So it’s been awhile since I posted anything; I have the real world to blame. In my non-gaming life I’m a senior developer for an international airline and am currently working with a database used for revenue decision support. We completed a major upgrade to the system recently and installed it into production about a week and a half ago. Things actually went somewhat smoothly, or as smoothly as anything can with a 50 billion row, 4.5 terabyte database used by around 150 people. So, I’ve been a bit busy. It looks like I may clock in at under 60 hours this week, which is an improvement over the 70-80 I’ve been logging for the past two weeks. At any rate, the other night I had a bit of a break and decided to burn off some stress by logging into World of Warcraft and killing a few innocent snapjaws to collect their scales for my master leatherworking quest. So I wound up on a beach in Tanaris, killing snapjaws and half-watching the latest Torchwood off the TiVo while waiting for the next set to spawn. Then, when the show was over, I not only turned off the TV, I logged off of WoW as well. I just wasn’t having that much fun. And that started me thinking about MMOs, grinding and what makes a game fun. No one likes grinding; I think everyone agrees with that. Unfortunately, that makes up the vast majority of most MMOs. Most of your

So I’m still making my way through the various bits of the Half-Life 2 saga and, somewhere in the middle of Episode 1, it suddenly struck that despite having what seemed at first glance to be a huge, complex world, the game really consisted of a single long corridor with lots of bends in it for things to hide behind and shoot at you. Think about it. All through the game you really only have one way to go at any given moment. Sure, you can sometimes go into a side room that has a second door that opens a bit further down the corridor but that really doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s well hidden because your path is constantly turning left, right, back, forth, up, down, over, under and around itself but the fact remains that the game could consist of a single long corridor and not really be that different. This bothers me because the environments in the game look interesting and I want to go out, explore and see what I can find but you really can’t get to most of it. Sure, you may be able to eventually get to the other side of that fence but to do so you will have to climb an elevator shaft, jump across the roof, shoot your way through five levels of offices and finally crawl out of a ventilator shaft to get there. There’s no other way to do it. Which leads me to the concept of

I love RPGs. I love the opportunity to become someone else in a game; becoming a valiant knight, a stealthy spy, a hard-bitten mercenary or a roguish star pilot for a brief time instead of a middle-aged office worker. So when BioWare, probably the premiere RPG gaming company out there, releases not one but two RPGs within a few months of each other, it should be a RPG gaming feast. And with Dragon Age: Origins this was fulfilled. My newly created Grey Warden was soon making his way across Ferelden. Fighting Darkspawn, picking locks, making traps and mixing poisons to aid in his quest, he was eventually able with the aid of his companions to defeat the Arch-Demon and save the world. Just in time too because no sooner had I finished then Mass Effect 2 was released. I had played and enjoyed the original Mass Effect so I quickly loaded it up, imported my character from Mass Effect 1 and launched into space to once again save the galaxy. And just as quickly realized that, even though I was enjoying the game, it wasn’t an RPG. As I said a few paragraphs back, the attraction of playing an RPG is playing a character that isn’t me. Hand me a sword and I’d probably cut my own leg off by accident before I could hit an actual Darkspawn with it. But this isn’t a problem for Dirk Rapier, human rogue and Grey Warden. I add points to his combat skills,

In my last few posts I have been talking about stories in games and how the best games have stories that follow the classic, epic pattern of the Hero’s Journey. The downside to this is that, despite being the “hero” of the story, as players we aren’t really telling our stories. Instead, we are simply actors in someone else’s story; improvisational actors in an outline created by someone else. Several people have given me examples of games that do allow you to affect the story. I agree that there has been some progress made in that direction, but in reality the effect of your actions is still fairly minimal. The story remains the same and your effect on that story is only an illusion. Many games have no choices at all, the Half-Life series for example. The most control you have over the story in Half-Life is choosing what weapon to use in a given encounter. There aren’t even any side branches or side quests to become involved in. You either proceed along a fixed route while killing enemies as you meet them or you simply stand around until you get bored. Just an actor following the script. Other games give you some choices but in the end they become meaningless. Most RPGs for example let you take on various quests in any order and allow you to choose which companions accompany you on most of them. (Though even there you sometimes are forced to take certain companions on certain

Whenever you read a book or comic you are reading the story as it was created by the writer. You may picture the characters a certain way or hear them speaking in a certain voice but you are still seeing the creator’s story. Television and movies are the same way. What you see is the story as envisioned by the director and the characters as brought to life by the actors and actresses playing the roles, but again the story is that of the writer or writers of the script. And ultimately, the story reigns supreme. Luke Skywalker fires off the “million-to-one” shot that blows up the Death Star, Gollum steals the Ring then falls into the fires of Mount Doom and James Bond will always stop the evil mastermind and get the girl. It’s in the script. Gaming lets us play the hero of a story. Instead of Luke Skywalker, we are the one who is flying down the trench with Darth Vader in hot pursuit, we are the one on the summit of Mount Doom when Gollum makes his attack and when the evil villain announces that he expects us to die, we are the ones strapped into the death machine. But, if we are the one in the center of the action, what happens if we don’t want to, or are unable to, follow the script? What happens if I, as Luke Skywalker, miss miss my shot at the reactor port? What if as Frodo I decide

Think back over the games you have played for a moment and think of what your strongest memories from them are. You may remember the time you defeated a particularly difficult boss or when you finally pwned your friend for the first time, but most of these memories are probably of some particular scene or event. Maybe you remember when the resonance cascade started after Gordon Freeman placed the sample in the test chamber in the original Half-Life, when Aeris fell at the hands of Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII or when Andrew Ryan handed you his golf club while asking “Would you kindly…” in Bioshock. In short, you remember a part of the story. The first video games didn’t have stories. You were a big yellow dot running around eating little white dots while evading primary colored ghosts, or you were a short, Italian plumber trying to get to the top of a tower while a giant ape threw barrels at you. There was no story (or at least just the barest trappings of one). Instead, these games were little more than exercises in hand-eye coordination. In many ways, that is all games are today. Fundamentally, there is little difference between Master Chief shooting Covenant attackers in Halo and the unnamed ship shooting asteroids in Asteroids. Yeah, the graphics have gotten better but the basic gameplay is still evade and shoot. Hand-eye coordination. The difference is that Halo and most other modern games have stories. Tales of heroism and

OK, so it’s been a while since I posted. Well, it’s been a really busy month or so for me. I had a major project wrap up at work. Then my wife and I took our first vacation alone together in about four years (and the computer wasn’t invited). Then I had to do taxes. Then I had more project fun at work when we had a Microsoft analyst show up for about two weeks to help us resolve some major problems we were having and I was assigned to work with him. Then my mother had what may or may not have been a stroke (even her doctors aren’t quite sure what happened) but she fortunately seems to be fine now. And my dog managed to escape from the fence for a day or so (fortunately someone found her and she’s back now). Obviously I haven’t had too much time for gaming lately but I had a need to take some time to relax and unwind. So, this past weekend I fired up Far Cry, courtesy of a Steam sale. Then, a few hours later, my wife comes in to see what I am yelling in frustration at. The problem was that Far Cry was proving to be quite difficult for me. The game is quite unforgiving. Your opponents all seem to be able to see you almost anywhere on the map and all have deadly aim. (I was once crawling through some bushes in the jungle and got