I wonder if there are any places like this NYU Game Center out in Southern California. The events they mentioned in the beginning sound super interesting.
When I chose to kill Larry, I didn't even think about how he treated me or anyone else in the past. In my mind, we couldn't take the risk of him dying and coming back as a zombie. There was no way in hell I was going to risk my ass, or any of the other survivors on a possibly slim chance that he'd be okay.
I was the same way with my Mass Effect playthrough the first time. I resigned myself to live with any mistakes I made, and I was glad I did in the long run. I lost people I had grown to care about at the end of ME2, and I was okay with that. Unfortunately I lost my saves for both Mass Effect 1 and 2, and had to re-do them in order to get ready for 3, and I wasn't able to replicate the same mistakes I made my first time through, so I went into Mass Effect 3 with everyone surviving, and I can't help but wonder how different my game would have been had my original saves still been around.
I agree completely with the idea that more games need to make failure something other than "game over." The Playboy X/Dwayne example is a good one. I can't remember feeling bad about killing Dwayne, but just the fact that it was a choice and not something that would end my game if I made it incorrectly is what made it more exciting.
In Heavy Rain I did a similar thing. I tried to play the game as David Cage intended, where I wouldn't quick load if I made any "mistakes." The only thing I really regretted doing in that game was killing the drug dealer. It looked like he was going for a gun, so I shot him. When I later realized that wasn't the case, I felt really bad about what I had done. There was another choice in that game that was really hard to make, but after I made it I was happy that I was given the choice to handle it however I liked.
Same with Mass Effect 2. I played through that game the first time, and decided that whatever happened, happened. I lost half my team in the final mission because of stupid mistakes I made, but I didn't re-load a previous save. I let the game play out as I had set it up to be, and definitely had that rewarding feeling that made me glad I did. Of course the next time I played through, I did everything I could to get everyone out alive, though.
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