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Death is a tricky concept to address in games, when another 'go' and a new life is only a restart away. It's even trickier in multiplayer games, where respawning is built into the architecture of play. Yet indie studio Vogelsap is attempting to tackle mortality in games in a very final way -- its upcoming game The Flock will itself eventually 'die'.

Described as an "first-person asymmetrical multiplayer horror game", The Flock will cast players as members of a tragic race, now the dominant race on a devastated Earth but still doomed to extinction. Gameplay sees players drawn to a mysterious "Light Artifact", which transforms the first to find it into the Carrier, hunted by the others desperate to seize its power -- a kind of Uplink played out in light and shadow, the Flock vulnerable to but endlessly attracted to the Artifact.


The twist comes when players start dying. Each virtual life lost brings the overall population down. When that figure is depleted and the Flock are effectively extinct, the game will be removed from sale, and only those still part of the world will be able to participate in the climactic finale to the greater narrative. After that, the game ends and will never be playable again. "Apart from it being interpreted as a business model, it's actually more about creating an authentic experience that's going to be one-of-a-kind. We aspire to write history, players can be a part of that," Jeroen van Hasselt, creative director and game designer at Vogelsap tells WIRED.co.uk.

The game began development back in 2012, when van Hasselt was studying at Utrecht University of the Arts. A brainstorming session yielded ideas of playing with light and dark, which snowballed into a bigger multiplayer experience. "We were thinking about a visible way to anticipate each other's moves," van Hasselt says. "Out of this came the idea to use light to visualise where you are looking. Now, the light needed to have meaning and power, so what if you had to get to the person with the light, but are not allowed to move in the light? We decided to start building an asymmetrical online multiplayer game out of it."

The idea to self-destruct the game came from observations of and frustrations with online gaming communities, which typically diminish over time. "The extinction theme is part of The Flock and its gameplay and lore," says van Hasselt. "However it's also bigger than the game itself. I think there's also a theme in it that's about the dying population of players in multiplayer games in general. It was only when we tried to come up with a solution for a multiplayer games' often anticlimactic ending that both ideas clicked. That’s how the population idea came to life."


Although the very concept of a game that renders itself unplayable at an indeterminate point in the future may sound like commercial suicide, to van Hasselt it's more about creating something intangible and precious to gamers. "On a personal level I cherish experiences and memories worth telling, more than things and stuff to own," he says, "but I also believe the experience of The Flock will be better for it." "This is a game that's designed to be immersive, tense, scary and unconventional. These things don't last unfortunately. The Flock’s unadulterated and pure form will only live from release until the end. I get that this means the game won't be for everyone, so we want to be very transparent and explicit about what we're doing. We'll have to see how people will receive our approach, but that we're here to give people a thrilling, one-of-a-kind experience that they can choose to be a part of already excites me!"

The Flock's concept is also a curious one when the gaming community is seeing increasing efforts to preserve video games in the same way movies and books are. It's something van Hasselt is aware of, and despite the planned finality of Vogelsap's work here he teases "a solution" to "be revealed in due time".

How long The Flock will run after it launches on PC later in 2015 is also unknown, though the initial population number will be "substantial". Then again, there's something almost poetic about the idea of playing a game exploring death and extinction, and not knowing exactly when the end will come.