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This is the first in a series of articles exploring the origin, composition, and evolution of some of the more common elements that make up the modern video game. Health systems are a long-standing component of video games. Over the years, health has been represented as a number, a colored bar, a sequence of bars, or a number of heart icons. Health starts out at a fixed value, and decreases as the player takes damage, until the player is out of health and dies. There are also typically health pick-ups, like med-kits, that a player can encounter that will restore a portion of their health by a fixed amount. How did these health systems come about?

Health systems in video games most likely originated from the hit point system developed by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax for their wildly popular pen-and-paper RPG: Dungeons And Dragons. It is not difficult to imagine this system being adopted by a RPG video game and from there, making its way into other video game genres.

Over time, many video games have moved away from this basic numerical representation of health, in favor of more graphical representations, like the health meter. More recently, standard health replenishment by way of pick-ups has been phased out in many games in favor of regenerating health that is typically but not necessarily represented in ways other than meter form. This transition likely occurred for several different reasons.

Traditional health systems like the health meter can make balancing a series of encounters in a level much more difficult. Game designers need to have a decent idea of what health the player is at when they start an encounter; otherwise they risk making the encounter too difficult. Standard health systems can also lead to scenarios where the player, almost by accident, barely survives an encounter, leaving them with extremely low health. Surviving this encounter might trigger a checkpoint or an auto save. Unless there is a health pickup before the next fight, the player will have to perform extraordinarily well to survive fights until the next health pickup is found. This can disrupt the difficulty curve, and frustrate players, who may be forced to load earlier saves before the initial encounter they barely survived.

However, regenerating health has created its own share of problems. It can make games too easy in some cases, where players regenerating health can power through sections they might otherwise have had to approach cautiously. These regenerating health systems are also often accompanied by a haze effect on the screen when a player’s health is low. In multiplayer scenarios, this haze effect can reduce combat to a game of who-ambushed-who, because whoever gets the first shot in will trigger the other player’s haze effect, making it impossible for them to react.

Even more recently, a hybrid of traditional and regenerating health systems has emerged. Players have regenerating health, but only up to specific points. For example, in Halo: Reach, players have shields that regenerate to full, and health that regenerates full, half, or fifteen percent, based on the damage a player has taken. This ensures that players will always have a set minimum health they will be at after an combat encounter ends, but preserves some of the more useful aspects of traditional health systems, such as better player awareness of their own health.

Game mechanics like health are constantly changing, and it’s important to consider where they are, and where they are going.

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