I'm standing in front of the gutted-out Washington Monument. I look up with the sun in my eyes, and I can see all the way to the top. I decide to go in. As I near the entrance I hear a radio playing a song by the Ink Spots. As I walk past it, I pause briefly to turn the radio off. Then I think to myself, maybe those two guards at the gate were listening to this radio. So I turn it back on, and I go inside.

I enter an elevator and press a button. It ascends and deposits me at the top of the monument. I see the satellite dish I've been sent to retrieve, but glancing to my right, I notice light streaming through an opening in the wall. I walk over to it, and when I gaze outside I'm frozen by what I see: the National Mall lies in ruins - the blighted earth once a park of green grass; the dilapidated Capitol Building shattered in the distance. I shudder when I envision the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial, both out of my view, blasted beyond recognition. I flash to a memory of my 8th-grade school trip to this very spot.

I turn my back to this view and pull up my Pip-Boy to check the map. The screen is washed out and hard to read, and I can't make out the controls. Ah. It's the sun beating down on the screen. I briefly close the Pip-Boy and turn to face the south. When I return to my screen, the glare is gone and I consult my map. I'm tired and need a place to sleep.

I grab the dish and return to the base of the monument. Billie Holiday is singing on the radio. I decide to chat with the guards, but neither will offer more than a cursory sentence, and one of them is decidedly rude to me. So I return to the radio, take out my sledgehammer and smash it to smithereens. That was the plan anyway, but it turns out I can only put a dent in it. So I turn it off instead. If those guards want music, they can turn it back on themselves. Wish I could have smashed it, though. I consider lobbing a grenade at them and running, but I've got other things to do. I need to deliver this dish and find my dad.

Some of our most gifted game designers say they want to get out of our way and let us discover our own stories in their games. Doug Church calls it "abdicating authorship." Patrick Redding and Clint Hocking call it "dynamic story architecture." Steve Gaynor calls the player an "agent of chaos" and observes, "It is not about the other-- the author, the director. It is about you."

My ongoing adventure in the rubble of Washington D.C. suggests to me that these designers are half right. I'm aware of my main quest, and I track it with interest, but I'm easily distracted by people I meet and places I discover. I'm pursuing my own objectives much of the time and - without really meaning to - my existence in this world has taken on its own storytelling dimension. Call it emergent narrative or some other fancy phrase, but when I'm standing at the top of the Washington Monument and remembering when I was 13 years old, or when I'm trying to figure out how to punish those two surly guards for being rude to me, I'm immersed in things that say more about me and my avatar than about any Fallout 3 quest line. I am, in important ways, authoring my own story.

But it isn't just about me. I'm also thinking about game design. And it's here that I think Church, Hocking, et al understate the meta-experience of playing well-designed games. My first thought at the top of the Washington Monument was personal and reflective. But my second thought, arriving seconds after the first, was "Wow, what a great idea!" This moment is like a Hitchock-Deus Ex cocktail. Give me a vital reason to reach the top of an iconic American landmark and make something important happen there. But Fallout 3 turns the tables. I don't meet the enemy or fight for my life; instead, I face the world as it now exists. I've already seen devastation, but this historic vantage point shows me the vastness and the painful resonance of it. And - crucially - this only happens if I look for it. I could simply grab the dish and run to my next destination. The designers trusted me to take the time to look. "Very cool," I think. "Great idea. Thanks."

I also think about game design when the glare from the sun obscures my Pip-Boy screen. "Are you kidding me," I think. "What a terrific, realistic touch. Amazing. Well done." Then it occurs to me these designers have figured out how to transform a standard menu system interface into a device that exists physically in the world of the game. "Excellent." Then I think about Far Cry 2 and Dead Space doing similar things, and...okay, now I'm just geeking out, but you get the idea. I'm thinking about game design, and loving it.

On the other side of the coin, I also think about game design when I can't smash the radio. Why can't I smash the radio? The moment I discover this, I think about arbitrary environmental interactions and wish I wasn't thinking about them. I'd prefer to think about how to smash that radio.

When game designers surrender authorial control to the player, unexpected and extraordinary things can happen. I'm enjoying Fallout 3 immensely, even though I feel only vaguely connected to the main quest. The game creates a wide space for emergent narrative, even when it stumbles in the presentation and depiction of its characters.

But succeed or fail, my awareness of game design is omnipresent, and I like it that way. It enriches my experience of playing. The in-world experience remains my first thought, but my second thought is nearly always focused on the system, especially when that system demonstrates originality or beautiful execution. I don't think I'm the only gamer who behaves this way.

So, when Gaynor writes about video games in his insightful essay "Being There" and suggests that:

"Unlike a great film or piece of literature, they don't give the audience an admiration for the genius in someone else's work; they instead supply the potential for genuine personal experience..."

I believe it's quite possible - even desirable - to achieve both. The richness of my personal experience in Fallout 3 is undeniable; but so is my respect and admiration for the genius of its designers. In fact, my awareness and appreciation of one naturally enhances the other, all within the same experience. And that, in my view, is a wonderful thing.

Lots of us complain about the mainstream media's shallow, often infantillizing, coverage of video games. It can be discouraging to witness a flourishing art form consistently packed into the same worn-out boxes. Yes, video games make big money; yes, lots of people play them; and yes, some of them are violent.

There's more to the story, of course, and lately it's coming from an unlikely general media outlet: National Public Radio. Over the past year or so, NPR has devoted considerable airtime to reporting on video games as part of its coverage of arts and culture. These pieces vary in length and depth, but the sheer frequency of them suggests that somebody at NPR has decided to take the lead covering video games in the absence of thoughtful coverage from other broadcast outlets.

In recent weeks, NPR has reported on the music game phenomenon with stories on both Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Rather than the standard sales figures and "gee-whiz it's popular" angles, NPR has focused on the social bonding and underlying tech aspects of the games. Liane Hansen spoke to Rolling Stone reporter David Kushner who plays Rock Band with his daughters; she also interviewed Tod Machover whose team at MIT helped to develop Guitar Hero. Morning Edition reported on the Beatles Rock Band deal; and All Things Considered ran a feature piece on the evolution of video game music. And those are just the music game stories.

In the same brief period, NPR has run stories on Indie game developers, Obama ads in video games, libraries using games to woo kids, Microsoft's XNA project for game developers, teachers using games to teach kids science, coverage of Comic-Con, the Championship Gaming Series, a feature on Jonathon Blow's Braid, and three separate stories from different angles on Spore. I could list many more.

Relative to other broadcast media outlets, NPR is lapping the field with its coverage of video games. These stories are nearly always thoughtful and well-reported, if not terribly deep or analytical. Given the network's diverse national audience, this makes sense; but I do hope for more reporting along the lines of Heather Chaplin's stories for NPR on GTA IV and Braid. Chaplin understands games from a gamer's perspective, but she also knows how to convey the experience of playing these games in a clear, jargon-free manner.

So, as a blogger who has done my share of whining and finger-pointing about video game coverage in the mainstream media, I tip my hat to NPR and hope for more to come. If you agree (and you live in the USA), I encourage you to consider making a pledge to your local noncommercial, not-for-profit NPR station. When you make your pledge, tell them you appreciate their coverage of video games. Such feedback, I assure you, can make a difference.

Let's say you're interested in finding a good E-rated game (evaluated by the ESRB as appropriate for "Everyone"). Let's say you have kids who want to play video games just like like dear-old-Dad or Mom, but they're not exactly ready for Gears of War 2. Or maybe you're planning a holiday family get-together, and you don't want Uncle Bob getting a load of GTA IV and going Hillary/Lieberman on you. What to do?

Well, you may decide to rely on game reviews to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. If so, you're likely to refer to sites like GameRankings or Metacritic to quickly search through reviews. If you're especially motivated, you might turn up What They Play, a website devoted to helping parents evaluate games their kids want to play.

These are fine resources, but they will only lead you to a small fraction of the games you may wish to consider. Metacritic doesn't offer a search function that includes ESRB ratings; What They Play aims at parents, but its ad-bloated site provides little more than feature-list snapshots of games, focusing most of its coverage on helping parents make informed choices about age-appropriate content.

That leaves you with GameRankings, a helpful and easy to use review aggregator. So, you run a search on E-rated games released in the last 30 days, and you receive a grand total of two titles: Wii Music and Little Big Planet. How can this be? Nearly 50 games were released in the last 30 days for the Wii alone.

A closer look at GameRankings' default search settings reveals the answer: you are seeing only games that have received at least 20 reviews. Cutting this number in half boosts the results a bit, but you soon discover the real problem. E-rated games receive very little coverage in the print and online games media. They are, in fact, routinely ignored. Only by reducing the search criteria to 0 reviews does GameRankings deliver its bounty: 163 E-rated titles across all platforms released in the last 30 days.

Why do these games receive so little coverage? Because they're dreadful, obviously. Because they have titles like Yummy Yummy Cooking Jam, Princess Debut, and National Geographic Panda. We ignore these games because they're shovel-ware; because they're games for kids (or, worse, games for girls). We ignore them because they're bad games. Period.

But are we sure about this? How do we know? If we never really take a close look at any of these games, how can we be certain every single one is a bad game? The Fallouts, Fables, and Far Crys of the gaming world receive hundreds of reviews from a variety of sources big and small. These are eagerly anticipated, high-profile games, so perhaps they require such wide-ranging scrutiny. But the coverage disparity between these games and others that receive virtually no attention whatsoever seems hard to justify.

Would you believe me if I told you that SpongeBob SquarePants featuring Nicktoons: Globs of Doom is actually a pretty solid game? Would my wife be playing Princess Debut if Leigh Alexander hadn't gone out of her way to shine a light on it? Both of these games were almost completely ignored by the games press.

Okay, I get it. Games sites and mags must cater to their readers, and who really cares about another SpongeBob game? I wonder, however, if we ought to scrutinize our assumptions about which games deserve coverage. Do we pay attention to games that carry with them a certain amount of hype, regardless of their quality? Certainly. Do we dismiss games, especially kids games, assuming they are unworthy of our attention, regardless of their quality? Certainly.

Years ago, in my business, we routinely assigned our least capable actors to roles in children's theater. The best actors got the plum roles on the mainstage. But in recent years, we've moved away from those practices. Today, we better understand the importance of offering kids the very best we can do. They are no different from the rest of us. They respond positively to quality, and they quickly grow bored and restless with mediocrity. They are our future patrons. If we expect them to value the arts, then we must offer them something of value.

We might consider a similar approach to video games. If we want our kids - heck, if we want all of us - to enjoy quality games, we must pay attention to and promote those games that deliver quality.

I realize that far too many E-rated games are shoddy, cynical efforts to squeeze money out of the least knowledgeable segment of the game-buying public. If gamers like you and me want developers to create high-quality games for kids and families, we must begin to insist that these games deliver experiences no less compelling than the ones we expect from our T-rated and M-rated games. And when developers deliver these games, we must be sure to give them the attention they deserve.

I've written recently about my students playing through the original Fallout games and reflecting on their experiences. These assignments were intended as preparation for our segue into Fallout 3, the only game in the course we've played together, each of us for the first time. I should note that many of us haven't completed it - me included - and I have a feeling I may never know when my experience with this vast game is "complete." My track record with games like Morrowind, Oblivion, and even GTA IV would suggest the answer may be never.

Several of you asked me to follow up with a post on my students' reactions to Fallout 3, so that's what I'll do today. I'm working on my own PopMatters review of the game, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about it here too. For now, this post is all about my students' responses to the game.

As you may know, many of these students were skeptical about Fallout 3, worried about the new game tarnishing the Fallout legacy. Zealous in their recent conversion, they essentially went from Fallout-phobic to Protectors of the Fallout Realm in the span of a few weeks. They were curious about the new game, to be sure, but skeptical about Bethesda's ability to deliver a "genuine Fallout" game.

Well, that was then, and this is now. Fallout 3 is a hit. With the exception of a few students who think the game fails to innovate enough from its Oblivion roots (the "Oblivion with guns" critique), nearly all of them ate this game up with great big spoons. When I asked them to elaborate and describe the key design features or experiences that connected them to the game, they responded with some useful observations. These, according to them, are the Fallout 3 essentials:

• It delivers and sustains a real sense of peril. You never feel quite safe in this world, and the environments accentuate this feeling. Limited resources also heighten the stakes considerably. Facing a mutant with one health bar, two bullets, and no recent save file is perilous gaming at its finest.


• It encourages the player to reassess. Circumstances change quickly in Fallout 3, and you must respond. Sometimes you must change your mind or your strategies to deal with events or situations, and making the wrong choice usually has consequences. You must think things through.


• It rewards exploration and spontaneous decision-making. Discoveries in Fallout 3 aren't about finding treasure chests or buried gold (though there are places full of loot). Exploring and discovering in this game can put you way out on the edge of nowhere; and then, suddenly, a small compound appears and it feels like you actually found it. If you hadn't bothered, the game doesn't care. But if you're willing to make the effort, you'll discover all sorts of freaky people, places, and creatures - all who seem to belong in this world, not tacked on for more fetch quests.


• It's hard, but never too hard. You just have to find the best way for you. The game gives you options to play the way you want and be the kind of character you want. This is one of the reasons it feels like a true Fallout game.


• It feels unique and nostalgic at the same time. It's a Fallout game at heart, but with a modern sensibility. You can play it like a shooter (okay, it's not a great shooter) and ignore VATS if you hate messing with percentages, but if you want the true "Fallout experience," you will use VATS and turn it to your advantage.


• "It's a plausible post-apocalyptic fairy tale."

Needless to say, I've had a terrific time exploring the Fallout universe with these students. I'm grateful to them for helping me think about the games, and it's been my privilege to introduce them to these "post-apocalyptic fairy tales." Now it's time to move on. Next stop: Earthbound!

Apparently I'm a bit thick. I've been corresponding with a person who doesn't exist and promoting a blog that's really just a front for an ARG promotional scheme. You can read all about it here.

When I found out about it earlier today, I found myself sorting through a mix of reactions. As a lover of ARGs (I keep hoping somebody will seize the day with an iPhone-based trans-media game), I thought it was a brilliant little ruse. Contact a few bloggers, feign interest in their work, encourage them to check out your new blog. Voila!

I bought it hook, line, and sinker. What's more, I engaged in an exchange of emails with PixelVixen707, discussing voice acting in games, games as toys, Spore - all topics I was writing about at the time. These weren't dashed-off little messages. This was a genuine conversation with a person who told me she was passionate about games. When she mentioned she was just starting to talk up her blog, I read through some of her posts and wrote to offer her some positive feedback.

And the fact is, PixelVixen707 did some solid writing about games over on her pseudo-blog. When I linked to her here, I was in very good company. It turns out my blog pals Mitch Krpata and Chris Dahlen did the same. Regardless of the ruse, you can still find some interesting pieces on a range of topics. Somebody there knows a thing or two about games.

So okay, I got played, and I like games, and it's all in fun. Nobody was malicious or destructive. No harm, no foul. But at the risk of being a killjoy, I can't help but feel a bit peeved about it too. Someone took advantage of my willingness to be responsive and supportive of a new games blog, and I was apparently expected to read between the lines and sniff out the big joke.

Maybe I need to be more cynical, but I took the whole thing at face value and made an earnest effort to lend a hand, just as people like Leigh Alexander, Chris Dahlen, and N'Gai Croal did for me when I got started. Every blogger who maintains a separate full-time job - and that's pretty much all of us - will tell you the same thing. Time is incredibly precious. We have so little of it to spare.

I love writing The Brainy Gamer, reading other games blogs, and doing my share to nurture our burgeoning little community. But I must tell you it requires every bit of non-teaching time I can muster. I'm not complaining, honestly, because I love doing it. But I'm disappointed that PixelVixen707 never bothered to consider just how much that wasted time meant to me, and I'm not exactly thrilled about being tricked into promoting somebody's product either.

So to the folks at Smith and Tinker who perpetrated this alternate reality hoax, I say "Well played. Well played indeed." But next time, you may want to pick on somebody smarter. Jokes are never funny when you have to explain them.

Update: I'm satisfied by the cordial correspondence I've had with Rachael's "handlers" since this all blew up. I think they were trying something different, and they miscalculated a bit regarding how such an approach might affect those of us who invested ourselves in trying to help PixelVixen707. She seemed genuinely interested in some things I was writing about, and we exchanged some very pleasant emails about common interests. In the end, I think whoever wrote those emails and blog posts is for real in the sense of someone who cares about games and thoughtful conversation about them.

It's the meta part of it that got messed up, at least for me, but I'm happy with how we discussed it yesterday, and I bear no resentment or ill will. As I've written before, I like ARGs...but I think they probably work best when they're consensual, especially if I'm being asked to devote my time and energy to them.

All roads lead to realism. In the arts, it's easy to track the predictable trajectory: artists reject stylization believing they will draw us ever closer to Truth with ever closer facsimiles of reality. Heroic verse gives way to Iambic Pentameter, which surrenders to Neoclassical couplets, which yields to Romantic prose, which succumbs to Realism, followed by Naturalism...just in time for the arrival of the medium that renders all theatrical realism self-defeating: Film. That's a woefully inadequate summary of theater history, but you get the idea.

One can find similar trajectories in the other arts. It's possible, for example, to condense the history of the cinema as an inexorable movement towards verisimilitude, with nearly every technical advancement designed to serve the prime objective: fidelity to real life. The closer we get to making movies indistinguishable from life, the more believable they are. Or so say the realists.

But history is never a straight road. Punctuating all of these movements are innumerable reactions against them. In the 20th century alone, the march toward realism has been met by counter-forces such as Expressionism, Surrealism, Absurdism, the New Wave, and the Third Cinema. While these movements rarely become mainstream, their impact on the dominant modes of theater and film can easily be seen. It's impossible to disconnect a single-camera show like The Wire, for example, from its influences in New Wave, Cinema Vérité, and Italian Neo-Realism.

Narrative video games are rambling down the same road to realism, and I wonder when the inevitable crossroad will appear. Cell-shaded games like Team Fortress 2 and The Wind Waker have notably demonstrated stylistic alternatives. Mirror's Edge has a cool alternative look, and the upcoming Prince of Persia adopts a painterly visual style. But the momentum toward realism among high-profile games is unmistakable, and most major developers continue to focus their efforts and resources at discovering new ways to immerse the player in highly detailed visuals that present realistic, if often improbable, environments.

I wrote recently about the stiff, lifeless character models in Fallout 3 and suggested that they detract from the overall experience of the game. Not surprisingly, several of my astute readers commented that the road to photorealism leads to places we may not want to go, and they reminded me that I expressed such a concern about Mass Effect nearly a year ago. True dat.

But when developers deliberately choose realism as their primary design aesthetic, then we must inevitably insist that they make good on that promise. We might imagine a Fallout 3 with stylized visuals, but the fact is that Bethesda has given us what they've given us, and for most reviewers the realistic visual style of Fallout 3 is one of its assets. It's a smooth ride, for the most part, as we take in the bleak, breathtakingly bombed-out environments. But the character models and canned animations are the potholes in that road. They detract from the otherwise exhilarating ride the game delivers.

As a designer (or a film director, or a painter, or a photographer, etc.), if it's photorealism you're going for, then you must deliver believably realistic subjects. We can object to the aesthetic (and I have many times), but in the end, we meet the game at the place it's delivered to us, and we hold it accountable for the places where it fails to deliver on its own chosen aesthetic.

So where does all of this lead? If I had to venture a guess, I'd say the end of the line for video games may turn out to be Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, a game that ups the ante on realistic detail to an unprecedented degree. Facial motion capture, minute tracking of eye movements, purposely imperfect skin textures, and shaders that add never-before-seen nuance to the human face - all serve to render characters that look as lifelike as possible on a modern console (in this case, the PS3).

Will Quantic Dream deliver a trip to Uncanny Valley? Will Heavy Rain be a good game? I have no idea, but I'm personally less interested in those questions than I am in how the industry will respond to this new high water mark. Will developer X study the chinks in Heavy Rain's realistic armor in an effort to deliver an even-higher degree of realism? Will developer Y continue to tweak the PhysX engine used by Quantic Dream, squeezing even more natural movement out of it? When do we reach the end of the line?

At what point will a major developer chuck the whole photorealism schtick and build a big-budget ambitious narrative video game based on a completely different visual aesthetic? Not because it's cheaper; not so it will run on older systems; but purely because the designers believe they can do better than realism. This day is coming. History suggests it's inevitable. I say it can't come soon enough.

Last March I was contacted by Roger Travis, who teaches Classics at the University of Connecticut, about a project he had in mind that would bring together scholars from various disciplines - as well as high school teachers, students, and the broader community of gamers - to create an online center for participatory learning about video games.

The premise was simple: video games engage us on multiple levels: culturally, rhetorically, pedagogically, and otherwise. The dynamics and the effects of these engagements are worthy of collaborative study. Roger's own work, for example, examines games' relationship to Homeric epic. From his "Living Epic" course description:

I happily accepted Roger's invitation, and we were quickly joined by Jeff Howard from the University of Texas at Austin and author of Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Together, we outlined a set of goals for the project and constructed a preliminary proposal for funding. Since then, others have joined us as Fellows with expertise in literature, technology, drama, education, communication, and modern languages. Thanks mainly to Roger's tenacity and hard work, final proposals for support were submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the MacArthur Foundation.

All of this means we're now moving forward to create an online nexus for courses and scholarship to advance our understanding of how video games and their culture can constructively shape our values and enrich society. We believe a rigorous approach to considering these issues is necessary to properly account for the many ways games provoke us to consider the world and our places in it. Gamers may have a strong sense of this from first-hand experience; but our culture at large remains mostly unaware that games can possess and express this powerful dimension.

Building the infrastructure for such a center will take time, and we plan to roll it out in phases over the next two years. But to get things started, Roger will offer the Initiative's first two courses very soon: a two-week online non-credit course “Living Epic,” specifically aimed at elementary and secondary school teachers and parents (enrolling now!), and a semester-long for-credit course “Gaming Homer,” aimed at advanced undergraduates, to be offered this spring. I will offer a course on the art and history of video games (and possibly a version of my RPG course) in the summer and/or fall of '09.

As I said, we're still in the construction process, but thanks to Roger we have a dedicated Video Games and Human Values Initiative website, as well as a wiki with lots of useful background on the project. I'm delighted to be involved in this work and hope it will contribute in positive ways to the ongoing conversation about video games.

As RPGs go, Fallout 3 and Fable II are remarkable achievements. While they differ significantly in the worlds they present, the role-playing experiences they provide, and the genres they blend, they both offer rich, satisfying experiences to the player. Tonally, they exist at near-opposite ends of the RPG spectrum, and I find myself motivated to play one or the other based purely on my mood. Sometimes gray desolation is the last place I want to go; other times, I just can't handle more twee.

Labels are always tricky, but I would classify Fable II as an adventure-RPG, while Fallout 3 feels more like a shooter-RPG. If you play both, it's likely you will prefer one over the other, as it seems these two games were designed to appeal to different sets of gamers.

Fable II is...well, a fable - a sly, fantastical tale told in a fanciful authorial Molyneux-voice with color and depth delivered via player choice. Fallout 3, on the other hand, is a gritty meditation on crafty survival in a world-in-shambles where we have become our own worst enemy. Choices impact experience here too, but in ways that lead to far less conclusive outcomes.

You might say Fable II aims for your heart, while Fallout 3 aims for your head. That's a bit too tidy, but I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of accurate.

Both games, however, share one pernicious problem that I had hoped they would overcome. All is well as I explore these worlds and determine my own courses of action. But the moment I must deal with another human being, the wheels on both games begin to wobble. Simply put, the weakest parts of these games are the stilted and awkward ways they present interactions between my avatar and the other characters in the games. In the case of Fable II, it's primarily an issue of mechanics; in Fallout 3, it's mostly about aesthetics.

Fable II is about the relationships you establish between your character and all the men, women, and children you encounter in the game. You woo, seduce, marry, divorce, trade, impress, insult - and all sorts of other interactions - with characters in every town, village, and highway. These exchanges are pivotal to the experience of Fable II because they determine what people think of you. Your status and behavior in the world affects the well-being of others and the conditions they live in. Given all this, why is my primary means of interaction with other humans a menu wheel with a set of canned expressions?

Basically, I can be rude, scary, social, fun, or flirty. I can fart, belch, and blow kisses. I can whistle, dance, and flex my muscles. In other words, I can do pretty much anything I want...except actually interact with other people. Standing in the center of a town cracking farts and showing off my trophies in an endless series of timed button presses will make me the most impressive, powerful, and sexually desirable man on the face of the earth to the crowd of swooning townspeople gathered around me. This may be somebody's idea of role-playing wish-fulfillment, but not mine. Fable II is a brilliant and even subversive RPG, but this, it seems to me, is a significant and unfortunate flaw.

Fallout 3 has no such problems. It offers me a seemingly endless series of interactions with a wide range of NPCs. Branching conversations, quests and story lines take me from one character to the next, and I feel genuinely motivated to encounter these people and get to know them. And that's where things break down for me.

The people of Fallout 3 are stiffs. They're like robots meandering from one place to the next with an illusion of purpose. Engaging one is like hitting his PLAY button. He stops and looks at you, the "camera" centers him in the frame in the exact same way every time, and his animatronic rubber-faced self begins emoting. The voice acting is markedly improved (with more variety, thank goodness) from Oblivion, but the facial animations remain primitive and mask-like. Rarely do the person I'm looking at and the voice I'm hearing seem to belong together.

Add to this the conundrum of text. I need text to respond to the characters, but I don't need text while I'm hearing them speak. Playing Bethesda games at their default settings often feels like I've inadvertently turned on subtitling in a movie that's already in English. So I turn it off. But when I do, I'm stuck watching  lifeless faces with mummified bodies delivering lively (sometimes a bit forced-lively) speech. Ironically, I prefer the subtitles. They distract me from the disconnect.

Am I nitpicking? I don't think so, especially when both games rely on frequent exchanges with other characters to carry so much of their role-playing and narrative loads. If the social mechanic in a game about social interactions is weak, as it is in Fable II, this is a problem. If first-person encounters are a primary means of delivering quests and storytelling (in highly realistic visual environments), Fallout 3's stilted character models and animations are a problem.

So I obviously hate these two games, right? Wrong. I love them both, and I look forward to explaining why in my forthcoming reviews of each over at PopMatters. None of the issues I've raised are showstoppers by any means, but they do suggest that neither game quite delivers on every promise, nor do they completely overcome the problems of their predecessors (the original Fable and Oblivion). You should, nevertheless, play these games, and I suggest playing them slowly. Just don't let their people drive you crazy. ;-)

I don't make a habit of writing political posts here. In fact, this is my first one. So I hope you'll indulge me for one day while I share a few personal thoughts on what happened yesterday here in my home state.

Barack Obama won the state of Indiana. I'm going to type that again just because it feels so good. Barack Obama won the state of Indiana.

I know that's not the big story. Barack Obama is President-elect of the United States of America. That's the big story, and no local victory can match the impact of this momentous event. But if you had grown up where I grew up; if you had seen the things I've seen living in my home state; and if you understood how utterly impossible this victory seemed even a mere six months ago - you would perhaps feel what I feel today. You would grasp the magnitude of this event.

I am a liberal. Not a moderate. Not a centrist. Not a "social liberal." I'm what my neighbors call a "Kennedy liberal." This means that here in Indiana, I am a perpetual loser. With the exception of my grad school years living in New York and a few years teaching in Wisconsin (both places where my politics were considered acceptable, if not universally embraced), every Presidential election cycle in my lifetime has meant defeat. Even in the Clinton years, we failed to deliver the state of Indiana. We never even came close. Indiana always votes Republican.

On my local election ballot yesterday, I could choose from a total of three Democrats: Obama for President, and two candidates running for state office. Every other candidate on my ballot was a Republican running unopposed.

Indiana is the home of the Church of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Indiana's Klansmen came from all walks of life. They were not disproportionately rural, or less educated or even predominantly fundamentalist. Several of the most powerful Grand Wizards of the Klan hailed from Indiana. I have never bothered to trace it, but I am certain some of my ancestors were active members of the KKK.

Indiana is a deeply conservative state with a long history of intolerance. Racial epithets remain commonplace (Mexican immigrants have replaced African Americans as the favorite target), and being gay is still a dangerous thing to be in the wrong bar on a Saturday night. My neighbor three doors down has a Confederate flag in his window.

And Barack Obama won the state of Indiana yesterday. Do you see the miracle of this? I'm too old and too cynical to think we've erased all our problems or found sudden enlightenment. But maybe we've begun to turn the corner in my tiny spot on the globe. Maybe this is the beginning of real change.

I knocked on doors and made phone calls for Barack Obama, and so did many of my friends. It was to be another hopeless cause. It was to be just another heartbreaking election night in Indiana. But it wasn't. He won. We won. For the first time in my political life, I feel proud to call myself a Hoosier. And for the first time in so very many years, I feel proud to call myself an American.

The Vintage Game Club begins its collective play-through of Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee today. All are welcome to join us as we dive into one of the most distinctive and beautiful 2-D side-scrollers ever made.      

As usual, we'll be taking our time with this game, so feel free to jump in and join the conversation at any point. If you're interested in synchronizing your play with other members of the VGC, you'll find separate threads for each area of the game. I hope you can join us.

Click here for more information about the club and our plans for Abe's Oddysee.

"Albion rose from where he labour'd at the Mill with Slaves.
Giving himself for the Nations he danc'd the dance of Eternal Death."
--William Blake, The Dance of Albion

"Oh Albion remains, sleeping now to rise again."
--Led Zeppelin, Achilles Last Stand

In Fable 2, Peter Molyneux's Albion is a lush snow-globe vision of Great Britain that weaves together an eccentric melange of storybook tales and fantasy adventure - with plenty of sexual escapades and political intrigue to spice things up. Set in a wildly anachronistic blend of medieval, renaissance, and 18th century England, it's a greatest-hits mix of English culture ala popular literature and film, with a healthy blend of subversive Swift and scatological Monty Python.

The wonder of Fable 2 is that it all works. Unlike its predecessor, which offered the promise of a meaningful experience it couldn't deliver, Fable 2's towns, countrysides and highways are full of landmarks, characters and situations worth stopping for.

It's a testament to the richness of the game's environments that no matter how intently I try to stick to the main storyline, something always draws me away. In other games (e.g. Fallout 3) it's usually an interesting side-mission or character-request that pulls me away; but in Fable 2 it's nearly always the world itself that diverts me: a mysterious path leading away from the golden trail, a curious object on the horizon, the voice of a gargoyle insulting me.

I'll save the role-playing elements of Fable 2 for another post - and I highly recommend Corvus Elrod's recent posts on his experiences with the game - but an undeniably defining feature of great RPGs is the vivid worlds they present to the player. I've been thinking about how this works (when it works), and it seems to me we can identify certain key features that tend to distinguish successful RPGs when it comes to creating and delivering a coherent and satisfying world to the player.

So here's a stab at a feature list of features, so to speak, and how they tend to work in Fable 2. If I've forgotten something (as I'm sure I have), please feel free to jump in and fill the gaps.

1. A world that stimulates my imagination
   Molyneux's Albion is a sumptuous and stylized visual feast that somehow manages to make sense of all its parts. It makes no effort to logically explain why traveling bards, rifles, and magical energy swords all belong in this world, but they do. Albion is a fun (and often funny) place to be, but it also contains a dark side that sneaks up on you when you least expect it. I've had two dreams set in Albion since I started playing Fable 2, so I guess I can safely say: imagination stimulated.


2. A world that rewards exploration
   Much has been made of the dog who functions as your sidekick throughout the game. He is a terrific addition to be sure, only partly because he sniffs out treasures. But Albion offers a tremendous wealth of content - side-quests, off-the-beaten-path locations, mini-games, and assorted nutty characters - all of which feel like valuable, worthwhile in-game events. You explore Albion not simply to extend your play-time. Navigating this world delivers experiences that deepen and contextualize your character's journey through the story. Taking on the game's many challenges nearly always results in something more interesting than an EXP boost.


3. A world populated by distinctive characters
   Fable 2 has extraordinarily high production values (thanks Microsoft!), and nowhere is this more obvious than in the broad range of singular characterizations voiced by a talented cast of English actors, including Stephen Fry, Oliver Cotton, and Zoë Wanamaker. I can't think of another video game with quite the gallery of fully-voiced miscreants, sad-sacks, hucksters, and self-deluded suitors. Clever and genuinely funny writing permeates the game from beginning to end, and you will never forget a particular heroine nicknamed Hammer who simply will not or cannot stop talking.


4. A world that responds to my actions and decisions
   I won't say much about this here because to do so would involve much spoilage. Suffice it to say that Fable 2 significantly revises the binary Good/Evil formula that so limited the original Fable. Your choices really do matter in Fable 2, but not always in the ways you might expect. To me, one sure sign of successful game design is my desire, upon completion, to immediately play the game again in a different way. If only Fallout 3 and Little Big Planet weren't staring at me so forlornly...


5. A world that provokes me to ask "What if...?"
   Gamers love exploring the margins of games, testing the limits of design, and generally trying to figure out what they can get away with. Fable 2 responds to this kind of gameplay reasonably well. While it's no Fallout 3 (more on that soon), the game leaves room for plenty of "what if" choices (without the multi-game save function crutch of Fallout 3). Fable 2 defaults to a "safety on" setting that prevents you from killing innocent people by mistake. But you can turn this off, and when you do all sorts of "what if" possibilities emerge.


6. A world that makes me reflect on my own
   Fable 2 was assigned an "M" (Mature) rating by the ESRB, a rating I consider appropriate. I mention this only to point out an interesting fact. In nearly every conversation I've had with gamers considering purchasing the game, not a single person was aware of this. On a hunch, I spoke with the manager of my near-local EB Games store, and he told me, "You have no idea how many underage people we've turned away on Fable 2. I'd say at least a hundred, including phone calls."
   
   Molyneux and company seem to have understood that Fable 2 must open up a world of gameplay choices, characters, and situations that speak to modern gamers in ways that go beyond the typical RPG tropes and good vs evil formulas. Homosexuality and same-sex marriage are perceived no differently than heterosexual or "traditional" marriage in Fable 2. Prostitution, casual sex, and other so-called taboo subjects are all just another day in Albion. The result, in my view, is a world that stands a much better chance of serving - however stylized - as a mirror on our own.

For another take on Molyneux's world-making achievement, I highly recommend "Fable 2: An open letter to Peter Molyneux" at PixelVixen 707.

Why do we play RPGs? Why are we drawn to these experiences and what do we derive from them? Clearly, we play these games for all sorts of reasons, and yours may differ from mine; but the defining aspect of the genre - that which separates it from others - is the creative role-playing dimension at the core of the experience.

What we're really talking about is pretending. Make-believe. "Role-playing" may bless the activity with a marginally more acceptable moniker, but when we play RPGs we summon our most primitive urges - the ones we've had since we were children - and we tap into something about the human psyche that inclines toward empathy.

We love pretending because we possess an innate desire to understand (to know and to feel) what it would be like to be *this* man or *that* woman. To mold a character through our own choices and to walk in his shoes, with as many in-world consequences and as few real-world consequences as possible, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

We know all this, and we've known it for a long time...but sometimes it pays to stop and take a another look. Sometimes we're jolted into knowing something in a better way than we knew it before.

My students have written autobiographies for the characters they created in Fallout 1 and 2. We use this exercise in the theater quite often because it encourages an actor to think about the life of a character outside the bounds of the script, accounting for his or her life experiences beyond the playwright's pen. Constructing such an autobiography can empower an actor in all sorts of useful ways, and it usually results in a more complete and nuanced understanding of the character by the actor.

It never occurred to me that my RPG seminar students would benefit from writing such an autobiography until we began discussing the characters they had created in the Fallout games. The sense of ownership they clearly felt, and their remarkably vivid descriptions of their experiences in the games, made the assignment a no-brainer. I asked for it, and they delivered with a wallop.

Some wrote in diary form; others constructed an interview between a reporter and their character; most simply told their stories in first-person. We read them aloud in class (I asked for 3-5 page essays), and for the better part of 75 minutes yesterday I sat listening, stunned in my seat. As I said before, sometimes we know things, and sometimes we *really* know them.

Lest there be any doubt about the creative freedom and personal investment great RPGs can engender, these students put those doubts firmly to rest. I found myself occupying a room with a collection of characters loosely bound by a defined world and a set of mission objectives, but otherwise radically different from each other in a myriad of ways. A few examples from the essays:

I sat straight up in my bed, covered in a sheen of cold sweat. Tomorrow morning would be the running of the gauntlet, both physically and mentally. ... I had no fear that I would be capable of completing the tasks inside the temple, but the sheer weight of what was at stake was apparent even in the dead of night. This was not some ritual to prove myself a man or any such nonsense; this was to prove my ability to venture out into the world, out of my ancestral home, to try and help my tribe...In whatever way that might entail.

I killed most of the people because Ian ran out of bullets. When we made it to the gate the asshole that had told me to put my weapon away and his girlfriend, the one I had saved from the raiders, were there and attacked us. I took them both out with a single grenade; the explosion was awesome, though the chunks of flesh that flew at us were rather annoying. It felt good to kill all of those idiots.

I stepped into the village to utter shock. My home had been completely destroyed with no one appearing to be left. I searched high and low for signs of survivors but was only met by Haukin, the village shaman. In his last few breaths he told me I must head to a place called Navarro, and there I could find my friends. I must save my people at all costs tomorrow. I just pray that I make it to them before they meet the same fate as Haukin and Sulik.

Q: What's with this Vic character?
A: "Save the Tribe." Bullshit. Vic could save my whole tribe by telling me something, anything about the Vault! And the bastard wouldn't--I realized no one in the whole world gave a shit about anyone.
Q: You didn't meet a single half-way decent person at all?
A: Not until it was too late.

Little did I know my inclination towards stealing would only grow over the ensuing months. At first there always was a reason, a need, but I always seemed to "need" more. As my resolve weakened so did my sense of importance in who I stole from. My selections became less about the righteousness and superfluity of the victim and more about convenience. I realized I was going down a bad road when I found myself one day contemplating stealing from a nearby beggar. What would I even gain from such a person? They would have at most one or two coins, money that unquestionably kept them alive. Still, I was low on cash and I would need a weapon soon...

Heroes with remorse and heroes with none. Heroes seeking honor and heroes seeking blood. Heroes evolving from good to evil, evil to good, and heroes who never deviate. Psychopaths and patriots and everything in between. Everybody takes a journey, and everybody has a different story.

None of this should have surprised me. I know what RPGs are all about. At least I think I do. But something about hearing those voices and those stories - alive in front of me - made me realize anew how absolutely singular a well-crafted RPG experience can be.

Listening to the psychopath chuckle about his violent exploits made us laugh at first, until it grew awkward and oddly disturbing. None of it really happened, of course...but in a way it really did. Similarly, the student who delivered a first-person account of the death and burial of Ian recounted a first-hand experience. He was there. He dug the grave himself. It happened.

This is why we play RPGs. This is why we remember them. This is why they can matter so much.

 
This edition of the Brainy Gamer Podcast features Leigh Alexander and Mitch Krpata in the Gamers Confab where we discuss our games of the month and the current state of the survival horror genre. We also chat about the game review grind; remind ourselves that games cost money; and remove the 4th-wall in a horrifyingly authentic podcast recording surprise in which no harm comes to Leigh whatsoever!

All this, and a plea for slowing down, in this edition of the Brainy Gamer Podcast!

Leigh Alexander's Sexy Videogameland   
Mitch Krpata's Insult Swordfighting

Mitch's review of Dead Space
Mitch's review of Silent Hill: Homecoming
Leigh's "Does Survival Horror Really Still Exist?"
Leigh's review of Silent Hill: Homecoming

• Listen to any of the Brainy Gamer podcasts directly from this page by clicking the yellow "Listen Now" button on the right.

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It's a great time to be a gamer. We're in the middle of a video game deluge the likes of which I can't remember. I've got games to play for pleasure, games to play for class, games to play for review, and games to play for vintage appreciation.

I'm fortunate indeed to be in this position, especially when I stop to consider the economic hardships many people are facing these days. Simply owning all the next-gen consoles is a big deal to most folks I know. Nearly all my local friends choose one system and stick with it, buying games for special occasions like birthdays and holidays. I'm a lucky guy, and I need to remind myself of that more often.

So if I'm such a lucky fellow, why am I not having more fun? Instead of delirious joy about all these terrific games, I'm mostly feeling pressure to keep moving, play quickly, keep pace with the cognoscenti crowd, be part of the conversation, stay relevant. The Far Cry 2 discussion is happening now; Clint Hocking is jumping on boards and responding to critics; you don't want to miss this, do you?! But I haven't even started Far Cry 2 yet! I'm only a few hours into Fable 2, still haven't finished the magnificent World of Goo, Fallout 3 arrives tomorrow...and Little Big Planet beckons me like a beautiful woman on the other side of an impassable canyon.

AAAAGGGHHH!!!

I know exactly what's happening here. I've boarded the Game Review Express, and this ride is giving me a bad case of kinetosis. The engineer of this fast-moving train is a games media with a woefully short attention span and no time to stop and gaze at the scenery. Its itinerary is an ever-expanding list of station stops, and its passengers do not tolerate delays. The Game Review Express is barreling down the tracks as fast as it can go because it only knows one speed.

I need to get off this train now. It doesn't suit me. I'm a very slow gamer. I want to explore every nook and cranny of Albion. I want to look over my shoulder when I leave Bowerstone and study the hazy outline of the city in the distance. I want to jump off cliffs and dive into water simply because I can. I want to talk to the people and explore every inch of every town. If the designers built it, I want to see it. I realize not every gamer feels this sort of imperative; but I do, and the Game Review Express forces me to barrel right past most of these things in order to fulfill the railroad's prime directive: marathon play sessions, finish game, compose review, move on to next game.

I want to believe this approach to playing games makes sense if you're a professional reviewer facing an onslaught of games, but I don't really believe that. On a practical level it's certainly understandable, but I nevertheless wish reviewers could truly take their time - especially for games like the ones appearing now - to luxuriate in a game world and reflect on their experiences in ways less driven by a deadline and more responsive to the shifting nuances and provocations posed by each individual game. Unrealistic? Sure. But a thing to be wished for nonetheless. Business is business, and I get that.

However, I'm surprised by the degree to which many of us (myself included) jump on the Game Review Express of our own volition, even when we're not charged with producing reviews. We behave as if we're all joined in a lockstep march, and pity the poor soul who can't keep up.

Social networking tools like Twitter exacerbate the situation. The amount of sturm/drang/envy produced among gamers following other gamers who already have their hands on just-released titles can be extraordinary. Reading Twitter friend X extolling the virtues of Fallout 3, having just completed Far Cry 2, after recently posting a Fable 2 review produces a small avalanche of desperate cries among the late-comers. The serious gamers are moving ahead, taunting us with their knowledge and teasing us with tidbits of info. "I won't spoil it for you, but wait until you meet Character X or see Location Z." It's all good fun, of course, and nobody forces us to take any of this seriously, but it's very easy to get caught up in the frenzy and feel a very real sense of pressure to pick up the pace and play these games NOW.

I don't mean to prescribe an "approved" way of playing games. If you enjoying plowing through a game quickly and moving onto the next one, I say go for it and have fun. The game industry loves you. But for those of us who enjoy contemplative play - and if you haven't tried it, I heartily recommend it - I suggest we slow down and chew our food. Resist the urge to finish a game simply to stay with the pack. Leave open the possibility of writing about and discussing games weeks or months after they're released. Enjoy the scenery. Jump off the train. I suspect it's headed nowhere anyway.

Image courtesy of fumblesteed at DeviatArt

With a splendiferous triad of "F" games descending on us this month - Fable 2, Far Cry 2, and Fallout 3 - chances are you haven't been thinking much about EA sports games lately, and who could blame you? The annual release ritual of Madden, NBA Live, NHL, NCAA and FIFA can easily dull the senses, especially when it seems each new iteration brings less and less to the table.

But wake up somnabulant sports game fans! Tiger Woods is here to remind us that EA can occassionally hit the ball squarely on the screws and boom one past the fairway sandtrap. In fact (strap yourself in for burst of hyperbole) Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 may be the most fully-realized sports game EA has ever made.

Here's a snippet from my PopMatters review:

Dating back to its roots as World Tour Golf, I have played nearly every annual iteration, and year after year I find myself thinking the same thoughts: these games are slick and well-produced, but essentially soulless. They’re full of pizzazz, but feel cold. They lack the spirit of the real game, which is a problem for a series that purports to deliver a realistic simulation of golf.

So when this year’s edition, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, arriv    ed at my door, I expected more of the same. But a funny thing happened on the way to the clubhouse. Walking off the 18th green after a scintillating match-play duel with Vijay Singh at the nasty/gorgeous TPC Sawgrass, it hit me. This is the golf game I have been waiting for. This is the best Tiger Woods game I’ve ever played. This may quite possibly be the best golf game ever made.

You can read the full review here.

Hey EA, next year how about throwing in that course designer we keep asking for. Jack Nicklaus Signature Edition had one back in 1992. I'm just saying.

Some ardent defenders of the Fallout series - let's call them Fallout traditionalists - have a beef with Fallout 3 and the RPG they fear it will be: non-isometric, non-turn-based, sans dialogue trees, simplified (i.e. dumbed down) SPECIAL system, and a distinct lack of the offbeat, self-referential Fallout vibe. Such a game, say the traditionalists, may be perfectly suitable for gamers who prefer 3-D action RPGs like Oblivion. But it's just not Fallout. So don't call it Fallout.

My students have been playing Fallout 1 and 2 for a couple of weeks, preparing for the release of Fallout 3. They are an unexpected mix of gamers: a small handful of RPG veterans, a large majority of relatively casual gamers (mostly sports games and shooters), and a few with almost no experience playing video games at all. Quite a challenge for a teacher who expected to be met by a small legion of hardcore D&Ders with a possible cosplayer or LARPer thrown in. Fortunately, they're all terrific guys willing to try anything I throw at them.

So when I handed them Fallout (half played the original, half the sequel) with no instructions or special preparation, they struggled. A lot. They had the original manuals, but almost nobody read them. After exiting the vault, they had no idea where to go or what to do. Their movements were limited for no apparent reason; "action points" made no sense; and they died within minutes nearly everywhere they went.

A few early posts from our online forum:

Idk if anyone else has this problem but I am having a hard time getting anything done... I started as Max Stone hopin to kill some things and level up... but there isn't much 2 kill... the redscorpians are owning me...  Any way to move like a little bit quicker?

I kept walking back and forth between 15 and 13 and get stopped by travelers... they took me to a town where I forgot to save and got dominated and lost all my experience and time...

i have enough to fire a gun and kill a scorpion, but then i'm only 1 action point short to use a weapon and i get screwed because i can't fight back...how do i gain more action points and why do they randomly go away when i'm fighting?

I'm terrible about reading manuals and whatnot, so it took me forever to find out how to rest because the pipboy doesn't work originally and I didn't try it again until I clicked it by accident. So far, I appreciated being left to my own devices, but because the game is so old, with the graphics it has and whatnot, it sometimes is hard to recognize what needs to be done. Like it's only after you play a game like this that you realize how much easier having glowing objects of interest is.

Our first Fallout conversation was a disaster. Few students had posted on the forum as I had asked them to, and it was obvious that almost no one had devoted much time to playing. They basically tried the game, got frustrated, threw up their hands, and walked away. Our midterm break began the following day, so I told them I expected them to continue playing over the break, be resourceful, roll up their sleeves, and figure it out. "Somewhere in there," I assured them, "is the best RPG you will play this semester. If you dig harder to find it, I promise you will thank me." A bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but I meant it.

All of these students have seen the trailers for Fallout 3. When I told them we would play the game immediately after release, they burst into spontaneous fits of delight. I should mention that I made this announcement at the conclusion of our Planetfall discussion, a text adventure they gamely tried to enjoy because I told them they should - but which they mostly detested. In this setting, Fallout 3 was received like mana from RPG heaven. Subsequently, Fallout 1 and 2 were seen as trials to be endured while awaiting the modern gameplay savior of 3.

Then, during the break, something broke. I began to notice increased activity in the discussion forum, which soon turned into a small flurry of posts. A sampling:

What is interesting about the random encounters in the game is that not all of them are hostile encounters. The kind of encounter that is very rare in games is the neutral encounter where you encounter people fighting. You can help either side but even then sometimes they will just turn around and attack you when they beat whoever they were fighting. My favorite way to deal with these encounters is to wait till a few of them die, and then it's looting corpses time. It’s amazing what kind of nice loot you can find on them. It’s also where I got my first gun.

Think about it, they have almost myths of what we know about these people and things. They don't know everything and have to rely on what they do know.  I'm really interested in seeing how much information is lost because of the isolation caused by the vaults.

That's an interesting idea. What effect would the isolation of the vaults have on the society? And what would changed based on the nuclear apocalypse? It would be like taking all the data in the world and deleting random parts. It would cause mass chaos, especially once the original humans (from pre-nuking) die out. Or, alternatively, there could be a safe-haven somewhere. From a developing standpoint, how could that effect the game? Could it?

I just found out that the greeter at the Den tells you to be vewy vewy quiet he is hunting rabbits, and i just stopped and laughed for about fifteen mins.

Suddenly, they got Fallout. They grokked the mechanics and embraced the non-linear gameplay. They made peace with uncertainty. But more importantly, they built a relationship with the character and the offbeat but perilous world. As Iroquois Pliskin points out in an essay I shared with my students: 

The big-name game avalanche is here, and I'm sure we'll all be talking about each one for the requisite 7-10 days before dropping it and moving on to the next big thing. In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy knowing about a couple of games bound to be overlooked due to the timing of their releases and the fact that their objectives differ significantly from commercial titles.

Operation: Sleeper Cell is a massively multiplayer puzzle game designed to raise money for Cancer Research UK. It could also be described as an ARG since it incorporates a story that ties in real-world resources like blogs, Twitter, and live events.  The game is designed and run by Law 37, an alliance of designers, programmers, and writers "working together to create pro bono, pro-social games." Importantly, all money raised by the game is donated to Cancer Research UK, with a maximum of 5% of the proceeds spent on running the game.

You can play Operation: Sleeper Cell for free. If you can't afford to donate, you can still play all the missions that others have unlocked. A new mission appears each week. The game started on September 23rd and will last for approximately ten weeks, but you can join in at any time and not miss anything.

Traces of Hope is another socially aware ARG. Sponsored by the British Red Cross, the game focuses on Joseph, a Ugandan teenager searching for his mother during a time of civil war. The game puts players in virtual communication with Joseph as he attempts to discover if his mother is alive or dead. "He has a satellite phone, you have the web – together you’ll make a great team. Time is running out; guide Joseph through sickness, fire and violence as together you follow his traces of hope."

After registering, you begin receiving email messages from Joseph, written in a way that conveys a palpable sense of desperation. Soon you are drawing on resources like Facebook and search engines to help Joseph locate a Red Cross official to begin the tracing and messaging process used to reunite displaced refugees.

Both these games are valient and worthy attempts to reach new audiences through creative, interactive, cross-media gameplay. I encourage you to give them a try and support the voluntary efforts of the people who designed and built them. My thanks to Adrian Hon, the person behind the Let's Change the Game initiative; and to Dorothea Arndt of the British Red Cross for contacting me and letting me know about these projects.

I forgive you for ignoring Yakuza 2. It appeared last month with little fanfare, designed for a console on its last legs, stuffed in a box that screams "generic Japanese PS2 game." Whatever excitement it generated on its release in Japan dissipated over the nearly two years it took Sega to bring the game to North America. When you ignored it, you weren't alone. The game has sold less than 50,000 copies in the U.S..

Sega does this sort of thing. They occasionally make a game that reminds us why they're one of the premiere developers in the industry, and years later we look back and write "Say, that Jet Grind Radio was a damn fine game," or "Hey, that Shenmue was a real groundbreaker, wasn't it?" "Too bad nobody outside Japan bought them."

I have a feeling we may say the same things about Yakuza 2 in a few years. It may not break ground like JGR or Shenmue, but it exhibits every bit of Sega's commitment to excellence and attention to detail found in those games. Its ambitions are modest compared to the bevy of AAA games on the way this month, but Yakuza 2 manages to make good on every promise it makes.

Yakuza 2 (Ryu ga Gotoku) is the best narrative game I've played this year, by a wide margin. Better than GTA IV and way better than MGS4. It can't match the the toys in Liberty City's sandbox, nor can it compete with Snake's superlative stealth. But in terms of pure storytelling finesse, Yakuza 2 conducts a clinic on how to deliver a rock-solid, minimally-cliched tale featuring characters that earn our empathy through their choices and vivid personalities, rather than via tortuous backstories, rambling expositional dialogue, or overreaching attempts at profundity. Yakuza 2 does storytelling the old-fashioned way: sound dramatic structure, compelling characters, convincing performances, and a good story worth telling. It helps that the game also happens to be a blast to play.

Yakuza 2 makes no effort to incorporate dynamic story architecture, AI-based emergent narrative, or any of the other current interactivity buzzwords. Thus, Yakuza 2 makes a hypocrite out of me and my "Narrative Manifesto" notion that games must move away from cutscene-driven storytelling. In many ways, the game is thoroughly backward-looking: an old-school brawler mixed with simplified RPG elements and sandbox-style mini-missions - all punctuated by a series of cutscenes responsible for delivering 90% of the story.

But, oh, what cutscenes they are. Sega wisely jettisoned the stilted and embarrassing English-dubbed voices from the original Yakuza, replacing them with generally well-written colloquial subtitles and preserving the performances of the original Japanese cast, including Tetsuya Watari, one of Japan's most respected actors. 

Without casting aspersions at actors like Michael Madsen or Mark Hamill, both of whom have done fine voiceover work in video games, I can't help but wonder what a first-rate, well-trained English-speaking actor might contribute to a video game from the beginning of the process. Watari and rising star Satoshi Tokushige are both fixtures in the series, and it seems clear the writers built their roles to take advantage of their emotional range and expressiveness as performers. Seldom, if ever, are video game actors afforded the kind of room these actors were given to flesh out their characters over the course of a lengthy and complex story. These are not one-note performances. They are personal and nuanced characterizations (embedded into well designed animations) the likes of which we almost never see in video games.

Games usually contain weak narratives because their stories are tacked onto pre-existing gameplay structures. Yakuza 2 conveys the impression that the opposite approach was adopted here. The brawling is fun and well-implemented with plenty of special combos and tough bosses to keep the beat-em-up gamer happy. The sandbox elements work well too, highly reminiscent of Shenmue's atmospheric rendition of Yokosuka's shops and restaurants, with mini-game opportunities throughout.

But all these features have been woven around the true centerpiece of Yakuza 2: its narrative. The utterly regressive, unrelentingly linear, cutscene-driven, genre-derivative story that I swallowed hook, line, and sinker. The one I was genuinely sad to see end. 

Did I mention that I never finished GTA IV and only limped to the end of MGS4 through sheer stubborn will?

Should we eliminate cutscenes in video games? Should we move beyond the sender-receiver relationship between gamed designer and player? Should we fully integrate gameplay and narrative to exploit the unique interactive power of video games? Probably. But Yakuza 2 reminds me t