On Black Friday, my husband and I purchased a second Xbox One. We weren’t initially going to do that, but we had reached a tipping point between the cost analysis (it’s expensive and we’re just two people) versus the games that we wanted to play together, namely Halo 5 and, in 2016, the new Crackdown. Our discussions were long. We ended up making lists of games that could be played co-op and only were available on the Xbox One, or that we had already purchased and could play co-op if we so desired. There was Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Halo 5, Borderlands: The Handsome Jack Collection, the Gears of War HD Remaster, Sunset Overdrive, Destiny, and of course whatever would be released in the future. Eventually, it just made sense to bite the bullet, buy the second console, and get to playing some games together.

Soon after we got our new console, my husband asked me if I wanted to play through the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 campaign with him. I admit now that I have never played a full Call of Duty game before, either campaign or multiplayer. I have watched my husband play through a lot of the games, but I kind of just felt like watching was more than enough for me. I always gravitated towards fantastical FPS games, stuff like Halo, BioShock and Borderlands. COD titles just kind of repelled me. But, for whatever reason, I readily agreed. I would be able to play as a woman (woo hoo!) and my husband and I would play through the campaign and be able to get some enjoyment out of our new dual consoles.

We ended up setting up both consoles in the same room. We have a computer room where we do most of our gaming and it made the most sense to have one Xbox One plugged into my computer monitor (a Playstation 3D display from years ago when 3D was the next big thing) while the other was already connected to the big TV. I would sit in my computer chair and he could sit on the couch. We would be able to wear our own sets of headphones and still be able to talk normally since we were only a few feet from each other. It was a good solution for co-op play, almost hearkening back to the good old days of setting up a LAN.

But this story isn’t so much about co-op play, although it is something that I love to do. It’s more about what this situation revealed about Black Ops 3 and the main character that you play, both the male version and the female version. When I play a game, and the developer gives you a choice of whether to play as a man or woman, I guess I always assume that the direction that the voice actors are given is similar. Like, your arm gets ripped off in this scene, so scream really loud and try to convey that you’re in a lot of pain, or you’re threatening a guy in this scene, so sound tough. It’s obviously more complicated than that, but that’s just the thought process that I have. I know that people reading the same lines can make them sound very different, even if they’re trying to convey the same emotional beats. I always think about how the two Shepards in Mass Effect can vary so much. I know this not just because I watched other people play the game as a guy, but also because I started a Renegade playthrough with a male Shepard as well. I felt like they were the same characters saying the same things in a lot of ways, at least so far as the words on the page go, but also seemed very different in others. Of course, one could argue that my familiarity over many hours with one Shepard influenced my feelings when I switched to the other. Be that as it may, I felt like my original Shepard was more organic and realistic, while the male Shepard felt somewhat stunted and had less emotional range. But the differences were mild enough, and they never reached a level to where I was thinking about them too much. It was an interesting exercise to compare the two, but not really much more than that.

Playing through the campaign in Black Ops 3 was a very different experience. I was hearing the lines virtually at the same time, given a second or two delay on either console. I decided to wear headphones, but I kept my left ear slightly uncovered so that I could hear my husband if he needed to say something while we played. He took his headphones off and so the audio was being normally played through the television speakers. This created a situation where I would either hear my female character first, followed a second later by his male character, or vice versa. In that situation, I began to pick up on some strange differences between the two, and I considering that I had no emotional investment in either portrayal going in, I began to think of it as a unique experiment that I somehow stumbled upon as we played.

His male character was very "gung ho" and I felt like he was loud and proud when he talked. If anything, he seemed to be a typical male action hero, like Jai Courtney or Sam Worthington in almost any film that I've seen them star in. It was a typical sounding voice that would appear in a military shooter and it was familiar to me as someone who plays games and watches movies and television shows. At the same time, my female character was speaking the same lines, but her tenor seemed to be more measured, there was definitely a feeling that she was more subdued, even though she was saying the same words and performing the same actions as her male counterpart. To compare the two as we played on the fly was very strange. I found myself wanting to listen again to portions of dialogue to compare inflection, tone and the way the lines were delivered by both voice actors. I came away feeling that the male voice was more enthusiastic and energetic, but that the female voice seemed to be more slow, thoughtful and perhaps even detached.

I wonder, upon reflection, if this is indicative of the actors themselves and what they brought to the recording sessions and that the direction was virtually the same for both as they recorded, or whether each voice actor was directed to read their lines differently? It opens up an interesting thought experiment, at least to me, about whether the female voice was purposefully made to be more subdued and less emotional than the male counterpart. If the lines are the same, and the characters are doing the same things, and if they are intrinsically the same person, why would things like tone and inflection change so drastically? Would it just be an accident and completely unintentional, or would it point to the developers molding a character is such a way that the personality of the character vastly changes from male to female?

In the end, I have no good idea about why this is the case. I could attempt to discern motives of the developers and try to suss out why the voice actors and their performances appear to sound so different, but I think that that would be presumptuous of me. I actually quite enjoy the female line readings in comparison to the more gruff and action hero-type voice that the male voice actor uses in his line readings. If anything, I feel like the female protagonist carries the weight of the narrative, as silly as it is, a bit more in her voice. To have to do horrible things and then explain why is handled, I think, more tactfully if you play the female character because of the more subdued line reading. It's an interesting comparison to make, and it was especially odd to be making it as I listened to both at the same time.

Of course, there is a third option. It may just be that the voice actor for the male lead just isn't that good. After some amount of my own research, I found some reviews that criticize the performances in comparison to other Black Ops games, making special note of how poor the male protagonist is. I don't know whether it may just be a case of one performer just being that much better. It's something to consider.

Still, even as I had this back and forth discussion with myself about the male voice versus the female voice in the campaign, I also realized that the game isn't some deep work of art. It's a story that doesn't make a whole lot of sense when viewed away from the action. However, the co-op is very fun, and makes the bigger, more bombastic missions memorable. There's something very rewarding when you're trying to help your teammate by hacking an enemy robot and laying down cover fire as they try to run across a courtyard or shoot a giant robot with a rocket launcher. It's silly, goofy and dumb, but sometimes that is more than enough to make for a good night of gaming. If anything, the experience of listening to both of the main characters at the same time was something that I think was worth my time. It will certainly make me think, in the future, about how developers approach a campaign where there is an ability to choose the gender of the main character, and what that means when the voice actors sound so different in the finished product.

There are some years where I feel like I have missed out, that I have spent too much time in the clutches of one game, only to realize as Christmas passes that I really, REALLY, should have picked up some other titles. At the start of this year, I wouldn’t have pictured myself in that situation. When my husband would turn to me and ask, “What’s next?” I would shrug my shoulders and go “I dunno, Fallout 4 is coming the week after my birthday, so that I guess.” And then I would turn back to grinding gear in Destiny or Diablo III and not give it another thought. Oh, how wrong I ended up being!

So to start, this blog is not as wide of scope as I would have liked. I haven’t played everything that came out, not by a long shot, and I haven’t even played everything that I wanted to play. The pile of shame is wide and deep and trying to muddle through it at the 11th hour is probably not good for me, for you dear reader, or for the games themselves. So I am going to do an end of the year awards blog and admit that I am probably leaving a lot of good stuff out. Still, I think there are things that I have played this year that deserve attention.

Also, this blog contains spoilers for games such as Fallout 4 and Halo 5. You have been warned, duders and dudettes!

Best Co-op of the Year - Until Dawn

In a year with a new Halo, Destiny: The Taken King, and any myriad of games that purport to have a crafted and lengthy “co-op” experience, my favorite of the year was a decidedly single player game. Until Dawn was a game that I played through from start to finish while my husband watched. He didn’t tell me how to play, or what to choose. The limit of his utterances was directed at helping me see collectibles in the environment. Still, the game was so good with an audience. We laughed at the funny stuff (thank goodness for the hammy Peter Stormare and one of the best characters of the year, Emily) and squealed at the gruesome deaths. We sat in tense silence as I tried to decide the fates of this motley group of kids. We would talk about what had just happened and try to figure out what would have happened if I had chosen differently. In the end, Until Dawn is an experience that can be played completely alone, but having a friend or significant other along for the ride makes it better.

Most Disappointing GOTY – Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number

I was so stoked for Hotline Miami 2, I even took the step to preorder it on Steam. It’s really funny because it’s not normally a game type that I would love, but something about the original Hotline Miami grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. The music, the constant experimentation and quick reloads all worked together to create a game that soon became one of my all time favorites. So, when I heard that a new one was in the works, I was psyched. Then, I played it. The soundtrack was still crackling and the gameplay was, for all intents and purposes, the same. So what happened? Unlike the bite-size bloody puzzles of the first game where you could see a good portion of the map, with a little camera manipulation, the levels were too spacious. The hook of Hotline Miami was quick gameplay. Quick deaths. Quick reloads. The levels were small enough that failing was not an impediment to fun. You would just press “R” and be only a few moments away from where you had just been mauled by a dog or shot by a Russian Mobster. Hotline Miami 2 lost something by becoming bigger and trying to do more. It’s a shame and I often consider going back to it and trying again. Maybe it was me. All I know is that no game really made me quite as disappointed as this game did this year. The soundtrack is still great, however, so it has that going for it.

This category, unfortunately, had a few games vying for the number one slot. Everyone's Gone to the Rapture was a pretty good story and amazing music in a barely-there game. I love trying different types of experiences, but the sluggish pace and lack of meaningful interactivity really torpedoed my enjoyment of this game. It's somewhat telling that my favorite game ever developed by The Chinese Room is Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, which has many of the same wonderful things that Rapture has, such as stunning music and a good story, but also has some actual gameplay elements to break up the monotony. But that's a discussion for another day or another blog. Also up for consideration was Halo 5. The worst thing that can be said is that it is just not Halo-y enough. I can't really put my finger on just why this game felt so bland, but it was just a real chore to get through, even playing through co-op. The shooting was nice, the art and graphics were okay, but it honestly felt like any another FPS, and that's just a shame. The game also makes you play as boring characters when all you really want to do is be the OG Master Chief (although Linda is pretty dope and has a neat helmet. Actually, scratch that. Linda wins HOTY (Helmet of the Year, new category I just made. Boom, you're welcome)). Also that revive mechanic was borderline terrible.

Best Story / Quest line – Fallout 4 “Blind Betrayal” aka “The touching but also kind of skeevy story of how I learned that my boyfriend was a synth made from the DNA of my kidnapped son”

Let’s get this out of the way first – The main storyline in Fallout 4 is underwhelming. The overall idea of being unfrozen after 200 years and going on a journey to find your kidnapped son is pretty interesting, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. Add to that the fact that I called most of the twisty twists about halfway through the narrative and you have a story that doesn’t do much on its own to propel you forward. The real meat is in the side quests and the fun that you make on your own.

So, why is one of the quests from Fallout 4 on my list? Well, it’s a weird, weird one. SPOILER TIME! If you decide to side with the Brotherhood of Steel (two word reason why you should: Liberty Prime) you will eventually be tasked with tracking down one of your companions - the steadfast, stick in the mud, perfectly coiffed Paladin Danse. It seems that some information that you stole from The Institute during the main quest line has uncovered a shocking revelation about your friend – he's really a synth. Now the BoS wants you to merk him. WHAAAA?!?

Now, the story is touching and the way I played it was to, of course, save Danse because I wanted him to be my forever love in the Commonwealth. After you complete that quest, if you’ve reached the highest affinity level with him (easy to do just make some gun mods and the guy gets all hot and bothered) you can romance him, which opens up a whole big can of worms. Yes, Danse is a hunky military man with awesome hair and a cool suit of power armor and yes, hearing him yell “Tango Down” or “Affirmative” is pretty sexy. But, on the other hand, one of the big crazy twists that you learn as you play is that the synths are made using your son’s pristine, pre war DNA. So, as your son tells you, you’re all family. You, him, that Courser that you just killed, Curie in her cool new body, and Danse of course... How much of my son is in Danse is anyone’s guess. I subscribe to the theory that the DNA has had so much sciency stuff done to it that Danse isn’t really all that close to being family. I hope. I really, REALLY hope that that’s the case. Otherwise, that’s some fucked up psychosexual shit I unknowingly stumbled upon...

Either way, great story and probably the one of the weirder things I’ve played through this year.

Worst / Most Incomprehensible Story – Halo 5

Going back to Halo 5 for a moment, and I feel like I'm beating a dead grunt here, but the story in this game was just a hot mess. I finished this game just a few days ago and I can only scratch my head. I guess if I was actually engaged by the ideas that Halo 4 had brought to the table, I might have paid more attention and gotten more out of the narrative in this game, but I didn't. Be that as it may, here is my kind of quick and dirty synopsis of Halo 5 -

Our boy Master Chief is being called by Cortana, who is not dead but apparently in some galaxy-wide internet, and so he goes off with a team of Spartan buddies to find her. Locke and a team of his Spartan buddies, including Buck from seceret best Halo game, ODST, go off to find MC because they think MC is going to do something stupid, I guess. After a lot of barely explained shooting, we discover that Cortana is now evil because, reasons. And MC knew she was evil because, reasons. So he tries to stop her from using a bunch of Guardians (not Destiny ones, but Halo ones) to do, something. For, reasons. Oh and a bunch of AI are pissed at humans because they're disposible and think that's kind of shitty. Can't argue with that, it is pretty shitty. At the end, Cortana escapes but Locke saves MC and his Spartan Buddies by punching a thing until it breaks.

~FIN~

And that is the story of Halo 5 in a big, messy nutshell. It deserves an award. It's not an award to be proud of, but an award nonetheless.

Game I Lost the Most Time To - Destiny (Year 1 and The Taken King)

Destiny is the brain worm from the Wrath of Khan. You don't even realize what you're doing until you've spent hours leveling up a Sparrow Racing League book that you bought with real money or grinding out the Court of Oryx in the hope for new and better gear. You know that it's just the same stuff. You know that you have hundreds of games to play across Steam, XBox One and PS4. You know that you have games from 2015 that you need to play for GOTY considerations and fake awards. And yet there you sit at 7 am on a Saturday morning, wrapped in a blanket, talking to your boy Xur and debating the merits of trying to ecru enough strange coins to buy the Mida Multitool. You're a lady with a sickness. And it can only be cured by... more Crucible.

A close runner up this year would be Diablo III, which pleasantly chugs along with new content, new seasons, and new reasons to go back. While Destiny can often feel like a vampire sucking away your precious time to play games, Diablo III often felt refreshing when I returned to it. It helps that the game adds new things frequently and for no additional cost.

Game I Wish I Had Played this Year - SOMA

It's totally my jam. I loved Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I was super hyped for it. And then I played a bunch of Fallout 4 and Destiny and now it's New Year's Eve. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge.

...And Finally, My GOTY - UNTIL DAWN

In a year with a new Fallout, giving my GOTY to Until Dawn seems insane. But here I sit, thinking about the year in total, and realizing that I had the most fun with Until Dawn. The characters were basic horror movie tropes, but they were acted with such conviction that I actually believed in them and their world. I wanted to save everyone, even the deliciously bitchy Emily. While the controls in the exploratory portions were sometimes finicky (I always had trouble aiming the flashlight even after hours of playing) I never had issues when the poop hit the fan and I needed to nail a QTE or make a quick decision in a conversation. Everything worked as I expected, and I never felt hindered when the action kicked in.

Interestingly enough, I had a very solid play through going until the very end. I made a quick judgment call and instead of saving all but one person, I ended my game with only three left alive. I failed them, and I felt it more acutely than I had ever expected to when I started the game. I figured if people died, they died. It was a part of the novelty. But as the game progressed to that final scene, I realized that I wanted desperately to save them all. I couldn't, though. Until Dawn, above all the other games I played this year, made me aware of what I was doing and what that would mean for the characters I was playing. Good job game, you made me care about a bunch of shitty kids. High five!

I would say that if you looked at Until Dawn and passed it over earlier this year, please return to it and give it some of your time. It's a fun, engaging story that doesn't overstay it's welcome. It's also gorgeous to look at, especially the snowy scenery, has some pretty cool twists and turns in the narrative, and you get to see Peter Stormare and Rami Malek chew a metric ton of scenery. If that doesn't make a GOTY, I don't know what does.

As a stalwart lover of all things Diablo, today is a weird day. It seems like the news coming out of Activision Blizzard as we near Blizzcon 2015, which runs from November 6th through November 7th, has become a deluge. Just yesterday, Austin wrote an article about Activision Blizzard acquiring King, the developers of the devilishly addictive and mind-numbingly successful mobile game, Candy Crush. Also yesterday, a trailer teaser (teaser trailer, whatever) popped up for the upcoming Warcraft movie. As if that wasn’t enough, a smaller but perhaps more exciting bit of information hit concerning the future of Blizzard’s past catalog, namely Diablo II, Warcraft III and Starcraft. Under the Job Openings portion of Blizzard’s website, a posting went up just looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Classic Games. The text for the posting is as follows:

Compelling stories. Intense multiplayer. Endless replayability. Qualities that made StarCraft, Warcraft III, and Diablo II the titans of their day. Evolving operating systems, hardware, and online services have made them more difficult to be experienced by their loyal followers or reaching a new generation.

We’re restoring them to glory, and we need your engineering talents, your passion, and your ability to get tough jobs done.

Emphasis mine, of course. Among the communities for these games, there is now a pretty intense discussion about what exactly this means. Are the games being optimized for new operating systems, but being kept as close to their original releases as possible? Or, in the alternative, is this the first hint that we may be getting something like HD remakes of these classic Blizzard games? Obviously, it is much too soon to tell. With the most basic interpretation, the text makes it sound like they are looking to make the older games playable on new computers. The more interesting portion, however, comes in the listing of responsibilities, where they state that they are looking for people who, “Own implementation and curation of features new and old.”

I don’t want to get too excited, but hearing about the possibility of new features in these older games is pretty exciting. Of course, new features could be just about anything, and may not be anything that would add to the game in any substantial way, But, with how little is said in this posting, it’s fun to speculate on the possibilities.

So, what do you duders and dudettes think? Do you fondly remember these games? Do you want optimized versions for your Windows 10 PCs or full on HD remakes for PCs and even consoles? Or are we riding this hype train way too early?

Also, is it too soon to start mapping out my Spearazon’s skill tree?

I am a sucker for loot driven games. Ever since I first installed the original Diablo, I’ve been trying to find new and fun ways to accumulate new and better gear. In Western RPGS like Oblivion or Skyrim, I end up spending hours upon hours searching every shelf and chest in every house and cave for unique weapons and armor. If it has a special name and skin, I desperately want it. It doesn’t matter if I can use it, I am content to keep it in a barrel in my home, safe in the knowledge that that thing is mine and not out there in the world somewhere. Of course, this leads to situations such me trying to jump on top of an arrangement of rocks in Oblivion for over two hours, all because I just had to have a pair of unique boots. In JRPGs, I will walk across every inch of ground, hoping to find a chest that holds some unique item or weapon. I usually end up over-leveled from all the random encounters I engage in, all while trying to get more stuff.

Of course, those games have loot, but they aren’t really about the loot grind. Diablo and its sequels are all about that grind, a feedback loop where you find something good, you use it to level up your character, all so that you can go out and fight harder monsters for better loot. Right now there are three games that I am playing that attempt to do this, and they are successful to varying degrees. They are Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, Marvel Heroes 2015 and Destiny.

I’ll get this out of the way first; Destiny is the least successful of the three when it comes to the loot… loop. The most important thing about the loot grind, to me, is to feel that the grinding is actually getting me somewhere, thereby pulling me back into the game when I otherwise may not have returned to it. At this point, at level 12, I don’t yet feel the pull to go back into the game to get better loot. I want to play to experience the gunplay and to see where the story goes, but the loot just isn’t interesting. What the guns do doesn’t change much, at least so far. The exotic weapons have unique appearances, but finding those seems to be relegated to end game content or pure luck. With new armor, there are slight changes to appearance, but nothing has really stuck out as being more aesthetically pleasing than what I started the game with. I recently got my first cape, and that’s been the most exciting thing to happen so far. Considering the cape looks like a used dishrag, you can probably gauge what my frustration level has been with the loot drops and how they reflect on my character model. When I see pictures of late game characters, I get excited because they look very interesting, with unique looking guns and gear. My assumption is that my experience will change when I reach level 20, but that’s a long time to wait for the cool stuff.

Marvel Heroes 2015 is the next on the list, and it is a bit better than Destiny. It is still somewhat lacking when it comes to the loot grind, but for a different reason altogether. In Marvel Heroes 2015, you get loot quite frequently, and it does interesting things for your character. Finding that one good piece of gear could change your whole way of playing. Adding to the positives is the fact that the game is free to play, so you can get a ton out of the game without having to put down a penny. The downside is that for all the loot and all the ways you can spec a character, it lacks one of the more important aspects of loot driven games. When you get a new piece of loot, it may change your stats, but it won’t change how your character looks. You will always appear the same. The only way to modify your appearance is by applying a visual effect, found as a bonus to certain artifacts, to your costume. You can also spend real world money to buy new costumes. So, if you liked the 1990s cartoon version of Storm, a personal favorite of mine, you will have to put down the equivalent of about 10 dollars to outfit Storm with that costume. They do sales and BOGOs for costumes, but you’ll always be spending money to change the look, no matter what. That is a big downside and degrades the fun and appeal of finding new loot. So while the amount of loot is good, and what the gear actually does for your character is good, the fact that the appearance of the character model remains static is a big problem.

The third game I mentioned, and the King (or Queen) of loot driven games, is Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. Diablo is a series that has perfected the feedback loop of finding, using and upgrading loot. With the newest installment, they have managed to make a game that has you doing similar things, over and over again, yet always coming back to get the newest and best gear. I will admit, if I had written this blog when Diablo III was first released, I would have called it a failure for someone looking for a fun loot grind. Diablo III, at launch, had a broken loot system as well as other crippling issues. I was one of the unlucky people that couldn’t play due to constant connection errors. When I could actually play the game, I didn’t get a Legendary item drop until I had invested over 6o hours of playtime. On top of that, the items that I was getting were woefully unfit for my class. As a Demon Hunter, my character needed gear that had dexterity and vitality. The first loot system didn’t take into account your class, so you ended up with various items that were completely useless. I was getting class specific gear, such as Quivers and Capes, with high strength and Intelligence rolls. There was no joy in finding gear that was never going to work. This is why so many people turned to the Auction House. To get the gear you needed, you could either grind until you got a good item or you could spend some in-game gold and get gear that was better than anything that had ever dropped in your game. It was a system that was horribly flawed and the community rightfully complained about it.

Blizzard has turned this around with patches, including one that I already mentioned called Loot 2.0. Gear drops are now more frequent and more tailored to class. With the time I invest now, I manage to get useful things all the time without expending an insane amount of effort. They have also added other things that have kept the gameplay varied, including Rifts, Greater Rifts, Season Mode and Adventure Mode. Instead of blindly playing through the story mode, which was what a player had to do in the vanilla release, they now have ways to teleport to different areas with different missions, called bounties. It is a cool system that makes the game feel fresh. The loot that drops is much more tailored to class and with each patch, more items and modes are added. If you’re looking for a loot driven experience, you really should try it. I stopped playing after I was disappointed with the initial release and came back. Now I find myself doing a few bounties or rifts per day, just to try and make my character that much better.

One more interesting thing Diablo III added, which seems kind of silly on the surface but which also adds to the fun of loot accumulation is the ability to change the appearance of items. With each level you unlock with a vendor called the Mystic, you can get access to more armor and weapon skins. As you find more Legendary gear, those unique item appearances are unlocked. So, if I like a specific helmet for the stats, but like the appearance of one that I just found a little better, I can spend some gold and make my old helmet look like the new one. It allows you to make your character much more personalized. Pair that with different dyes that you can apply to each piece or armor, and you can do a lot of creative things. Even if every wizard uses the same gear, they could all look different if they utilize the Mystic. It’s a neat system that I abuse frequently.

My main takeaway from playing these three games, all at the same time, is that Destiny needs a Loot 2.0 reboot. Reflecting on the way that Diablo III has learned from mistakes and improved their game, I believe that Destiny can, and should, do the same thing. I am sure that the content for Destiny is on the way, the recent Vault of Glass being an example of new things added to the game after launch. With new strikes and raids being folded into the game, I could also see them patching in new patrol mission types over time. The loot is what really needs to be shaken up. Gear should be more tailored to the class you play and it should drop with more frequency. If you get a legendary engram, it should yield a legendary item with a small chance at an exotic. It shouldn’t regress to uncommon or rare. I also wish that the shader system would allow for more choice in where to apply the colors, but that’s a pipe dream and I am not expecting that to ever be a possibility. What I really want Destiny to do, and it may never happen, is to be more exciting with it’s loot and the grind to get that loot. The running and gunning is fantastic and the worlds are beautiful to behold, but the missions become repetitive with little variation in what you do from moment to moment.

I will always be on a quest to find the newest and best loot game. I will try any of them at least once, whether it’s an MMO or a first person shooter with different gear and guns. Destiny could be that game if it takes lessons learned from the other big names in the industry and applies them smartly and quickly to their own game. Time will tell if they can adapt and improve, instead of withering on the vine.

These past few weeks have been rough. People are tired, frustrated and emotions are raw. That’s all I will say about that. This piece isn’t about what is bad or frustrating about games, but instead about what is so very good. It’s about the ways we find friends and keep them, how memories are formed and treasured when we play games, and how our lives can become so much richer when we play.

When I was 13 years old, my best friend committed suicide. It was a cold January morning just after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I woke up before the alarm went off. My bedroom was dark and the house seemed unnaturally quiet. I walked to the spiral staircase leading downstairs. I stopped. I could hear my mother talking very quietly to someone else. She must have heard me because she called out to me. She wanted me to come downstairs but she wouldn’t say why. I ended up sitting beside her at the kitchen counter when she told me what had happened. She told me I didn’t have to go to school, but I could. It’s all so fuzzy now. I did go. I walked to school alone in the cold, ice and snow crunching under my sneakers. When I got to school, I didn't speak to anyone until the announcement came over the intercom. I sat in a quiet stupor most of the day while everyone else around me seemed to be reacting much more than I could. I suppose it was because I felt like I was blindsided. I honestly didn’t see it coming, or maybe I did sense it was possible, but I never imagined it would actually happen.

That part of my life with her is something that I resist the urge to dwell on. What happened at the end isn’t the sum total of who she was. What I do think about, what my mind often goes to, is Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom. After two straight years of playing that game, off and on, the farthest we ever got was about halfway. We became stumped. I remember that we had an umbrella and no idea what to do with it. For those who are unfamiliar, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is an adventure game that operates with very basic commands chosen from a menu. The areas are depicted by pictures with minimal movement and sound. You must talk to people in those areas and take and use items to progress. When you complete a chapter, you get a password and the next chapter begins. It’s very much like a text adventure with simple visuals.

We tried to beat Princess Tomato by ourselves. There was no Internet, no place to go to suss out the game’s secrets with others, it was just the two of us trying to put our brains together and get through it, one step at a time. When we managed to finish a chapter, we were so excited. It was a slow process. We didn’t always play that game and we would get frustrated and give up sometimes, but when we progressed, it was a fantastic feeling of triumph and relief. Looking back, I know that the game was not great. On a list of adventure games, it probably wouldn’t crack anyone’s Top 10, or even a Top 100, but it still holds a little place in my heart. It was a game that helped me create memories of a person that I still miss terribly, even though she’s been gone now for almost 20 years.

There are other games that make me think of her too. M.C. Kids, which was a game that was unbelievably fun and of a surprisingly high quality for being tied to the McDonald's Restaurant chain. We ended up renting it multiple times from Sounds Easy, a local movie and video game rental store that was just a five-minute walk up the street from my house. It was another game that, try as we might, we couldn’t beat. The difficulty level would go from easy to monstrously difficult. And, instead of progression being tied to finishing the level and then the next like most NES platformers, it was tied to collecting “M” cards throughout those levels. Without the right amount of cards, you couldn’t get further in the game. Even with the game becoming too difficult for us to complete, we still kept going back to it. We were gluttons for punishment, or maybe we just really enjoyed the game.

As we grew up, we also grew away from the Nintendo and into other platforms. Only a few months before that frosty January morning, we were huddled around the PC in her family's dining room. It was her 13th birthday and she had invited a group of friends over for a slumber party. We were going to eat junk food, watch horror movies, and play Wolfenstein 3D. We each took a turn with the keyboard and mouse. Whenever one of us would die, or get to a new area, we would trade off. Finally, after maybe an hour or two, we got to the final level in the first episode. I remember another girl was in the chair, and the rest of us were looking over her shoulder telling her to walk one way or another and trying to spot enemies or items before she did. We had no idea what was coming. As soon as she opened that door and Hans Grosse yelled and started shooting, we screamed and every last one of us, probably seven teenage girls, ran away from the computer, some into the kitchen and some into the hallway. Obviously, we died, but we didn't care. It was probably on of the silliest moments that I have had playing a video game with other people. And it's a moment that never fails to put a smile on my face.

That is what games have the power to do. Yes, they can be pieces of art that make us feel and think about issues on a deeper level, but they also have a very basic function. They allow us to have fun with each other, to connect with each other, to form moments in time with other people that we can look back on fondly. As we grow older, we can lose people in our lives, whether it is a function of the natural passage of time and growing apart as individuals, or whether it is something more sudden, a friend who is lost much too soon to comprehend. When I think about games, I want to remember that for all the discussions we have as a community and all the arguments we can get swept up in, we still have this amazing hobby that brings us together. Let's not lose that. Let's not lose each other. Let's make those memories last and find those rare and wonderful islands of common ground.

And then, let's play some games.

Sometimes when I play a game, I don’t end up thinking about the game when I am done. I end up dwelling on things I’ve read or seen before. A game, or more accurately a demo, that was very effective in doing just that recently was P.T. Unless you’ve been living in a cave with no internet connection, you’ve probably already heard about this”playable teaser” and how it’s just a very clever and frightening vehicle to announce the relaunch of the Silent Hill franchise, simply called Silent Hills. I played through a majority of the teaser and now, some days later, I find myself thinking about certain images, sounds and ideas. This blog isn’t so much about P.T. as it is about what it made me remember, whether it was something else I played, read or experienced.

Haunted Houses

Searching out more hallways, more turns, Navidson eventually leads the way down a narrow corridor ending with a door. Navidson and Reston open it only to discover another corridor ending with another door.

House of Leaves p.188

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski is, at it's core, a haunted house story. While the book itself seems to engender polarized opinions concerning its structure and the author’s writing techniques, I think that it remains an effectively creepy tale. While I found the framing story to be somewhat tedious, the main plot concerning the house was what kept me reading. The house itself seems normal, until the owners find a mysterious room between two bedrooms one day, one that they know wasn’t there before. Measurements are taken of the interior of the home and the exterior, and upon consulting blueprints they realize that the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. These small events culminate in the sudden appearance of a long hallway that leads further into the impossible interior.

Playing P.T. was like reliving the more intense parts of House of Leaves. The moment it really clicked with me was when I had to walk down the red hallway, my vision blurry and my pace frenzied. It was a neverending loop. Sometimes the bathroom would be to my left, sometimes my right, and I couldn’t escape until I found just the right action to progress the demo. I felt like the house was conspiring against me, an active participant in my terror. The house in House of Leaves is also very much an active participant in terrorizing the characters who live there.

Haunted Time

There's a mysterious time of day; you only notice it if you have a digital clock. Once you've heard the story, you'll know that it's true.

Ghastly Ghost Stories p.38

I collected books as a kid, and my favorite genre was horror. If it had vampires, ghosts or other scary stuff, I was hooked. My aunt gave me a hardcover book for my eleventh birthday called Ghastly Ghost Stories. It’s a collected volume that encompasses two earlier books, Ghost Stories from the American Southwest and Ghost Stories from the American South. All of these stories are very short, barely even a page at most, but I remember one quite vividly. It was called “11:11” and it was about a haunted time of day. Two teenagers who were driving home from a party years ago died in a car crash at 11:11, so whenever you notice the time in your real life, you are actually supposed to be receiving a ghostly message from the two teenagers. Even 20 years later I still see this time and think of that story.

Realizing that time is stuck at 23:59 pm in P.T. is horrifying. In games we are often trying to beat the clock. Missions are timed and you fail them if you don’t come in under the limit. RPGs like Skyrim will make certain quests only available or completable at certain times of day, so the player is forced to make the clock jump forward, either by sleeping or waiting. In P.T. there is no time limit because time doesn’t progress as it logically should. The haunting is of the time of day as much as it is of the space of the house. The game plays with you, letting the clock go to 00:00 only to go back to 23:59 when you loop back through the hallway. Seeing the time 23:59 repeated is another way to let the player know that this isn’t over.

Haunted Bodies

Rosemary Woodhouse: You're trying to get me to be his mother.

Roman Castevet: Aren't you his mother?

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

One of the most personal fears I have is about becoming a mother. I’ve reached the point in my life where many of my friends are taking that next step to adulthood, but I find myself lagging behind. Even before I had a steady boyfriend or graduated high school, I had dreams involving birth and death, always being linked. I think it’s a natural fear for a woman. Part of that fear isn’t just that you or the baby could die, but also that something inside you may not be quite right. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is impregnated by the Devil. There’s way more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist of the film. When I first watched this, I was probably 12 or 13 years old and had a close friend staying the night. She became frightened and didn’t want to see anymore, so we turned it off. Later, I went back and watched it on my own and loved it. The slow burning paranoia was something I hadn’t yet experienced in a movie. But underneath all of that, there was the fear of the other being inside her the whole time.

The ghost in P.T. is named Lisa, and she was pregnant when she was murdered. In the sink, when you gain access to the bathroom for the first time, you find what looks like a deformed fetus. It moves and cries like a human baby, or something frightfully close to that. The door locks and you’re trapped inside with the wailing… thing, until the demo deems that you have had enough and can leave. Most people during the Spookin’ with Scoops live stream mentioned Eraserhead, and I can see why. I’ve never seen the movie myself, but I know that it there is a deformed baby in it, perhaps even similar in appearance or sound. My mind, however, dwelled on the thought of whether what was in the sink was what was inside Lisa when she died. Is it the world of SIlent Hills deforming the baby, is it the haunting that does it, what makes it look like that and why? It was an arresting image not just for me, but also for my husband, who happened to mention it no less than three times the next day after watching me play the demo.

Haunted Minds

One pulls out what appears to be a gun, but it’s just a water pistol, and shoots the man right in the face. It is a red foam, almost liked aerated meat. Suddenly, everything is tinted red. The man turns psychotic. The foam slides down and his face looks like it is covered in blood.

Dream Journal Excerpt - 5/10/06

I kept a dream journal for many years. I started at the end of 1998 and continued until August 16, 2007, the date of my last entry. I lost focus and I stopped writing in it regularly. I still dream frequently, though the dreams are less vivid and usually involve more mundane activities. One of the things that I always remembered in lurid detail were my nightmares. I always considered myself to be more prone to bad dreams than other people based on conversations I had with friends and family, but I suppose it could have just been that I was better at remembering the details and writing them down.

Color takes the main focus in many of my dreams. Reds are sickeningly vibrant. Scenes are tinted in shades of blue, yellow or red. Dark rooms are filled with almost palpable inky blackness that can pull you inward and eat you alive. I looked through the second volume of my dream journal (I tried to locate the first but I’m not sure where it is) and saw that color is mentioned many times, especially in dreams that take on a sinister dimension. This excerpt was from a dream that started with the scene being tinged blue. As soon as the man was shot with the toy water gun filled with red foam, everything turned red. It gets much weirder than that, but the crux of the terror came from that sudden change in color.

Like those dreams I wrote down, P.T. plays with color and changing color to elicit emotional reactions. The warm incandescent light you come to expect as you walk the hallway multiple times is suddenly replaced with demonic red. Later in the demo, you could see green, blue or yellow. Different people experience different occurrences of color, although the red lights and the red, blurry hallway occur as a normal part of the demo for everyone who plays. In my playthrough, I saw the red lights, hallway, and then as I tried to solve the final puzzle, the room was tinted green by my flashlight. All of these changes, especially seeing the red lights for the first time, caused a great deal of stress and fear. I didn't want to walk towards the red light, but I knew that I had to. I didn't want to keep running down the red hallway, but I had no choice. It's amazing that such a little change in the lighting can cause so much apprehension.

The End of It All

There are other things that I thought of while playing P.T. I remembered playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent for the first time and how frightened I was whenever I heard footsteps coming closer to me from somewhere in the dark. I remembered watching Home, a fourth season episode of The X-Files, and seeing the deformed Peacock family and thinking about just what they were and how they lived. I remembered long nights spent reading collections of urban legends and trying not to look at the illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The fantastic thing about P.T. is that it plays with so many horror ideas and does it so well. I hope that the new Silent Hill game will be even half as scary as the interactive teaser. If it is, I will have many sleepless nights and many more disturbing images to lock away and remember on a stormy, darkened night.

Diablo III is a game that has become one of my favorite ways to waste time. Along with Marvel Heroes, a similar entry into the ARPG category, I find myself going back frequently to kill more monsters and accrue newer and better loot. While Marvel Heroes pushes me to try new characters, I tend to stick with my best character in Diablo III. She is a Demon Hunter named Erin, and she is one awesomely bad-ass lady.

One of the things that I love about Erin the DH (Demon Hunter, not designated hitter) is that she is completely self-sufficient. She can jump into a swarm of monsters, each one with 4 or 5 glowing auras of doom, and come out the other side, no worse for the experience. She can shoot arrows of lightning, poison or fire and she can lay down traps that decimate hordes of her foes. And in those moments when her back is against the wall and her life globe is slowly emptying, she can call upon a spirit of vengeance, grow black, inky wings and become a machine of pure, killing hate. I imagine that she laughs when she does this, a cool manic laugh, something that would strike the proper amount of fear into demons and humans alike.

One person who may not be afraid when those moments come is Kormac, my DH’s steadfast companion. Unlike other Diablo games, Diablo III decided to introduce a follower mechanic. Kormac is one of three that become available as the game progresses. He is the first you will meet and, in my opinion, he is also the most interesting and useful to pal around with. Eirena is an enchantress with a sweet as sugar disposition that tired my DH out within moments. Lyndon is too similar in power set to my DH to be really valuable. Kormac, a Templar, is just the right fit in both abilities and temperament. He draws aggression and heals my DH when she gets in over her head. He can take the point position while my DH tries to snipe from further away. It’s a partnership that just works, like PB and J, Hall and Oates, or David Ortiz and October. And like all great partnerships, once you lock into it, you never want to lose it.

This is kind of where my story really begins. Kormac and I became as close as two isometrically represented fictitious characters could. I realized after over a hundred hours that I really had an emotional attachment to him. So when he began to reveal an almost boyish crush on Eirena, I really began to hate him. I seethed every time I heard him talk about her smooth skin and golden hair. I could picture my DH scrunching up her nose viciously, narrowing her eyes, and then stabbing another demon in the face to quiet her disappointment. For some reason I really disliked this walking meat shield talking about another woman.

I thought about this reaction for some time. I mulled it over. The more I thought about it, the more absurd the whole thing seemed. I was honestly feeling a little bit of jealousy, or I rationalized it by saying my DH was the one who had become a green-eyed monster. But aren't my DH and I one and the same you may say? Of course. So I was feeling abandoned and emotionally betrayed, and for no other reason than the developers decided to create a little flavor text to color their world and lend character growth to their creations. They certainly didn't intend for me to fill in the blanks and create a blossoming relationship between these characters as I played, but I did. Kormac had traveled with me and opened up to me about his fears and dreams. I felt like I had earned his devotion. Not her.

I think the important thing that I learned from this is that romance and emotional attachment can come not just from carefully crafted story lines, say for instance what Bioware has done with the Mass Effect series, but also in the margins of a game that doesn't even really attempt to seriously craft these entanglements. I highly doubt that the creators of Diablo III had any intent to make the player become enamored with Kormac, but it kind of just happened to me. Similarly, I had a moment much the same in Star Trek Online as I played through the Romulan Republic storyline. My captain became interested in her first officer, Tovan Khev. Nothing in the game points to there being anything romantic in this relationship, but with each mission, common enemy and common goal, I felt like there could be more going on behind the scenes. Dialogue and plot that could have no significance but to draw the player along suddenly had more weight and caused a stronger reaction. All because I, as a player, imagined something happening beyond what the game was giving me.

Both games somehow found a way to make me feel like I was fostering these connections with pretty much unchangeable NPCs. I think a huge part of it is the way that they have you view the characters stories through game play. Kormac goes through an emotional roller-coaster, first being a devout Templar, then slowly realizing that his entire crusade is pretty much a lie. This is only revealed if you, the player, constantly talk to him and get him to say more about his time with the Templar Order. Similarly, Tovan Khev is with your character from the very beginning in Star Trek Online, and the main plot of the Romulan arc also has his search for his lost sister as a prominent focal point. Pair that with a mission where your captain is captured, tortured, and the reassuring voice that helps you through the torture is Tovan himself, and you have a character that is tied closely and, I would argue, intimately to you. Another factor is most likely my own personality and what I bring to the game. I can't claim that these games will make everyone react the same, but I personally find them both to have found an interesting way to inject emotional resonance without having to bludgeon the player over the head with obvious tropes and mechanics.

In the future, I hope to see game developers exploring these possibilities more fully. Emotions can be created not just by having the player go through an entire romance story, complete with dialogue trees, binary choices, gift giving or whatever other game mechanic they use to try and make you care for their characters. It can also emerge organically from taking two characters through a journey together. They don't have to say "I love you" or embrace passionately like in a movie or television show, but they can fight side by side with plots that focus more on mutual goals and desires. I learned through spending time with these titles that a developer can pull me into their game and if their characters are interesting and charming enough, I can be drawn to them naturally. Kormac and Tovan didn't do anything special, they just helped me in my time of need, in demon haunted halls and the quiet expanse of space. That's more than enough to engender my devotion, even if it's only for as long as I'm living and playing in their worlds.

Mass Effect 3 was an awesome game. We can all debate the merits of the ending, but when I played the final minutes, I thought it was a successful finale to a great series. Characters that we had grown to love were given satisfying arcs and Commander Shepard saved the galaxy from the Reaper threat. All in all, it went pretty much as I had expected it would, and I was content.

One of things that I loved about the series was the feeling that my Shepard was the coolest, most hardened soldier in the galaxy. In all 3 games, I played the Vanguard class. In the first game, Vanguards were kind of a bridge class between the Soldier class and an Adept class, taking a bit of good gun play and a bit of good biotics and rolling it into one powerhouse. In the second and third games, the Vanguard gained the ability to charge, which made the class almost like an angry bull, slamming head first into combat and blasting enemies away with shotgun blasts and well placed biotic shockwaves. The third game also introduced Nova, which added a much higher risk and reward style of play. You could charge in and follow by using Nova, but you would be without your shields and at the mercy of anyone that hadn’t been knocked down. As a player, this class was a blast to play. You were always trying to remember to balance your abilities effectively, while also trying to resist the overwhelming urge to charge enemies, because the charge power is just so much fun to use. You could get carried away and end up in the middle of bad situation, but that was all part of craziness of playing a Vanguard.

Because of the class I played, and the backstory I chose, I had certain ideas of how my Shepard looked, how she must think, what she must feel. For the most part, the developers made good decisions in how Shepard carried herself and I had no complaints through most of the series. As the third game came to a close, I had a romantic moment with Kaidan Alenko, and I came face to face with a harsh truth. My Shepard, underneath her armor and her biotic barrier, didn’t look like what I wanted her to look like. She looked frail, small. She looked weaker than I expected, and I was taken aback by how annoyed I was at such a small and seemingly inconsequential detail. But there it was, and I couldn’t quite figure out why I was so heartbroken by it.

After a lot of time and thought, I know why. I feel the way I feel because my expectations crashed into reality. Playing this tank-like, biotic rhinoceros made me feel like she would look like a tank-like, biotic rhinoceros under her armor. Instead of my character looking like Zoe Saldana, I wanted her to look like Gina Carano or Beth Phoenix. It’s a small detail, but I came to the realization that it was as important to me as any story beat or gameplay mechanic tweak. Seeing Shepard so small, so wimpy, broke my suspension of disbelief in her character and what she could do, what she was at her core. It’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s the truth.

To explain my state of mind a bit more, I need to tell you about Shepard’s best feature, her messed up nose. Originally, this was due to a mistake I made in the character creation menu. I was messing with sliders and while her nose looked good from the front, it looked like it had be seriously broken from the side. I hated it at first, but as I played the game, it grew on me. It was a part of her and it made sense. She was a tough, gritty soldier. At some point in training or battle she had her nose broken, maybe multiple times by the look of it, and she didn’t care. That’s just Shepard. And it didn’t matter to anyone she met. Kaidan still fell in love with her, she was still made a Spectre, she could still charm almost anyone she spoke to, and she could still outfight anyone. So her nose became a badge of honor to me. Even when I couldn’t import my appearance properly in Mass Effect 3, I took the time to try and recreate her exactly as she was, broken, flattened nose and all.

So why get caught up on a brief romance scene that showed Shepard in her underwear as a more petite figure than I had imagined? Again, it’s hard to put into words. I felt let down by the developers making her a more classical feminine figure. The message I got was that she was beautiful, but only because she seemed to be skinny with no real muscles to speak of and barely any scars. Her appearance was disappointing to me. It seemed like she was made to be attractive to the player, even if it didn’t fit in with her overall character arc.

The interesting thing is, I felt similarly disappointed in the change of the appearance of Kaidan Alenko. In the first game, he appeared to have relatively normal muscle tone while he became much more muscular in the third game. His class began as primarily support based with biotic and tech powers and, in that first game, he could only wear light armor and use a pistol. He was quite literally the equivalent of a mage class, so a slimmer, more acrobatic figure would make sense. By the third game, it had appeared that Kaidan had been hitting the gym in his free time, becoming a much more stereotypical hunk. He also had slightly altered facial features, including differently shaped eyes, although improved graphics between the first game and the third could account for some of the differences, I suppose, I can't say that that's the only reason he looks so different. So while some may think that I am disappointed just because of how the developers decided to portray a female character, I am also trying to say that I am disappointed that they decided to stay true to stereotypical views of attractiveness in both male and female characters.

At the end of the day, my main issue is that there are other games that portray female warrior characters well and realistically within their own universe. Diablo III has a barbarian class that is large, weighty and still beautiful and feminine in her own recognizable way. The Amazon in Demon’s Crown is muscular and powerful, but still attractive. These characters embody their class and their play style. When you see them, you know their capabilities and what to expect when you pick up a controller or a mouse and keyboard. When I saw Shepard without her armor, I didn’t see the Vanguard that I knew she was. I saw someone less.

In my mind’s eye, Shepard will always have a broken nose and will always look more like a female MMA fighter than a female leading lady. To fight the Reapers, she had to be stronger, faster and more powerful. To become an N7 and then a Spectre, she had to be a soldier with intense and grueling training. All of things, combined with the fact that she was killed and rebuilt make for a scarred, ferocious, battle-hardened woman. That is the image I will take away from Mass Effect, even if it’s not the image that the game left me with in it’s final hours.

“What’s your favorite game?”

That question, whether asked in a face-to-face encounter, or online in a forum thread, is a constant in the lives of people who play video games. We judge each other based on what games we say we love. We praise people we agree with and ignore or admonish those who don’t share our opinion. Sometimes we even get into the really interesting bits, the reasons why people love the games they love.

To explain how I feel about games and gaming culture today, I went back and reevaluated just what my favorite game is and why. I mulled over how games affected me. I even tried to pinpoint the events surrounding my first experiences with the game, and I tried to see if things beyond the game itself had changed my perceptions.

My favorite game, one that I always return to, is Super Mario Bros. 2. Logically, I understand that it is not as revolutionary as the first or third games in the series, but it made a huge impact on the younger me. It showed me something that I didn’t think was possible at the time. It showed me that I could be a female protagonist in a game, and it showed me that a female protagonist was just as capable, maybe ever more so, than her male counterparts.

What an amazing thought that was! At 6 years old, I was too young to have known about movies like Alien. My morning cartoons were filled Ninja Turtles and GI Joes. And my games, the games that I had loved since my brothers had first helped me get them running on the Commodore 64, had been filled with burly barbarians and scantily clad slave girls, knights defeating evil wizards, and plumbers braving evil mushrooms and turtles to save a waiting princess. All of these things had been shaping my life. To that point, my heroes had been men and the people who needed saving had been women. That’s not a complaint, it was just the way it was.

Then, my father borrowed Super Mario Bros. 2 at some point in 1989 from a family friend. I can’t pinpoint when, but I remember holding the cartridge in my hand. The label had an exciting shot of Mario jumping against a sky blue background, turnip in hand and a smile on his face. I put the cartridge into the NES and after pressing start, I got a screen that prompted me to select my character. And that’s when I first really remember being able to choose to be girl.

I now realize that this was something that would forever change my expectations of games. Not only could I choose to be a girl, but the girl was doing everything that the guys were doing, and she even had her own gameplay benefits. She may have been slower pulling up vegetables, but her floating jump was great for passing over large gaps. I found myself, after I was introduced to this game, gravitating towards other games where the player could choose to be either a boy or a girl. Alien Syndrome, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Mario Kart, Diablo, Diablo II, Mass Effect, Dragon Age and on and on. While I also played games with only male protagonists, my favorites allowed for the choice most of the time to be a female character.

Now, I know that people will be asking how this applies to the controversies we are seeing more and more of today. I will begin by saying most of the things that have come up don’t bother me. In fact, I didn’t really feel any need to speak up until the Dead Island Riptide Pre-order story hit over a year and a half ago.. It was a moment that crystallized a desire to put words to what I was feeling. At first, when I saw the piece and read about it at various gaming news sites, I thought it was pretty tasteless and wondered to myself why anyone would want something like that. I certainly didn’t, and I was trying to figure out just what was so off-putting about the whole thing. Then I read some of the comments on the story and I admit I was kind of astounded by how many people were defending it. A lot of people weren’t defending it by saying it was a perfectly fine pre-order bonus and saying that they wanted one. They were just saying that they may not like it, but someone might and we shouldn’t be upset that the people who made this made it in the first place. It was made to create controversy, a lot of commentators said, and I agreed. But that shouldn't have absolved the creators of their bad decision. It shouldn’t be a mulligan; it should have been talked about for any number of reasons.

Since that story, we've had Bros before Hoes, the Hotline Miami: Wrong Number rape scene being talked about and eventually amended, and conversations in the forums about myriad other stories, blogs, and video series. I've always tried to join these conversations as a participant who may have a slightly different point of view, someone who comes at it from a female perspective and also as a person that loves to play games so much that Diablo II seriously effected her GPA as a college freshman. All of these issues and stories are of varying degrees of importance to me. Some seem too silly to spend much time on, while others, usually ones that involve real people dealing with real issues such as treatment at gaming conventions, should be talked about and acknowledged as more than just someone complaining or trying to gain attention. It's a continuum of issues, and while we may not want to take time to sift through and talk about them all as they come, we shouldn't ignore them in their totality either.

I can sympathize with the desire to defend games and gaming culture. I remember vividly the shootings at Columbine and how I felt being a junior in high school at the time, and how I was angry when certain media talking heads tried to blame music or Doom. I remember the surreal happenings surrounding the first Mass Effect and how certain conservative bloggers were calling it a sex simulator and how Fox News was airing that as fact, and again how mad I was. These are the things we should, as reasonable people and people who play games, be pushing back against. These instances were obvious attacks on video games by people looking for an easy talking point instead of looking at broader and more complicated issues. But those serious and egregious allegations, which later proved to be invalidated, should not harden our minds to real and concerning issues that come up from within the gaming industry and culture. It isn’t kill or be killed, totally black and totally white, it’s shades of gray. We can all have different opinions at the end of the day and we should be talk about them, even if we can only agree to disagree.

So, I go back and think about those first years when I was just being exposed to games and I realize that everything I have seen and played has changed me, but also how a changed me has come back to games. The girl who grew up coveting the Atari 2600 that was locked away in her older brother's room has become an adult with a disposable income, an abiding love of games, and a desire to have those games speak to her. For the most part, the games are beginning to deliver on that decades old promise. It's the stuff around and outside that lags behind sometimes.

Yesterday I tried out Microsoft Game Room. I fooled around in my arcade, decorated a few rooms, and then I went straight into demoing about a third of the games offered. Out of all the games I tried, I only found one that I would spend my space bucks on, and that game was Crystal Castles. I really enjoyed how fast the game was without being completely incomprehensible or utterly cheap. I actually felt like I was playing a game and using skills, not just desperately trying not to die within five seconds of the beginning of the level.
 I will try out the other games over the course of the next few weeks. My hope is that they expand their offerings to include games that I remember from my childhood. I would be most excited if they added Commodore 64 games, but I don't know how realistic that hope is. Either way, the idea is promising, but the games are not intriguing enough right now to make me shell out my MS Points.