If you’ve played Bioshock, you’re probably familiar with the vita-chamber. The first time you keel over dead in the underwater dystopia of Rapture, you’re instantly resurrected in said chamber with all your inventory and half a bar of health.

It’s a little bit different from a continue in other games. Instead of starting over from a checkpoint, you burst forth on whatever enemy just killed you, probably still hurting from the fight. If this surprised adversary manages to put you down again, you’ll just come back again as many times as it takes.

We’re well past the 8-bit days of getting X number of lives in a game before you have to start over from the beginning, but this is pretty drastic. In fact, many players took the unusual step of purposefully making the game more difficult for themselves by manually reloading from the last checkpoint whenever they were resurrected.

Why distaste for the vita-chambers? There’s a theory of gaming out there that the experience of “fun” comes from failure, allowing the player to learn in a safe environment without having to face real-world consequences. I’m not sure that’s the whole story, but it would explain why the vita-chambers feel so cheap.

The vita-chamber removes the failure, allowing you to overwhelm obstacles by simply piling them under your various dead bodies. It robs you of a sense of accomplishment when you do overcome whatever obstacle it is that killed you the first time. There’s no telling if you actually learned anything the second or third time around, because you started at a drastic advantage when you got a free half-bar of health and your opponent got nothing.

I get the sense there was some kind of additional penalty for using the chambers at some point; perhaps some kind of limited number of uses before you had to go back to a reload. Little Big Planet uses this sort of recharging pool of lives. The chambers are actually a plot point, so they were clearly part of the core design. They might have been unlimited use from the initial conception on, but I kind of doubt it.

I’m hoping to get Ken Levine in here some day for an interview, and if I do, I want to ask him what the thought process behind the vita-chambers was. In the meantime, 2K Boston saw fit to patch a hard mode into the game that turns off the infinite clone tanks if you so choose.

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