Sexist, racist, and homophobic sentiments may be amplified by the somewhat anonymous and depersonalized format of internet venues – an “online disinhibition effect” (Suler, 2004) in psychological terms, though well known to geeks under such terms as “the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” (Kruhulik & Holkins, 2004).

The phrase is indeed well known, and I offer an endnote to expound upon that a bit. But it still looks like a weird sentence. (And yes, the lowercase “I” in “internet” is intentional.)

My dilemma today is how to cite an article by Iroquois Pliskin. Citing people by handle/screen name is usually no big deal for me. Because I’m quoting heavily from comments on blogs and publicly viewable forums, I already have plenty of citations like “(CmdrTaco, 2007).” This gets trickier when citing someone using a screen name that takes the form of a pen name. If I’m to treat this like a screen name, I’d cite it as “(Iroquois Pliskin, 2009).” On the other hand, this has a first and last name, so should it be “(Pliskin, 2009)”? “Mark Twain” was just a pen name for Samuel Clemens, but I think you’d still cite him as “(Twain, 1876).” And I haven’t even addressed how I decided to cite the Penny Arcade strip noted in the quote above as “(Krahulik and Holkins, 2004)” rather than “(Gabe and Tycho, 2004)”; citing when you have a screen name and a real name associated with a work presents its own challenges as well.

I’m not going to let something so silly hold me up right now, so I’m just going with citing as a screen name for consistency with the other online sources I’m using in cases when no real name is given on the work itself. Perhaps I’ll revise after defending if need be.

I have a question for my fellow Slashdotters, and yes, I realize I am entering the lion’s den covered in tasty meat-flavored sauce. I have never been a very social person, preferring to throw myself into technology; therefore, I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful in developing any meaningful interpersonal relationships. Lately I have begun to feel that this situation is not tenable, and I would like to fix it. But I really don’t know how and haven’t the faintest idea where to start. I know that I am in the minority and that there are many different kinds of Slashdot readers, most of whom have more experience in this realm than I do. So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks — preferably including some of the opposite gender — in meatspace?

The asker acknowledges that s/he is going to get flamed (and eaten), which seems exacerbated by wording that seems to have been interpreted as genuinely detached rather than playfully self-mocking (e.g., using terms like “meatspace” and analytically concluding that having no friends “is not tenable”). I’m not sure which I find more interesting: the frankness of the asker in trying to find a solution to this dilemma, which is presumed to result in meeting one of our own kind (so to speak); or the variety of answers that Slashdotters offer, ranging from specific things to try to get geeky and non-geeky women alike. (Everyone assumes that the person posting is male, though I’m not sure that was ever stated outright.)

I’m too far into the dissertation to really be incorporating new data, but this seems interesting enough to at least warrant a footnote. Maybe I’ll come back to this if I ever get around to writing a paper on the role of dating in shaping geek culture and identity, as has occurred to me repeatedly as I write this. And in that case, I’d like to also note that this post has directed me to Sex Tips for Geeks, and has reminded me of an Escapist article titled “My Big Fat Geek Marriage” and a potentially relevant xkcd cartoon.

And as for the original Slashdot post: As easy as it is to mock someone for asking this question, you’ve to give this person credit for recognizing solitude as untenable, and taking the first step toward finding an alternative.

I was particularly interested in writing up a quick post about this piece because of the last few paragraphs:

Munn’s knows that part of why Playboy came calling, and was cool with her not doing nudity, is she has a fan base that’s highly coveted by advertisers. Gamers are easily separated from their dough, after all. But the positive response she’s gotten for not taking it off tells her that her fans do care. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, titty! Oh, that’s Olivia’s vagina, let’s go buy it!’” she said. “They’re supportive, not just because it gets them off.”

But she doesn’t worry about being typecast for the geek demographic. To the contrary, it gets her plenty of work. She’s just finished up a role in Iron Man II, and got an offer for another from producers who said they wanted someone who isn’t the kind of pedestalized-hot that Megan Fox represents.

“I love this world I am in,” Munn said. “If I could stay in this world forever, the nerd world, I’d be happy. I’ve been here for three years, and I can confidently say this is a world I feel comfortable and welcomed in.”

I thought it was really nice that she describes her fans as supportive and welcoming. Predictably, Kotaku’s comments on the article include many crude responses, though I was interested to see several people commenting that this makes them respect Munn even more. I’ll leave further commentary aside for now (must focus on more pressing writing tasks), but I thought this might be of interest to some readers here.

Some other tropes, however, remain quite common and entirely possible to address if you’re really interested in prioritizing storytelling aspects. I thought it might be fun to point out a few such annoyances and suggest how they could be (or even have been) approached in more coherent ways. (And yes, when you’re writing a multi-hundred-page dissertation, thinking and writing about anything else in the world for a few minutes a day definitely counts as “fun.”) I invite you, too, to respond to these or come up with some more of your own in the comments.

The Disappearing Key: When you use a key on a door, the key suddenly disappears. This is the one my friend pointed out, which kicked off the discussion. I suppose it doesn’t bother me too much in very abstract games like the original Legend of Zelda, but it does seem pretty perplexing in games that are presented as more realistic and immersive.

Alternative: Make a show out of actually tossing the key away if we’re so sure it’ll never be used again—or even just let us keep our keys. Fallout 3 actually has a keyring in the inventory, full of keys you’ll never use again. I’m okay with that!

(Un)armed to the Teeth: You’re packing the most fearsome arsenal known to humankind, but you’re only shown carrying one weapon at a time. Once you’ve broken that rule, you’d think you could just carry anything you want—but no, despite your incredible weapon-hiding abilities, you probably still have a limit to how much you can carry based on an abstract calculation of your total weight allowance (Fallout 3), a fixed number of inventory slots (Mass Effect), or physical space in a magical briefcase that you don’t actually seem to be carrying either (Resident Evil 4).

Alternative: I actually thought it was pretty neat the way you can actually see the a weapons available to you right on your character’s person in Gears of War (and Mass Effect, sort of, but you actually had a huge inventory full of other junk too). For more complex inventory management, though, Fallout 3 implies an elegant solution that it never quite follows through with: gradually slowing you down as you carry more stuff. What the game does do is make you walk slower when you wear heavier armor, which was a decent step, but could have been similarly applied to weapons as well for a more balanced and immersive system. Rather than giving a single cutoff number for encumbrance limit, how about actually showing every piece of equipment we’re carrying on our person (or at least a big backpack or something), and make us slightly slower or less agile as we carry more, up to a certain limit where we won’t be able to run at all? For games that don’t want to deal with encumbrance systems, I suppose you could also just assign a “pack mule” character to carry around your stuff.

Puzzle Locks: I am all for games that make you solve puzzles to progress. I find it extremely distracting, however, when the puzzle is being used in a situation where it would make much more sense to have just had a locked or password-protected door. In Silent Hill: Homecoming, anybody can find a free hunting rifle in a graveyard as long as they find some special stones lying around and solve a riddle. In Resident Evil 4, anybody can unlock a jail cell door (in a church, of course) as long as they can align three colored lights properly. What evil villain guards an important treasure or secret room with an easy riddle? And don’t even get me started on sliding block puzzles.

Alternative: Come up with puzzles that make sense in the narrative framework. Alone in the Dark has a splendid puzzle, for instance, that involves dragging corpses around inside a bus, teetering over a chasm, so that the weight is distributed evenly enough for you to get out. But if we’re determined to have rooms locked with puzzles, we should come up with a narrative framework that explains why the villains are obsessed with puzzles. I would not complain about this in a game that pits you against an evil sphinx; that’s just their M.O.

Apocalypse Eve Shopkeepers: It’s the end of the world and you’re the only one who can stop it—but the guy at the store still insists upon charging you for guns. A lot of games do this, but my personal favorite example is Mass Effect; even the shopkeeper on hero’s own space ship is charging his superior officer for guns when the fate of the entire galaxy hangs in the balance.

Alternative: I suppose it wouldn’t be so glaring in those cases when the shopkeepers might be believably ignorant about the impending apocalypse, but really, this wouldn’t be such a problem if two-thirds of video games weren’t about literally preventing the end of the world. As for the ones that are, though, consider not putting shopkeepers with a subordinate military rank on the hero’s spaceship.

Crates: You can bust open crates (or barrels, or whatever the heck). And guess what? There are bullets (or money, or guns, or whatever) inside for some bizarre reason, and you feel perfectly justified in taking them.

Alternative: Make fun of players for thinking they can find stuff by busting open barrels (Fable II). Also, consider making “crates” that actually make sense as a place to store weapons, ammo, and money, like a safe/cash register (Bioshock, Fallout 3) or a gun locker/ammo magazine (can’t think of an example of a game that does this offhand, but I know they exist).

All right, I’ll call it a day with that. What weird quirks distract you in narrative games, and how would you like to see them changed? Feel free to chime in if you have better alternatives to those suggested here, too.

I’ve been seeing some fascinating interviews lately with David Cage, director of Heavy Rain and head of the development studio behind that game and its predecessor Indigo Prophecy (a.k.a. Fahrenheit). As you might have been hearing, one of the big points of buzz around Heavy Rain is that when characters die, they stay dead, so as to tell a more seamless and less frustrating story—a mechanic discussed elsewhere on this blog and in one of my articles. I’ve been fascinated to see that some gamers reacted with skepticism (or even hostility) to this idea when I first published on the topic, but it looks like some might be warming up to it—albeit with some reservations—now that it’s actually being implemented in a a promising fashion.

Consider this interview with Cage. Cage explains, “We always found that ‘game over’ situations were quite frustrating for gamers,” noting the repetitiveness of dying and replaying. “Here we just wanted to make it that dying is just a part of the story.”

Among regular gamers, however, this raises a frequent question: What’s to keep players from just reloading an old save to prevent that from happening? In the interviewer’s words, “If you choose one way and you don’t like what happens, can you go back, or is it set for that playthrough?”

Cage does his best to reassure that they have no desire to “frustrate” players, but notes also that “we hope to convince players to continue with the consequences of their actions because this is what will make your story unique and different.…”

The interviewer presses: “So there will be multiple save slots?”

Cage relents: “There will be different save slots, but we will encourage the player to play it the way it’s supposed to be played.”

I found this exchange fascinating because it so closely parallels conversations I’ve had with other gamers about what games need to do in order to be able to tell stories more complex than those of summer action flicks. A friend of mine, for instance, once pointed to Fallout 3 as an example of why games aren’t able to make players deal with their consequences: If you screw up and lose an important item or ally, you don’t “deal with the consequences,” but just reload a recent save. My response to this is that Fallout 3 is a great example of a game with only a halfhearted system (at best) for dealing with consequences. Yes, if you screw up, you will face negative consequences permanently—but there’s nothing there to encourage you to keep playing that way. Heavy Rain, however, is supposedly a game that puts this at the heart of its design, where dying is not “losing,” but an equally valid way of getting through the game, giving access to content you wouldn’t experience otherwise. (Cage even notes that, of the multiple endings, the ending where all four protagonists die is his favorite.)

The tricky thing here is that some players are simply more interested in “winning” in the most complete way possible than they are in exploring characters or themes (what I’ve described elsewhere as prioritizing “mastery” over “story”). This raises some interesting questions for me. Do game designers have a responsibility to make games appeal to both story-loving gamers and hardcore completists? Or, looked at another way, do game designers have a responsibility to offer players options for a more convenient gaming experience over options for a more fully realized dramatic experience?

This is a consideration other media producers don’t really need to worry about as much. When you buy a DVD, certain ways of interacting with the product are standardized, like chapter selection and the ability to pause. Games offer a broader range of methods of interaction. Considering a distinction Jesper Juul makes in Half Real, we could identify that some interactive elements are available within the game world itself (like choosing between different dialog options), while others take into consideration the concerns of the real world, outside the game (like choosing where to save your game). Protagonists face choices within the game, facing the consequences of their action, but players should also have some ability to choose how the game is played so that it fits into their lives conveniently.

In a way, this might be a matter of the respective rights of the player and the developer: Shouldn’t the player have the right to choose how the game will be played? If you don’t like letting your characters die and you want to play it differently, shouldn’t that be an option?

On the other hand, shouldn’t the developer have the right to encourage audiences to approach the story a certain way? Some narratives are meant to be challenging—not in terms of “did you push buttons fast enough,” but “how will you deal with this disturbing event”?

These are both valid design issues, though I think that in the case of a game that is largely predicated around “dealing with consequences,” making it easy to avoid consequences you don’t like kind of undercuts the whole point of the game. There are ways to make the game convenient for players’ real-world situation—like fast and frequent autosaves—that also discourage playing it like a die-and-retry style of game. (Or, for a compromise of sorts, completing the game once could even unlock the ability to save wherever the player wants in future play-throughs, to ensure that you don’t just see the same game on the next time you play.) This approach is, after all, based on the notion that the story will be more emotionally engaging and affecting when it’s not disrupted or repeated, when it’s not treated like a boss fight to be beaten. This is an attempt to mesh emotional storytelling with interactive gameplay.

In another interview, David Cage states:

My biggest frustration is I went to the theater to watch Gran Torino and I left the theater extremely frustrated. And I thought, “Oh my God. When will we be able to create experiences like that in video games?” We are just telling stories about little boys shooting and jumping. When will we be able to tell real stories with real characters and real emotions?

It must be frustrating for writers and directors to see people react to All in the Family as an uncritical celebration of racism, or to Fight Club as an uncritical glorification of violence (not that either is unproblematic). I imagine that asking “Will we be able to reload from saves?” feels similarly like the person asking has largely missed the point. I’m hoping Heavy Rain turns out to be sufficiently compelling that a game without trial-and-error comes to be seen as a viable branch for the medium rather than a head-scratching puzzle for the hardcore.

Over at Sexy Videogameland, Leigh Alexander relates an interesting bit from a panel she was on at the Game Developers Conference with Smartbomb co-author Heather Chaplin. In short, Heather said that the reason we haven’t seen many sophisticated games isn’t that the medium itself has too short a history, but that game developers themselves are a bunch of immature dudes who really just want to shoot things (”fucking adolescents,” in her words). Leigh responds that calling game developers immature is not the way to bring about this change, and that while the developers she knows personally might benefit from broader base of cultural references, this isn’t necessarily indicative of them being un-manly or immature. One portion of Leigh’s response stood out to me in particular:

Things that we hold up as groundbreaking in terms of story, immersion, emotion here in the West, are what — Oblivion? Mass Effect? Half-Life? Let me be enormously clear, here: Those are great games, and I have the highest genuine respect for the teams behind them and the way in which they try to further human interaction in their very high-quality work.

But plainly: That’s nerd stuff.

And hey. I’m a nerd. Just to be clear I’m not holier-than-thou here, I run a freaking video game blog in my spare time. But every time I hear a game designer talk about how they hope video games can be “sophisticated” and “reach broader audiences” the way that comic books can, I die a little inside. Comic books are cool and all, but if I thought video games would stay stuck in that niche, I’d quit writing. I agree with Chaplin: Tights-and-cape fantasies aimed at young men are not mature at all, and I want developers to do better.

This is a topic I’ve touched on before, suggesting that video games will not be considered an “adult” medium until they focus on doing things other than dressing up as a superhero (or, knight, space marine, rogue cop, etc.) and killing bad guys.

If this still feels a little abstract, it might be worth bringing up the second link I wanted to call attention to. Today I stumbled upon Close Range, a game (with a playable Flash “demo”) made by The Onion. The game, which is about a guy who has to rescue his brother, consists entirely of shooting people in the head at point blank range. The Onion News Network video describing the game (also at the above link) has some choice quotes:

SHANE PATEL, video game reviewer, IGN: “Just like great literature or film transports you to different worlds, Close Range transports you to a world where you shoot bullets into an endless stream of faces.” […]

JEFF TATE, ONN Tech Trends reporter: “Fans say it’s the games well-developed characters and story line that make Close Range feel so compelling.”

BRIAN CAMARCO, gamer: “You just feel like you’re inside this complex character, who’s thrust into this world where he has to blow people’s heads off.” […] “It’s completely open-ended. You can shoot someone in the ear, but you can also shoot them in the eye.”

This is excellent satire because the absurdity is so familiar to those who follow video game news and criticism. Close Range is “about a guy who has to rescue his brother” about as much as Gears of War is about Marcus Fenix’s search for his father and attempts to save Sera from the Locust Horde. Did you even know that the name of the planet in Gears of War was Sera, not Earth? It doesn’t really matter: These games are about killing your enemies. The characters, the back stories, and the graphic goriness are just the little bit of added spice, as it were.

I know that to many, there’s still a question of whether becoming “sophisticated” is even a desirable direction for a historically geeky medium to take. (If you’re interested in reading more on that, “(Why) Should Games Be Art?” here, and The Geek Culture Debate, chronicled by Matt S, and which I think might end in the middle of a discussion because I’m easily distracted.) As I’ve said before, though, I don’t think that making games that aren’t about geeky things, and aren’t focused on killing, doesn’t mean that those games will cease to be made. Action and sci-fi are still doing fine in the film and comics industries, but both film and comics can apparently handle award-winning works about the Holocaust. In video games, the term is never even uttered, even as the award-winning Call of Duty series has been spread over more years than World War II itself lasted.

I do think that the insular (and nerdy) culture of the gaming industry is partly to blame for the lack of innovation, but I’m inclined to agree with Leigh that berating developers on a personal level is not the way to effect change. Building a more diverse pool of game designers and developers, with creative backgrounds that show familiarity with media besides video games, is an important step, though there are other factors at work here. As Leigh and others point out, you can’t really fault the game industry for following a particular market. I don’t think that means, though, that no other market for games must ever exist. We have a bit of a catch-22 right now: You could change mainstream opinion of games by making more sophisticated games, but nobody will buy them until mainstream audiences are already convinced that games can be sophisticated.

For now, then, every game that attempts something different will be something of a risk—but if a comic book can win a Pulitzer Prize, I believe we could see one of those “risky” games as a similar turning point in the near future.

I’m a nerd. Not the “I was pretty popular in high school, but I loved those ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies” faux-geek, but the real-deal-Holyfield “I’ve seen every episode of ‘Stargate SG-1,’ and I openly dislike the taste of beer” Duke of Nerds.

I’m nearsighted, have terrible hair and get creepily good grades for comparatively little effort. Attractive girls still (kind of) make me nervous. I’m pretty sure my inner monologue is unabridged insanity.

I am, as my former kindergarten teacher put it, an “independent thinker.”

I’m fascinated by this concept of the “faux-geek.” The same concept comes up quite a bit in the material I come across in my research (such as in the analysis of the “fake nerd” in Ben Nugent’s American Nerd: The Story of My People). And, for obvious reasons, it’s something I have to address in my own writing.

The “nerd army” article quoted above doesn’t explicitly define what divides a real geek from a faux-geek, but it does offer some characteristics that the author considers self-evidently authentic: The real geek can’t achieve or actively dislikes that which is considered popular, mainstream, or adult (beer, ability to talk to the opposite sex); s/he embraces that which is denigrated (Stargate SG-1, good grades which are apparently “creepy”); and s/he sees some (undefined) connection between these characteristics and being “an independent thinker.” It’s clear that this author believes that the difference between the real geek and the fake has something to do with rejecting and/or being rejected by others according to certain cultural norms, but I’m not sure how some of these conditions (like “terrible hair” and nervousness around attractive women) might be connected to intellectualism and free thinking.

I’m curious, then, how people reading this blog might (or might not) draw the line between real geeks and faux-geeks. Certainly there are people who affect a trendy, nerdy image but wouldn’t call themselves nerds—but are people who actually call themselves geeks who you’d have to disagree with? If so, how can you tell that difference between the real and the fake? Even if you don’t make such clear judgment calls, do you find yourself acting differently around some geeks than you would around others? Personally, I’m more interested in keeping track of other people’s definitions than in declaring any one definition to be “right,” so I welcome any and all to chime in here—even if you’ve already put in your two cents on the subject of defining geeks vs. nerds.

Part of what fascinated me about this subject was how many journalists and even some other academics described video arcades as havens of racial harmony and class equality—a development, I think, partially resulting from the fact that arcades are much more socially stratified around gaming skills and interests than any more normally recognized index of cultural belonging. The distinction between “hardcore” and “casual” players made by many in the gaming press may be an incomplete and problematic construction of who plays games, but arcade-goers appear to make similar sorts of divisions between themselves, both in terms of social organization and formal differences in the games they choose to play. (Some of this now reads like a retrospective of how the Wii has been capable of reaching new gaming audiences, but this research was first conducted before the Wii’s control scheme was even announced. Ah well—so goes the pace of academic research and publication.)

The first version I wrote of this (even before presenting it at a conference) was actually quite a bit longer because a good portion was devoted to discussion of the much-lamented “death of arcades,” which ultimately seemed better addressed in some other paper. I focused on this direction because I’m more interested in connections between gameplay and culture than in developments in the industry, but we’re probably overdue to see a paper comparing and contrasting the American and Japanese arcade scenes. In fact, it was somewhat challenging to find enough sites for this paper, as some of those I planned to visit had closed not long before I started the research. Two more of my four sites have been effectively closed since submitting the paper for publication.

“Arcadian rhythms” goes online in the fall of 2009, but please feel free to email me now (jason @ this domain) if you’d like a copy to look at in advance.

I’ll be back with a real post sometime, too. Lots of good links lately—just very busy.

Update: The storm seems to have passed, and anonymous commenting is going back on. I’m thinking I’ll set up one of them “what does this image say?” verification tools to screen out evil robots, when I have a few more free moments. (Thanks, Denise!)

The paper might look somewhat familiar to regular readers of Geek Studies, as it weaves together some strands I’ve been playing with here for awhile. I discuss how the trial-and-error approach to death and failure can be a frustrating narrative interruption in games where the characters, story, and emotional involvement are treated as comparably important to the gameplay mechanics. Some games in recent years, however, have offered different—and sometimes quite emotionally engaging—ways of thinking about death and failure.

So, what’s this divisive issue I speak of? Well, game studies scholars might call it “ludology” versus “narratology” (even if I see it as a bridge between these). Among gamers, though, it seems to boil down to “the way games have traditionally been” versus “the direction (some) games are headed.”

On one side are the “hardcore.” We see this viewpoint represented by a subset of commenters on Kotaku, a gaming blog, where Maggie Green recently linked to the recent issue of Eludamos and remarked upon my article. Several of the commenters on Kotaku seemed receptive to the argument in the paper, and, given some of the games suggested as considerations of how death in games works, I suspect some would’ve been even more receptive if they could actually read it. (I suspect that link drove too much traffic to the journal, as its site has been down ever since.) Some other comments, meanwhile, simply refer to me and my article as “just wrong all over,” “pretentious bullshit,” and “as arrogant as he is ignorant.”

It’s hard not to feel insulted when people go beyond criticizing the work and start criticizing the person behind it, especially when the insults are so off-base. (“Doesn’t have a strong background in gaming”? “Armchair games theorist”? I’m tempted to throw down my glove and challenge somebody to duel. Choose your weapon, swords or pistols!) I see these hostile reactions, though, less as a personal attack or even an informed criticism of the paper itself, and more as a knee-jerk reaction to the idea that the focus of gaming is changing at all.

Much of the protest in these comments comes from gamers who clearly feel threatened that anyone would want to change their medium. For these gamers, the whole point of games is to face challenges and prove mastery, and focusing on any other appeal—like storytelling—is a sign of femininity and weakness among players, or ungratefulness from the industry. (We see similar vitriol toward Nintendo in recent years for abandoning its “core.”) One commenter, for example, suggests that the problem with death scenes has already been answered in the form of “easy mode,” and that other modes are for “old school gamers and everyone who’s done with Easy Mode, where we screw the story and get hair on our chest.” To these players, the story is for “casuals”—those who aren’t real, manly gamers.

Oh well. We’ve already discussed around here how gaming encompasses multiple appeals (as have a number of other writers), but some opinions are set on the issue. Even as some passionate gamers on a blog decry the idea that games should evolve, however, other passionate gamers and developers point furiously at examples of how games have already begun to change, and call for even more.

In a recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel, for instance, film critic Roger Moore strangely extrapolated from the Max Payne movie adaptation that games in general are “emotionally inferior” to film. He then erroneously stated, “Nobody ever shed a tear over a video-game character’s death.” Having just written a paper that I would’ve hoped could put that very statement to rest, I checked out the comments thread of that review, and found I had little to add to what had already been stated. Gamers asked, what about Aeris? What about Shadow of the Colossus? And so on. (Also feel free to check out Kotaku’s comment thread on a post about this review, offering another glimpse at differing opinions about the role of storytelling in gaming.)

Games aren’t inherently emotionally inferior; we just don’t yet have many examples of games that really prioritize story comparably to gameplay. That’s why the same handful of games keeps coming up over and over again in Moore’s comments thread.

This is changing, however, and that’s what “‘You are dead. Continue?’” is about. Changing approaches to death and failure in games represent just one piece of a larger move to create games that give more attention to narrative. The “hardcore” may call me a n00b, and film critics may think that games have no stories to speak of, but I suspect we’d see some different opinions, say, on Bioware’s forums, where the regulars discuss immersion breakers and actions they can’t bear to make their protagonist commit. Meanwhile, the developers of the upcoming PS3 title Heavy Rain pledge that the game’s story keeps going even after the protagonist dies, and urge players not to restart from checkpoints, instead “bearing with the consequences of their actions”—exactly the sort of development predicted in my paper.

These are just a couple examples that didn’t make it to my article before it went online (at press time, as it were). I suspect we’ll see even more over the next several months.

Let’s be clear here: I enjoy wickedly challenging games from time to time as much as the next player. I play my games almost exclusively on “Insanity,” “Legendary,” or “Expert” as soon as I unlock that difficulty level. I don’t mope every time I die in a video game. And, heaven help me, I still enjoy playing NES games like Legendary Wings and Ninja Gaiden.

But some games, like N’gai Croal says, are more about getting from point A to point B, and experiencing that in a way you never could with a movie. My paper isn’t arguing that game developers need to start making these; it’s explaining how this has already started. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing where it’s headed. If it’s any consolation to the hardcore gamers out there, I doubt this will eliminate your favorite genres any more than Citizen Kane prevented Max Payne from hitting the big screen.