We’re launching with a bunch of reviews already up, with plenty more on the way. I’d especially like to draw your attention, however, to some of the commentaries and features I’ve been working on over the last few months, including pieces on…

• what roleplaying games look like when they don’t involve playing roles;
• game controls in a world without buttons;
• some lessons learned from Glitch;
• the evils (and some of the good!) of cool-down timers in game design;
• an argument in defense of pointless games;
• and the ethics of “freemium” as a business model.

I’ll have more to say soon about some of the other venues I’ve been writing for. For now, though, I’m too excited about this project finally seeing the light of day to share this space with anything else!

Over at Kotaku, Kirk Hamilton offers a fairly comprehensive round-up of critics’ comparisons between the game and its trailer, and some thoughtful consideration of why so many seemed so let down. What was so special about this situation that it should provoke such strong reactions? It is, after all, just an ad, and everybody knows by now that cinematic game commercials typically have little to do with the actual gameplay experience. Why get so worked up about the game being different? Kirk hazards a guess:

The trailer was well-made and engaging; it channeled a hugely popular TV series (Lost) and it showed a little girl getting brutally murdered as her mother looked on. But I think the real reason for the trailer’s impact was that it promised us something that, as it turned out, we wanted very badly.

We may not have known it at the time, but I think we want a zombie game that is tragic and sad, action-packed and tense, full of loss and emotional catharsis. We want a game to make us tear up, to show us impossible loss, to make [us] come to terms with the actual risks and small but human costs of a deadly viral outbreak. Brilliantly, manipulatively, the Dead Island trailer promised us that, and our desire to see our wish fulfilled outweighed our skepticism. It was fun to believe that maybe, just maybe, this game would be different from the others.

I think he’s close, but not quite there. As Tom Bissell writes at Grantland, “There is, anyway, only one story worth telling in a zombie game, and here it is: See those zombies over there? You should probably get away from them.” Sure, on a thematic level, zombies represent all kinds of metaphors about consumerism or our inherent primal nature or whatever – but at the end of the day, the plots tend to be pretty much the same.

I don’t think the world is specifically clamoring for the most emotional zombie story ever. Rather, I think we just want more games that tell stories worth caring about at all, told in a way we haven’t seen in so many other games already. Dead Island looked like it might be one of those games, and it wasn’t.

Big-budget video games with complex narratives are still pretty dominated by the genres typically associated with geeks and young men: science-fiction, fantasy, and horror, with the more “realistic” end of the spectrum occupied by gangsters, soldiers, and cowboys. Think back to the most acclaimed stories in video gaming and see if you can come up with one that doesn’t fit into one of those subsets. Mass Effect, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Fallout, Shadow of the Colossus, the Final Fantasy series, and even the Uncharted games end up at something fantastical by the end. (Honorable mentions go to anything published by Rockstar, though I wonder if it’s no coincidence that they have more mainstream appeal and also come up less often in the “games that made me cry” conversations.)

These are, of course, not exclusively the domain of geeks; they’re also the blockbuster genres of Hollywood action movies. Hollywood, however, has also managed to make some stirring dramatic content in other genres. In video games, if you want drama and high audiovisual production values, you pretty much have to accept that the story’s also going to have wizards, space marines, or – sure, what the heck? – zombies. I imagine that “an emotional story about zombies” must have been seriously enticing for some of the people ogling that trailer, but I think it was too explosively popular for that to be all that was going on.

This is what I think happened: We almost got a rare taste of what we keep insisting video games can be. Meaningful. Emotional. Thought-provoking. Artful. And – this is key – different. The trailer made us wonder if it would be different not just in its story, but in gameplay, each component complementing the other.

When was the last time you saw a major console release that told a grand story and really played differently? The first title that comes to mind for me is Heavy Rain – a deeply flawed title to be sure, but so much broader in its story, in its scenes, in the ways that you could interact with its world, than perhaps any of its peers. Other games map one or two constantly repeated actions to each button – press RT to shoot, X to reload, A to jump, over and over again – but Heavy Rain had us cradling a baby to sleep, searching a crime scene for clues, escaping a car in a wrecker. The controls didn’t always work very well, but the approach meant that we got a real story rather than the same action scene played out over and over again in different settings. No wonder that so many who saw Dead Island’s trailer speculated that it might be “Heavy Rain with zombies” – we haven’t really seen other games attempt any story with quite so much range in emotion and content, successful or otherwise. We expected something more than another game about whacking monsters with blunt instruments.

I don’t think we can really hold it against Techland for not meeting our expectations with Dead Island. It’s a rare developer that can risk a AAA console release that bears practically no resemblance to any known genre of gameplay. After all, it’s something of a truism among critics and developers that a game with a good story but cruddy gameplay isn’t worth playing, whereas a game with a cruddy story can still be playable. And it sounds like Dead Island is playable, at least.

I think it’s worth noting, though, that so many of us really hoped for this to be that other game, that special and different game. There’s an audience waiting for this, and I suspect that the developer who finally pulls it off will be celebrated and imitated for years to come – with or without the zombies.

During the podcast, each of us chats about our personal experiences in gaming, I fail to restrain myself from babbling about my dissertation research, Scott awes and terrifies with his tales of villainy, and Hipster, Please! gets an unplanned plug (because we recorded it right when I finally got around to listening to 20-Sided Rhymes). I hope you enjoy it.

I realized recently that just about everything I write about games could start that way. I write about games because I find them so interesting to play and to analyze, but as any of my friends will tell you, I am one of the most cantankerous and critical entertainment consumers you will ever meet. I’m the guy who complains on the way out of the epic movie we just watched together because of that plot hole in act 2, or who watches every episode of Lost just to pick apart every foreshadowed plot point that never comes up again, or who tells you in one conversation that he loved Red Dead Redemption and then will go write an entire blog post about its flaws.

I am hard to please, and even when I am pleased, I’ll probably still criticize. This is why I don’t really reflect much on the “Game of the Year.” I can’t pick one; I’m too picky.

I do read other people’s (and publications’) “game of the year” lists, though. One of my favorites each year is Slate’s “Gaming Club” roundup, which is what got me thinking about the topic for this post. You see, I was a little surprised to read the overwhelming consensus among this year’s contributors that Red Dead Redemption was the game of the year. There’s a lot I loved about that game, of course, despite all the griping in my last post. Still, I was a bit surprised that the repetitive gameplay was so easily forgiven.

Sure, the world was great, the characters interesting, the story thoughtful—but did all those critics really love following the same old Grand Theft Auto formula over and over again? As my friend Tony likes to say, video games often boil down to “running errands for psychopaths”: go to place, talk to someone, kill people, repeat. Red Dead Redemption did some things better than every other game last year, maybe than any other game ever, but in other areas, I’d call it sorely lacking. Personally, I had to put the game down for a few months because I got so bored of the gameplay. It was only after playing Fallout New Vegas into the ground that I was able to return to Red Dead Redemption with renewed appreciation for its gorgeous graphics, believable character animation, and rich environment—but I still rushed through the rest of the plot missions because “running errands for psychopaths” never really got any more interesting.

To be honest, though, I can’t really think of a game from 2010 that I’d call better than Red Dead Redemption. I wouldn’t call the game I enjoyed playing the most (probably Mass Effect 2), or even the game I spent the most time playing (definitely Fallout New Vegas), the “Game of the Year.” Objectively speaking, these had even more glaring flaws than Red Dead Redemption in many ways, from Mass Effect 2‘s ridiculous plot points and equally repetitive gameplay (but of a kind I just don’t mind repeating as much) to New Vegas‘s graphical inferiority and unforgivable bugginess (which many of us will play through even if we won’t forgive it).

When I look back on the games of 2010, then, I don’t see a single “Game of the Year.” I see a bunch of innovations that excited me, and old conventions I wish we’d move past. I suppose my view is more like an awards show than a top 10 list, a list of ways in which games raised the bar this past year for the games that will follow.

Red Dead Redemption, for instance, wins hands-down for the most realistic game world. Running over dusty paths kicks up dust; staying out in the rain gets you wet; hanging around wild animals gets you killed (or pelts, if you’re careful). The game isn’t just set in “the old West”—it’s about the old West. “Open world” games with vast, outdoor environments, but without changes in weather, will be a little disappointing from now on.

Mass Effect 2, meanwhile, wins for best acting and cinematography in interactive dialog. I don’t mean the voice acting (which was fine, but may have been outdone elsewhere), but the way the digital actors themselves interacted on the screen, and the way the camera moved with them. Staring at blank-faced mannequins in Fallout games (or even the characters in the first Mass Effect) no longer feels acceptable. I might also credit Mass Effect 2 as the best serialized story in gaming, but it wasn’t actually presented in pieces; it just felt that way. Many felt the plot was lacking, focusing on “side missions” rather than the overarching plot about facing a galactic menace, but I’d say it turned the idea of “side missions” on its head, replacing pointless fetch quests with television-quality, episodic sci-fi.

Heavy Rain deserves credit for conceiving of conflict beyond combat in a story-driven game. I’m quick to admit that the controls impeded immersion, the plot was riddled with holes, and the developer’s idea of female empowerment is accidentally insulting at best. Still, I think it demonstrated that it’s possible to tell a story in a video game that doesn’t take place in space, or in the old West, or in a Tolkienesque fantasy world, where killing another human being is not the expected norm, but a rare and major turning point in plot and character development.

In my own retrospective, even the lowly Alpha Protocol deserves credit for the best fusing of gameplay and narrative elements in a dialog system that I’ve ever seen. As I wrote about here months ago, dialog in Alpha Protocol isn’t just a choose-your-own-adventure mechanic to decide whether your character is a good guy or a jerk, but is both a narrative element and a game mechanic in itself, an exercise in social interaction (and, sometimes, psychological manipulation). I’ve found myself wanting more from other games’ dialog systems since playing this, and I’m pretty excited to see previews and speculation indicating that L.A. Noire is taking a similar approach, even playing up the need to read facial expressions.

I can’t help but notice that even in the course of praising these games, I’m pointing out what’s wrong about them, or how they show other games to be lacking. To me, I suppose, the real Game of the Year may be the game of next year, the game that I hope was implied by the advances I saw made in 2010. It’s the game that learned from Heavy Rain‘s successes and failures in emotional realism, Mass Effect 2‘s cinematic dialog, Red Dead Redemption‘s rich environment. It’s the game that you briefly mistake for a movie when you walk by GameStop in the mall, and that makes your relatives admit that while they don’t play games (except on the Wii, of course), they heard interesting things about this one. It’s the game that I’ll gripe about in a blog post because the walk cycles looked a bit off, or the inventory management was more complex than it needed to be, or the controls felt a bit laggy—but I’ll sure be looking forward to what it inspires in the year to come.

I liked the game, too, but I think I must have been spoiled by all the RPGs I play that take “choice” as a matter of course in plot development. Actually, what bothered me most about Red Dead Redemption wasn’t the lack of choice per se in any given interaction—such as not being able to choose your own dialog in cut scenes, as you might in many RPGs—but the times where it looked like I had a choice and it turned out I didn’t.

(Some major SPOILERS follow.)

The most obvious example of not-choices in the game are the duels that take place as part of side quests. If you’ve already been accepting duels from random, mouthy strangers, and especially if you’ve been taught the finer parts of dueling in tutorials from the story and side quests, you already know that you can shoot an opponent in the arm to disarm him without killing him. The story makes clear that protagonist John Marston is trying to change his outlaw ways, so it’s nice to have an option to not kill people for a change.

Unfortunately, this only holds up for random strangers and the one side quest where you’re required to disarm somebody. In other side quests, if you try to disarm your opponent, it might look like you’re about to win, but you can’t. Why? Because the only ending scripted for the quest was the one in which you win by killing your opponent. The only alternative is to die and try it again.

The most egregious example of not-choice at work, however, has to be in the climactic scene near the end of the game. Cornered by the army, John Marston sends his family to safety, walks out of his barn, and automatically goes into a moment of slow-motion “dead eye.” I knew I didn’t have time to line up a shot on every soldier there: John was going to die a brutal, heartbreaking death.

This was an excellent scene.

No, I was not at all bothered by being denied choice here, by not having any means of escape. For the purposes of the plot and the themes the game explored, it made perfect, gut-wrenching sense for this to be linear, final, inescapable. What was going to happen was clear, even inevitable, so I didn’t feel ripped off. It speaks well to the storytellers behind this that the scene has so much emotional weight to it. We’re given just a moment to reflect, in slow-motion, how the last seconds of John Marston’s life will go.

I decided that John would go down shooting.

John had done all he could to change his ways. He’d fought among these men, these soldiers. He’d talked to them. They were relatively innocent, caught up in orders they didn’t understand from people they didn’t fully know. John wasn’t going to shoot these men if he didn’t have to, but he was sure as hell going to get the last word in with the two backstabbing government men who’d kidnapped his family, and now broke their word to leave the Marstons in peace. If John was going, he was taking these guys with him.

I lined up two shots—one on Ross, and one on Fordham, targeting the heads—and fired away. They went down, and I felt good. The cut scene started afterward, and John was riddled with bullets, staggering to the ground and coughing blood.

Then, Ross lights up a cigar, and he and Fordham walk off smugly.

I don’t mind having no choice, but I do mind having mechanics that imply an illusion of choice, and then seeing the wires in the act (and then having the wires snap and being told we need to run the scene again until I shut up and do it the director’s way). The funny thing is that there actually are two ways to finish most side quests, as they have different dialog recorded depending on whether you play them as John or as his son (whom you play as after the end of the main storyline). It’s not that Rockstar failed to recognize that things could go more than one way, but that some of the most obvious choices weren’t accounted for, or seemed too troublesome to deal with.

In a game with this much polish, this much detail, this much care to storytelling, the jarring inconsistencies are even more jarring for being so unrepresentative of the whole. Overall, I’d say that Red Dead Redemption represents a triumph of storytelling and world-building, with one major caveat: A choice that goes unrecognized in a game is much worse than offering no choice at all.

You might notice that this isn’t the kind of peer-reviewed, open-access academic research article I normally link to here. For a change of pace, I thought I’d pitch this one to one of my favorite online magazines, The Escapist Magazine. I’ve been reading The Escapist‘s thoughtful articles on gaming since the publication was available as a (smartly designed) PDF download, and I’ve been pleased to see it getting some additional attention lately through features like Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation reviews.

Even in my academic writing, I try not to sound that academic. Still, it was nice in this case to just relate an experience without worrying about whether I mention enough French theorists or statistical data to be taken seriously by my readers. Also, did you know that some publications will pay you to write things? The novelty of this has yet to wear off. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the piece as much as I enjoyed writing it.

From Games to Comics: I saw a few people (including my buddy Dan) link this Kotaku post about an Apple patent for a technology that would turn your video game stories into comic books through a series of screen shots. The example used in the patent is clearly from Mass Effect, with the implication being that this is most intended for games where the player gets to choose how the story unfolds, so each comic created would be about a player’s own, personal story.

Kotaku seems pretty jazzed about the idea. Personally, I’m confident this would result in many terrible comic books that might make us realize just how disjointed video game plots tend to be. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, as it might encourage better stories in games in the long run. As I mentioned in a recent post, for instance, Alpha Protocol and Heavy Rain both foreshadow things that the game might never deliver on again later, depending on what choices you make. We forgive that kind of poor storytelling in games because it’s a concession to player choice and because games are often so long that we forget what happened earlier. I think we would notice those kinds of plot holes and paths leading to nowhere if we could revisit the stories in another format.

With Great Power: A BBC article summarizes a study by Sharon Lamb describing how superheroes make poor role models for boys. (I can’t find just one article, as the study seems to have been presented at a conference and possibly derived from the book Packaging Boyhood.) The researchers suggest that it’s problematic that so many comic book heroes are either hypermasculine jerks or lazy slackers, as they present poor role models to boys.

What I found particularly interesting, though, was that the researchers don’t seem to be condemning superhero comics altogether, but sort of commenting on how the “dark and gritty” move since the ’90s has resulted in male characters with less depth and emotional vulnerability. I imagine that there are examples of heroes that don’t fit this “problematic” mold nowadays, and I’ve never been one to suggest that material for adults should be changed or restricted in order to provide “healthy” material for kids, but I thought it was some interesting food for thought. In a way, Lee and Ditko’s Spider-man was a real nerd role model for readers, but I imagine those are harder to find in comics today.

Catching up with the Trend: The BBC also asks “Will Geeks Inherit the Earth?” (with regard to politics and business). The Guardian muses on “The Geek Stranglehold on Cinema” (which may be debatable after Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s unimpressive box office take this past weekend). CNN asks: “Geeks: Smart, Harmless, Authentic, Exploited?” Adweek notes that “Consumers Embrace Geekdom,” and Businessweek reflects on ThinkGeek: The Home of Geek Chic.” (I am pretty sure these came from Church, who sends me so many interesting links that I lose track of them.)

The Psychology of Geek Community: Psychology Today offers some words on how Comic Con offers a community for geeks and nerds. The article notes…

The folks at the convention may use the Internet to create their own virtual communities of like-minded “friends” (I use the term friends loosely, in much the same way as Facebook does). But there is something about stepping into a convention center, an exhibit hall, and a hotel, knowing that you share an interest with almost everyone there.

… And handily sums up about two or three chapters of my dissertation. Turns out I can be pretty wordy!

“Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?”: Geek Feminism reposts an incisive critique of issues of sexism in World of Warcraft and gamer/geek culture more broadly, “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery.”

I have a bunch more links about Scott Pilgrim, but I’m thinking that deserves its own post after I get some other work done.

The basic point of the paper is to offer a rough typology of elements that players find “appealing” about games, providing an analytical vocabulary that critics, scholars, and developers can use in describing what “works” (and what doesn’t) in game, and why, without assuming that it’s the players themselves who exist in types. The appeals I’ve been looking at are those that I’ve heard or read players themselves describe, even if indirectly, when discussing how they engage with games. I’ve been describing these appeals lately mastery, story, sociality, and foolery (not too unlike what I called them in my early musings on this subject). Some other kinds of appeals have occurred to me as potentially worth discussing, though I haven’t heard other players specifically describe them as much—e.g., do the Wii and Dance Dance Revolution offer an appeal of physicality distinct from other kinds of appeals?

It’s occurred to me recently, though, that I’m leaving out a couple other kinds of “appeals” almost willfully, and maybe that’s just a bit too convenient for me. You don’t hear players describing these as things they like about games, but you might hear players note them as reasons why they play games.

These are the appeals that players themselves refer to when they talk about planning raids for World of Warcraft even when they don’t really enjoy the game anymore. These are the appeals that keep people coming back again and again to Facebook games that offer no story, no challenge (and thus no sense of mastery), no social interaction, and no way to explore, break the rules, or otherwise “fool around.” These are the appeals that Ian Bogost was critiquing when he designed Cow Clicker.

Cow Clicker is a game on Facebook that involves nothing more than logging in periodically to click on a cow. It is meant as a satire of other Facebook social games, an object lesson on the pointlessness of games that require frequent, repetitive updating—what Ian calls compulsion—and offer no more challenge, strategy, or creativity than simply clicking a mouse—what Ian calls optionalism. (Ian describes other effects of formally pointless Facebook games, but I think you’d be harder pressed to argue that players actually respond to “destroyed time” as an appeal.)

Arguably, compulsion may be seen as a trait of the player than an appeal built into a game, but I mention it here because I think one could argue that some games are designed specifically to capitalize on this. Game designer Nels Anderson, for instance, draws out the comparison between these habits in Facebook games and “gaming” in the casino sense of the term. Facebook games that require you to do nothing but periodically click on a cow are essentially like slot machines, only without the slim chance of a monetary payout—they are compulsion plus optionalism in a nutshell. Roleplaying games and MMORPGs often skip the optionalism for a rather textured gameplay experience, but arguably encourage compulsion by requiring grinding or even by providing an environment in which new equipement must always be acquired for “Keeping up with the Joneses.”

And so I feel stuck in my mission to describe the appeals of gaming. I want to offer broad categories of appeal so that just about any other kind of appeal can be broken down into them—e.g., story might include either or both “spectatorship” (in narrative games with lengthy cut scenes) and “directorship” (in narrative games where you get to choose the direction the story takes). If I really want to be entirely inclusive in describing what gets and keeps people playing games (as opposed to proscribing what ought to be available as an appeal), I may have to figure out a way to include appeals that I personally find more problematic than appealing.

And as a bit of a postscript: I wrote this draft, let it sit awhile, and then found out that Michael Abbott is putting together a similar sort of project at his Brainy Gamer blog called The Fun Factor, which approaches this question more from the micro-level than my macro-approach. Head on over and leave a comment to describe what you enjoy about particular games, which he’ll be compiling later.

To be fair, critics’ complaints with the game are not unfounded. The game is indeed a transparent rip-off of Mass Effect, but was stuck in development for so long that it looks and feels dated now. Released months after the supremely polished Mass Effect 2, Alpha Protocol has the graphical fidelity of the first Mass Effect, but without the eerie and expansive alien worlds. The run-and-gun combat also feels like the first hour of Mass Effect‘s, in which weapons are so wildly inaccurate that it feels like firing blind. You can instead focus on putting points into “stealth builds” with little or no focus on gunplay, instead focusing on a pared-down sneaking mechanic reminiscent of the Splinter Cell series. This is a recipe for frustration, however, thanks to extremely challenging boss fights in rooms where you have nowhere to hide. And, though I haven’t seen others mention this much (perhaps because some reviews I’ve read seem to find the plot confusing), the game has occasional serious issues with keeping its story straight, such as when my protagonist seems surprised during one mission to discover intel that I (the player) already paid for and read in-game before the mission even started.

All of that said, Alpha Protocol does two things that blow most of its contemporaries out of the water in terms of narrative game design. I hope Obsidian reuses these design decisions in its later games, and that others find some influence in them.

The first of the two things Alpha Protocol does right is a focus on dialog as game. I don’t just mean allowing you to choose your own things to say in dialog scenes. What I mean is that conversations become a mini-game of their own, in a way. Dialog isn’t just flavor to pad the space between “action” scenes—it is a kind of action. In the very beginning of the game, the protagonist is told that he was recruited for this operation because of his ability to manipulate people, making it clear that whatever your choice of skills, whatever your imagined attitude, you’ll get rewarded for reading other people and speaking to them accordingly. And then the game delivers: During a conversation, the game (relatively unobtrusively) tells you when a conversation partner begins to like or dislike you more based on your responses.

There are benefits both to being liked and being disliked, depending on the character and the situation. Sometimes you need to weigh what’s most valuable to you as a player and as a spectator. Would you rather personally impress a certain mob boss, or would you rather blackmail him, now that you’ve discovered he lied to you and nearly got you killed? Would you rather have a handler who hates your guts, knowing that this will make you a better fighter just to spite them? Do you really want a coked-up, murdering mobster to consider you a pal?

To consider a contrast, recall that in Mass Effect a great many dialog prompts turn out the same way no matter what you respond (which becomes disappointingly apparent when you replay using a different kind of character). In both Mass Effect and Fallout 3 (and even more so in Mass Effect 2), conversation options are pretty cleanly split between “thing I need to say to keep things moving” and “better thing to say, unlocked by progress of a conversation-related skill.” If you’ve got a high enough Speech skill or Charm/Intimidate skill, it’s just about never worthwhile to say anything but the special “unlocked” dialog option. This can be fun, but it also feels rather unlike actual conversation, especially as many of the “locked” dialog options are extremely obvious to anyone who’s ever been in a real conversation before (which hopefully includes all of us). Dialog then becomes a reward for the point-allocation portion of the game, rather than a game in itself.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Alpha Protocol‘s approach, meanwhile, is that all of these conversation options—and other choices you make along the way—seem to actually matter, even if only in tiny but observable ways. This brings me to my second point about what Alpha Protocol does so impressively: making character choices feel truly relevant in how stories unfold. I realize even as I type this that it doesn’t sound very different from what earlier RPGs have accomplished, but the difference here, I think, is in the details, in how far the developers were willing to take this concept to make replays feel genuinely different. Bioware has made a big deal about how many thousands of variables it tracks between Mass Effect installments—but as players point out, the actual effect of your actions in Mass Effect 1 tended to be no more than a brief email message in the sequel.

Having played and replayed Alpha Protocol multiple times now (it’s very quick to get through once you know what you’re doing), I can attest that dialog, challenges, and rewards can change quite dramatically depending on various choices you make. Acting suave, professional, or aggressive to any given character changes how they regard you, what information they give you, and what information they share about you with others. This means that the order in which you do your missions is quite relevant, as your reputation can precede you as you get later in the game. Characters address you differently depending on how you’ve treated other characters, whether you approach missions with stealth or rushing in with guns-a-blazing, and what kind of clothing you happen to be wearing. And, of course, the game offers the kind of major lynchpin choice moments that you see in other games, and more of them than you tend to encounter elsewhere—multiple moments of deciding who lives or who dies, whether to prioritize a mission over a friend, and so on.

Your choices are further chronicled by minor “perks” you get awarded along the way: A couple extra skill points, a bonus to Endurance, or a discount on intel prices to mark noteworthy accomplishments, like that time you snuck past those guards, made a friend with an informant, or finally got 100 critical hits. In general, you get rewarded one way or another, regardless of what you do, but the point here is that the game lets the player know in a concrete way (even if you don’t play the game repeatedly like I did) that there was more than one way to do things, with more than one possible result.

The reason why I say that Alpha Protocol has the potential to be so important is that the two things it excels at—dialog and choice—represent the union of a traditionally “narrative” element with a traditionally “gamelike” element. In this way, it’s kind of trying to do the same thing as Heavy Rain, despite how dissimilar they seem to be on the surface. Personally, I believe these games are on to something, even if they haven’t quite gotten it yet. Both are trying to find a way to tell a story with “action” that isn’t just a series of fight scenes. (Heavy Rain has few fights at all, and Alpha Protocol usually rewards you much better for remaining completely unseen than for winning fights.) I think the major failing of both games is more one of plot than of gameplay: If you’re going to develop a game system tailored to telling a story, it needs to have a story worth telling. Plot holes and inconsistencies are bad enough, but both games also offer so many choices that they fail basic storytelling tests like following up on their own foreshadowing (unless you choose very specific options along the way).

If we’re ever going to see a game that has any kind of narrative purpose besides “an action movie you get to control,” we need games that can handle dialog and protagonist choice in interesting ways. It’s not enough just to make us watch a conversation, and I’m starting to wonder whether the illusions of choice we’ve gotten so far will continue to satisfy in the future. Alpha Protocol is not the long-promised game that will prove to everyone that “games can be art,” but it’s potentially a bigger step than critics give it credit for, and we could do worse than to look to it as an influence.

This article focuses on how people interact in arcades, and how social dynamics and the cultural connotations behind games influences who plays what and with whom. It’s not nominally about geeks or geek cultures, but this study did end up influencing how I thought about my dissertation research. When you get to the parts about how people insulate themselves socially, and particularly one moment in which a boy loudly proclaims upon winning a game, “I’m the One! I’m ****in’ Neo!”, you may see what I mean.

A lot has happened since I wrote the first draft of this paper, back when the Wii was still codenamed the “Revolution.” I wish I had been quick enough in revising it and progressing through the academic publishing process that I could have explained why the results of my research indicated that Nintendo’s new console was going to sell like hotcakes, but not as much among the gamers who call themselves “hardcore.” The best I can do is point back and say, “In retrospect, this should have been obvious to us.” Ah, research.

My thoughts on the terms ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ as applied to game players have also developed somewhat since writing this article, but I think that has more to do with how the terms are applied elsewhere than with what seemed appropriate for this paper. I opted to use ‘experienced’ over ‘hardcore’ in the most recent revision, and I suspect I could have replaced ‘casual’ with ‘inexperienced’ or ‘irregular’ (which is not at all consistent with how you’d refer to a “casual” gamer who plays Plants vs. Zombies several times a day), but those terms have their own sorts of connotations as well. For now, I hope I can be forgiven for using the terms that seemed most appropriate at the time, despite their lack of terminological specificity. For more on how I was thinking about the terms, check out Diane Carr’s excellent 2005 study in Simulation and Gaming, “Contexts, Gaming Pleasures, and Gendered Preferences” (sadly, not available free online unless you belong to a library that subscribes to the journal).

Of course, probably the most predictable development since writing this has been the continued erosion of the arcade business model in the US. The first draft of this paper covered such developments in greater detail, but I had to pare the focus down to something more manageable. For now, though, I’ll say that arcades have only gotten more scarce since this paper was written, and I think that’s a shame. For all the negative stereotypes surrounding such establishments, what I remember most about my months of research was how central some of these arcades were to their communities. The two sites where this struck me the most—”City Arcade” and “Strip Mall Arcade”—are still in business. The other two have closed since turning in the final revision of this paper to the journal editor. I can’t speak for the reasoning behind closing down “Campus Arcade,” but as far as I know, “Sports Bar Arcade” was still doing good business when its landlords refused to renew its lease so the space could be sold to a chain store. As the end of the paper predicts, chains like Dave & Busters still seem to be doing okay.

As a final side note, I thought some of my readers here might arch an eyebrow upon reading the sentence, “One of the most useful tools at my disposal was being good enough at certain games—and being sufficiently able to gauge the ability of my opponents—to control for the outcome of a match.” Please do not think me merely boastful. Before graduate school, I worked a job as an overnight security guard in a mall (which was not among my research sites). I was only expected to patrol once every few hours, and invited to use the rest of my night as I wished, so long as I stayed awake. The mall left the arcade open all night, where it remained accessible only to the security and cleaning staff. The arcade had Soul Calibur 2, and I am drawn to playing characters with Italian names. Let us leave it at that.

(But yes, I do still stink at the entire Tekken series.)