BioWare: because you need a doctorate to be that awesome.

Discussion of Mass Effect 2 is long overdue, I feel, but a general review is hardly necessary. It's a fantastic title, improving over its predecessor in every way, including the emotional intensity of its story. As with Dragon Age, the main plot is disappointingly simple, involving an unambiguously evil bad guy with an unambiguously evil horde of minions, but the journey is much more potent and engaging than the destination might lead you to assume. Also there are explosions and murder simulation, which is rarely a bad thing.

Spoilers ahead: I'd like to share another anecdote, as I did with Dragon Age, because I so enjoy an opportunity to test my philosophical ideas. The tale involves the 'loyalty mission' of one Mordin Solus, scientist salarian, who had a hand in optimizing a devastating biological weapon called the genophage, which has rendered an entire species nearly sterile. It was used against the krogan, whose brutality and aggression rendered them a galactic threat, and functions by reducing the viability rate of krogan pregnancies. No krogan are killed by the genophage, but so few are born that the species can no longer pose any large-scale threat due to the lack of numbers.

While on the mission, the player learns that a potential cure for the genophage has been created, and must decide whether the research data should be saved or destroyed. Mordin is opposed to the cure: he feels guilty about his role in the disease, but believes it a necessary evil. The krogan, if allowed to repopulate, would once again pose a great threat to the galaxy at large, likely resulting in innumerable deaths, krogan and otherwise. Even if cured, the krogan aren't likely to just start behaving nicely out of gratitude - reciprocal altruism does not turn off their aggressive survival instincts, nor is it generally effective on a species-wide level (not every krogan would care to reciprocate).

One might argue for saving the cure to reinforce a kind of social contract that all species will respect the welfare of all other species, but Galactic Peace, much like plain old World Peace, is a bit of a pipe dream. Regardless, concern for the health of the species is misplaced: the fate of the species does not directly affect the happiness of its members. The genophage does not harm any living krogan (except to crush the dreams of those interested in parenthood, which isn't many), whereas a strong krogan population poses a threat to the welfare of many individuals across many species. As long as we act under the assumption that the krogan area a danger, then curing the genophage is a bad idea regardless of how you approach the issue.

Some pirates are just pragmatic. Some pirates are just total assholes.

A report came in from the host website of the Humble Indie Bundle that more than 25% of the downloaded copies of the 5 game bundle were pirated. One can only hope that the number is inaccurate and inflated by legitimate repeat downloads. The Humble Bundle was pay-what-you-want with a minimum price of one USA penny. All profits from the bundle were split between either going directly into the pockets of the game developers (allowing them to continue their outstanding work) or being sent to two charities, including Child's Play, a charity that donates toys and games to children's hospitals worldwide. There is no logical reason to steal this game bundle, except to be a douchebag.

Copyright infringement is a strange crime. Unlike physical stealing, with information piracy the victim does not actually lose any property, rather they only lose the opportunity to make a sale. This is because ideas and information are not really be 'stolen', they can only be copied - but the process of creating and sharing a copy still costs the original creator the price of what might have otherwise been a sale.

The copying of content to allow others to enjoy it amounts to sharing, and sharing within reason is rarely considered criminal. Sharing with even one person is (to the creator) effectively equivalent to stealing one copy, but it's only once a large group of people start 'sharing' that it becomes problematic enough to be thought of as a crime. Arguably, this is an arbitrary standard: if the information can be copied so easily, even effortlessly, then it has no real market value; only the act of it's initial creation has value. Information could, then, be considered impossible to own, but if that were the case, a society would most likely need to find some other way to fund the creators of useful or entertaining material.

As a general rule, it is in the consumer's interest to pay for a product, even one that is strictly information. Paying for the product provides the creator with a source of income, allowing them to continue making more product, and in turn allowing the consumer to enjoy more of that product. While a single stolen copy or item isn't necessarily enough to prevent a creator from continuing to work, that same single copy contributes to a mass of stolen copies which can become prohibitive if it grows unchecked. If one person is willing to take without paying, there will be another, and another.

But that still leaves the Humble Indie Bundle. Why steal when it costs literally a penny? Why steal when anything you do choose to pay goes straight to the people who deserve it, the developers? Why steal when anything you do choose to pay also goes to charity? It can only be a direct effort to leech off of the developers and show them that making games is not worth the trouble.

 I'm sure Dead Space would be lots of fun...right up until I finished it.

If you use the duration spent playing a game as a metric for its quality, the best game I ever played was Neverwinter Nights, the play time for which I cannot track in hours because I spent the better part of four years often playing little else. I like to think that was a good return on my investment, and I often find myself looking for the same quality of investment in other games I might buy. Something that I can see myself playing not just from start to finish, but for years to come.

The aspect of NWN that allowed me to keep playing for so long was the user-generated content, made not only possible but frankly easy by the inclusion of the Aurora Toolset. When I was not attempting to assemble adventures of my own, I could be found playing the ones produced by any of the countless other members of the community. I've tried my hand at a small sample of other such toolsets, and while typically they aren't anywhere near as easy to operate as Aurora, their very existence means that whenever I run out of content for those games, I can simply and freely go download more.

Although I never bothered much with it at the time, NWN also had the other major means of extending a game's longevity: goddamn multiplayer. Goddamn multiplayer extends a game's lifespan in many ways - firstly because the added randomness of other human minds in the game make even repetitive scenarios slightly different each time, and because social interaction is fun on its own. As long as you enjoy the company, the game becomes little more than a framework for hanging out.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good relationship with most goddamn multiplayer formats because a lot of them are competitive, and I suck. Deathmatches are only great fun as long as you aren't the one dying all the time. Competitive games can still be friendly, but they do mean someone is winning and someone else is losing, which takes the steam out of things once a clear player hierarchy is established. Cooperative survival modes resolve this issue, but they tend inevitably to lead me to realize that I'm playing a game I can't win - staving off failure just doesn't seem as fulfilling as, say, completing an objective.

Now logically, the MgoddamnMO format might be just the thing for me - long-lived, cooperative and objective oriented - but the demands of solo questing and grinding counteract the fun of the occasional instanced dungeon, to say nothing of the forced interaction with a broad community of potential assholes. No, it's titles like Borderlands and the Left 4 Deads that keep me coming back, where I can grab a couple of pals and run a challenging, cooperative, and relatively short mission at the drop of a hat. 

 BioWare: because Edmonton is too boring without video games.

I finally finished Dragon Age: Origins (about six months after everybody else) and I've come to agree that yes, BioWare is still up to their normal tight standard of moral screwery. A BioWare game is never short of awkward situations that cause the player to have to carefully consider the outcomes and significance of his or her actions. The main plot is much less complicated, as it centers around beating down an unambiguously evil threat to virtually all life, the player's included - but it's the ancillary moments that lead to said beat-down that really make the game shine in one's memory.

Spoilers ahead: My favourite moment wasn't even a side-quest, but just a single, simple encounter. The second of three moments in which I would have to pause the game, pace around the room for several minutes, consult with friends, and ultimately check a strategy wiki before settling on a course of action. A desire demon has enthralled a Templar, and given him a mental illusion in which his secret, lifelong desires of having a wife and children have been fulfilled. The demon asks the player to simply move on and leave it be with its new host. If the player insists on exorcising the demon, it will trick the Templar into attacking the player, and both human and demon will have to die in this case.

A knee-jerk reaction says the demon should be killed, but let's look at potential reasons for why. Killing a demon in the name of deterrence is right out, because demons are bastards by nature and cannot be deterred. Direct personal gain is also out, because there's not much here for loot, and it'd be much easier to just let them go without a fuss.

The big reasoning behind wanting to kill the demon is of course that it has abused the Templar's personal freedoms. There is always a potential risk that a demon might similarly abuse the player character's freedoms, so the player should establish a precedent or protocol for his or her own future rescuer by acting appropriately in regards to the Templar.

In that case, we can take a quick look at our potential fates for the Templar: One, he leaves under the demon's influence, either to spend his life in deluded happiness, or to be abandoned by the demon and left in despair at a later date. Or two, he dies now at the hands of the player character, never to experience happiness again. Which fate would you prefer?

 Old school RPGs are 100% only good for their stories, never for their gameplay.

Back in my reflection on Borderlands, I clued in to the fact that character growth is by no means exclusive to games featuring RPG mechanics (not the role-play ones, but the character aggrandizement ones), which has left me wondering, since, what it is that makes those same mechanics still so attractive in a video game. Having a character sheet and a load of statistics is by no means a boon when the player could simply complete simulated tests of their own real skill, but then again, a character sheet isn't all that there is in your average RPG.

First we have item acquisition and collection, complete with inventory management. This is the crack of video games, the easiest way to addict a player. There's a constant aspiration to get better loot, and since the players don't know when it might drop, they have to keep playing on and on in hopes of eventually finding that next upgrade. Of course, once they do the new equipment will serve only to help them find the subsequent upgrades, but the inherent pointlessness of this cycle isn't typically much of a deterrent. Ironically, if a player ever actually acquired the very best loot possible, such that there was no superior set of equipment to seek out, they'd essentially have beaten it, and all of their amassed wealth and power would cease to be valuable at all when they then stop playing. At least it was a fun ride, right?

There's something to be said, too, about customizability. Most RPGs offer a wider range of player options than your average game, but at a drawback - you can't master all of them at once, you have to pick and choose your specialities. This makes your playing experience more unique to you, and also means you've got to play through the whole game again every time you want to try out a different play style (for better or worse: more replay value, but more effort required). I most appreciate the games that offer easy re-specialization, but this still seems fairly uncommon.

Now for the terrifying revelation. Given that the fun parts of the RPG mechanics are character growth, item (and special ability) collection, and easy customization of play style, while the boring, clunky parts are things like statistics and inventory management, what's an example of a game that has all of the fun, and none of the boredom?

...Modern Warfare 2. Yeah. The archetypal example of current competitive FPS action gaming has also perfected the RPG-style aggrandizement formula.

 Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

That's actually only true in video games, though. In reality, evil is firstly incredibly hard to define (what with the specifics of morality varying from culture to culture and person to person) and secondly, typically antisocial. Refusing to cooperate with your peers forces you into a serious handicap, while others can draw on the resources of their allies to get ahead.

The most useless moral choice system is probably the prototypical Fable model - where random, unmotivated and inconsequential acts of either sadism or kindness create purely aesthetic effects on the player character. The system literally might as well just not exist - it would have no impact on the gameplay.

A step up from this is the BioShock model, where specific moral choice events that occur lead to differing consequences. Depending on how this is handled, it can be just as useless as the Fable system, or even worse (particularly if your moral choices arbitrarily block your access to sets of abilities, which removes morality from the situation altogether, making it just a stat-building choice instead). BioShock itself does an okay job of replicating the real-world scenario, though. The 'evil' course of action leads to immediate rewards, while the 'good' action is a longer-term strategy that relies on mutual cooperation with the Tenenbaum character. In most practical situations, the evil course of action would be coupled with some negative consequence, but given that most everyone in the city of Rapture is already your enemy, it makes sense that you don't lose much by acting like a bastard.

Then we have the real winners: games like the old classic Planescape: Torment, which don't have an explicit moral choice system, but instead just treat the player to the real benefits and consequences of their actions. Being a bastard is usually a bad idea; there is much more personal profit to be earned from cooperating with the NPCs to a mutual end. Mistreating, injuring, or killing them still produces benefit, even if nothing more than in the form of stolen money, but this is typically sub-par. Better yet, some of the game's areas have proper governing bodies and police forces, so rampant criminal activity will lead to severe negative consequences - just like it should in real life. If you want to be a crook, you have to learn how to manage it while dodging the cops.

Moral choice constructs made a fair effort to try to introduce some meaning to the games where they appear, but it's the fact that they are as simple and artificial as they are that ruins them. Proper "morality" is complex, nuanced, and incorporates shades of grey that can't be represented with a simple score. Better to drop the "moral" choice and just have choice - along with the reasonable, logical consequences that would come with choice. Do that well, and the morality content will appear on its own.

Character aggrandizement is for nerds.

Borderlands has been the source of much discussion lately in my circle (or at least it used to be prior to the recent release of Left 4 Dead 2) and as such I had planned to write a reflection of sorts on it. I wanted to write said reflection because I considered Borderlands a rather important game. You see, while it's a first person shooter through and through, it layered over the FPS with some very well built character aggrandizement components, which is significant because it represents the merging of two of my favourite genres - shooting games and role-playing games. Now, aggrandizement and role-playing are far from synonymous, but aggrandizement does constitute the major mechanical feature of RPGs, so this is still considered a blend of genres.

But the more I thought about why Borderlands was special in this way, the more I came to wonder whether this is actually an important accomplishment.

Aggrandizement is prevalent in RPGs because most RPGs have no skill-testing action component. When a character is in combat, there is no direct interaction that allows the player to aim an attack; the player merely tells his character who to hit. Because the player's skill cannot be tested to determine the success of the attack, the game instead uses the character's documented statistics to determine a probability and degree of success. Only...this is a video game, isn't it? The player's skill CAN be tested, the game just needs to be built as a shooter, or other form of action game, instead of a typical RPG.

I don't mean to put video RPGs down. They aren't usually trying to win fans on their gameplay; rather they are judged on their stories, so it doesn't really matter if they are little more than interactive books - that's exactly what I (and hopefully other RPG players) want from them. But if we're out looking for a mechanically superb video game, then aggrandizement, if there is any, has to take the back seat to some kind of fun, flowing action - and if you're asking me, that action needs to be shooting.

But aggrandizement is still worthwhile in any situation where getting new stuff equates with a meaningful change in gameplay. The funny thing is, most games already do this. Even in the most straightforward PC shooter I can think of - Half-Life - you still load up with a wide variety of guns over the course of the game that unlock more and more options and strategies for you to use against a variety of foes.

So Borderlands isn't monumental. It still rocks though - it does the shooting, and because of the aggrandizement emphasis it has, it creates a lot of variation in the ways you can play, much more so than other shooters.