recent survival games. 

In Minecraft, the meter is basically a timer that counts down until you need to eat; however this issue is mitigated somewhat by the gameplay integration of the meter; once it has been depleted enough the player is significantly slowed and unable to sprint, and when the bar is full, health is slowly regenerated. Using such mechanics as a way to gain power-ups through positive reinforcement is one way that I feel makes the balancing act of using a hunger meter in a survival game work better, while at the same time being more immersive as it makes sense that one’s strength would be diminished when suffering from starvation. 

Don’t Starve’s implementation is, on the other hand, even more acceptable, because the whole game is centred around the theme of managing hunger in a hostile environment, and so it makes sense that the hunger bar would be an ever present threat in such a game. However, an even better innovation comes from the fact that there are craftable items that can slow the depletion of the hunger bar, giving further freedom to the player to reduce the looming threat of starvation.

I think that what these examples show is the importance of integrating a hunger bar into the gameplay itself, not just having it as an additional meter to which the player should be paying attention. In the aforementioned early survival games, the hunger meter offers tangible gameplay benefits that help the player survive rather than just being a babysitting requirement that will kill the player if they ignore it.

A bad example of this takes place in Subnautica. While I truly love the game for being a unique and enjoyable spin on a tired-out genre with its focus on biology, underwater tech and base building, it is difficult to defend the hunger and thirst meters in the game.

My first complaint is that the bars offer no tangible benefit or restriction to the player in gameplay terms, except for simply killing the player if they are allowed to deplete completely, meaning that the meter is completely arbitrary and not integrated into the gameplay whatsoever. Immediately, player engagement with these bars feel simply like they are satisfying an arbitrary complaint set upon them for no real reason beyond ‘other survival and crafting games have this’. The frustrating thing is, it would be so easy to enable some kind of mechanical change as a result of starvation, such as tying swimming speed to how close the hunger bar is to 100%, or even setting gameplay benefits to eating and drinking regularly, such as being able to see further in the water (which I think would be an excellent benefit considering the limited draw distance that comes from setting the majority of the game underwater).

My second complaint with the implementation of protagonist baby-sitting in Subnautica is that it tears the player right away from some of the best aspects of the game, where you are exploring deep underwater cave systems and becoming truly immersed in its excellent sense of place and exploration, suddenly there’s this annoying little beeping noise to remind you that it’s time to eat, which usually requires tearing yourself away from your beautiful surroundings to go back to base to cook food, as while you can gather and eat food in its raw form, it really only works as a temporary solution to help the player’s meter last a few more moments so they have time to get back to base. This is further exacerbated by the fact that drinkable water is impossible to craft without using a fabricator. In this case, the hunger and thirst meters seem to just take the form of padding, to make the player take longer to gather resources explore around the map, which is a shame because it is astonishingly beautiful.

Perhaps the previous complaint, however, could have been justified as simply an inevitable issue given the game’s status as a survival game, but my third complaint is what propels the issue into a real problem; the meters simply deplete too fast. Using a protagonist-babysitting model is a difficult balancing act to be sure, because if hunger depletion is set too slow, then the game’s difficulty is set too low and integration of the mechanic with the gameplay systems becomes more difficult, because unless there is a very significant benefit of constantly feeding your player when not needed, most players would be content to ignore the bar until they are absolutely desperate. On the other hand, setting hunger depletion too fast, as it is in Subnautica, gives the player a sense of being pestered by the protagonist. You truly do get a sense of artificial babysitting, not unlike an actual baby constantly crying for something, be it food, nappy changes or attention. We want our games to be fun, not more stressful than looking after a constantly crying baby, after all.

I think that Subnautica, for all its strengths, represents a poor implementation of the hunger and thirst bars, simply because no real gameplay consequences or benefits seem to come from keeping the meters topped up, apart from death from neglecting them for too long, and because the protagonist-babysitting model tears away players from the really good parts of the game as what feels like a needless distraction, which is made worse by the meters depleting so quickly that it just feels like the player is being pestered by a real life baby for arbitrary reasons. It is a shame, because Subnautica otherwise is an excellent and enjoyable game. However, I think that due to its status as an Early Access game, as development continues this issue may be addressed in a satisfactory way, and I only hope that the developers of Subnautica will see the negative attention that is coming to the protagonist-babysitting model as more and more mainstream games tack it onto their gameplay as an afterthought, so that they can make this change before the game is ready for full release.

The most important thing about protagonist babysitting however is not that it is always bad, but it is a balancing act, much like any other creative choice in game design. If the survival game genre is to continue going from strength to strength, developers must be careful to set this balance just right so that their games aren’t accused of simply having a tacked-on survival element for the sake of it. I think that the way ahead is to look at what early adopters of the trend have and haven’t done in their implementation and trying to come up with innovative ways to make the player feel less like they are babysitting and more like they are engaging with a hostile environment in a desperate fight to survive.