"Sit down and I will tell you a tale like none that you have ever heard."

A major part of who I am as an individual and how I identify myself as a person is by the media I partake in. One medium I am particularly fond of is video games and, to be perfectly honest, it will be something I will talk about plenty in this blog so I thought it might be best to get a post solely about video games out of the way early on. I may write others later but for now I give you this.

Fig 1: No, not yet. You've got a lot more reading to do. There's a reason it's 50G.

Now, what makes this medium connect so much for me as well as for many, many other people out there? What makes it different than say a movie, a book, or music as a medium of expression? The main thing that makes video games different, which I am sure I don't have to explain, is the interactivity. The interactivity of video games allows them to pull you into the stories and experiences in the game. Now this isn't to say that the medium is always more immersive than any other. Sitting down with a copy of Cannery Row can pull me into another world better than easily 95% of the samey first-person shooters on the market today. However, there are experiences that only gaming can give through their immersion in interactivity. For example, anyone who has played Half-Life 2: Episode 2 knows how unsettling it is when the game actually wrests control from you when you meet the Combine Advisors.

Fig 2: A.K.A, Telepathic Space Slugs

For the entirety of the game you were in complete control of your character, Dr. Gordon Freeman, even during what would be considered the cut scenes of the game. During the whole adventure you had been learning about the Combine, the aliens that took over earth, and about their super powerful leaders, the Advisors. When you finally do meet one, it picks you up using its telepathic powers making the player completely relinquish the control that they had and truly making them feel helpless. This sort of use of immersion is something that truly makes video games unique as a medium. Anyone who has played through Bioshock has probably already thought of another great example. Of course immersion is not only useful for taking advantage of the player's mindset but also has many other uses. It is great for creating true fear in survival horror games and overall just making a game fun to play. I might be jumping the gun a bit in talking about immersion right off the bat. This is something that most modern games still sadly fail to convey but a game rarely becomes great without having this element.

Fig 3: A Game That Most Definitely Has It Down

So other than immersion, what makes the gaming medium so great? There are some experiences and stories that can simply only be made great as games. No matter how hard Hollywood tries, they have yet to make a truly great movie out of a video game. Look at this list and I dare you to try to find something good in there. Maybe Halo Legends. And, no, Clannad does not count. The "game" was a visual novel which many people, myself included, do not quite consider games. Not to say visual novels don't have merit, I don't want to make anyone mad at me over this one, but now I have gotten myself way off track.

Fig 4: And there goes any doubt that I'm a geek.

So what types of experiences and stories am I talking about? Well, the astute observer will recognize Fig. 4 as being from the rather noteworthy Shadow of the Colossus. This is a game where the main character brings a girl to a shrine to ask a deity to resurrect her. The back story is vague, but the deity says he will if the protagonist can destroy the 16 collosi that can be found across the land. Thus begins an adventure alternating between taking in the scenery on the way to the next battleground in the complete solitude of the beautiful landscape and frantically climbing up several-story tall monsters while they try to crush you and shake you off. I don't know about you, but in another medium the beauty in the simplicity of the travel across the gorgeous scenery in silence would only come off as boring. Another great example of such an experience on quite possibly the opposite end of the spectrum is a little game known as Katamari Damacy.

Fig 5: A Truly Unforgettable Experience

No matter what your opinion may be on this game, as the caption points out, it is something that will stick with you. This is not a game you play for the plot which can be summed up "go to earth with a sticky ball to roll up shiny objects to replace the stars which are disappearing for some reason" which of course fits the goofy atmosphere really well. What you play this game for is the incredibly unique gameplay and the incredibly distinctive, goofy, and very Japanese world. The game starts you off collecting thumbtacks and by the end you're picking up skyscrapers and even islands. I remember one level where the goal was to get as a ball as big as possible before picking up a cow which would end the level. It seemed straightforward enough. I rolled over a can to start and the level ended. It was a can of milk. I began to understand the challenge and tried again avoiding anything even close to what might possibly be cow-related. I got to a much larger size my second try before rolling over a human protestor that was holding an anti-cow sign. When I found out why the level ended I had quite the bout of laughter. I had some great experiences with that game. Now, one more element of the gaming medium I would like to explore is choice and how the medium can help you experience the consequences of said choices.

Fig 6: You probably saw this coming.

Granted there are many games in the modern libraries that have such moral choice systems, in my opinion none of them comes close to the Mass Effect series in how well they make you actually deal with the consequences of your actions. The game company Bioware has always been known for good writing and the Mass Effect series is some of their best mixed with some amazing characterization and some of the toughest moral choices in gaming I have seen. How most game moral choice systems work is the game presents you with a set of options to solve a problem, generally the good, neutral, and evil options. Now most of these systems are flawed at making you actually think. The options are always very clearly good and evil, the good and neutral options being what most people would actually do in such a situation while the evil option is generally so absurdly evil that no actual human would ever do such a thing. For a rather extreme example, we go to Fallout 3. I loved Fallout 3, and it probably has one of the runner-up moral choice systems, but it does tend to give you evil options that only the spawn of Satan himself would likely choose. One particular option I am thinking of revolves around one of the few remaining towns in the Capital Wasteland, a place called Megaton.

Fig 7: Yep, that's an A-bomb.

In the center of the town is an atomic bomb which has been sitting there ever since the war that left the Fallout world as the scarred wasteland that it is. Megaton was built around the bomb for who knows why and the settlers have just agreed to live and let not-explode with the bomb. When you first enter the town you are greeted by the sheriff who tells you about the town and you can offer to disarm the bomb for him. He says if you can he'll pay you a small sum. If you go to the town's tavern you can meet up with a man who offers to pay you an absolutely absurd amount of money if you rig the bomb to explode instead. If you do rig the bomb to explode you need to travel about halfway across the rather large game world to go to the HQ of the man who hired you where he lets you do the honors of pressing the button to detonate the town. This sets off one of the most dramatic moments of the game where you get to see the town of people you met become obliterated in the wake of the mushroom cloud you see from miles away. If you choose to detonate the town, later in your adventure you will run across survivors from Megaton who will attack you on sight to the death. The game does a great job of making you feel like a truly terrible person.

Fig 8: You sir, are not nice.

So while Fallout 3 does have you take some responsibility for your actions, the Mass Effect series does a much better job of making you really think and weigh your options by presenting much more reasonable and complex issues. I know this was especially effective for me due to the fact that I try to answer such moral choices in games the way that I would if I really were in such a situation. The moral choice options instead of being split between good and evil are instead between "paragon" and "renegade." I suppose the best way to describe it is just in the method you go about solving your problems. Do you act in more the heroic or badass fashion? Long story short is your character more like Superman or King Leonidus?

Fig 9: If for some reason you don't like Spartans, think any Bruce Willis character ever. 

The game throws several difficult choices at you that provoke thought and actually help you realize how you weigh your own values in life. One of the choices that sticks out well for me actually isn't one of the big ones but rather one that is a small optional sidequest. The setup is that a man's wife was in the military and got killed in a Geth attack, the Geth being a race of AIs that I talked about quite extensively in the last post. Said man asked the military for her body for a funeral and they denied him. They said that her body was valuable to study Geth weapon tech that they had yet to understand and that, with the information, they may be able to help create shields against the weaponry. As the well-known Commander Shepard you have the option of convincing one of them to go with the other's opinion. Now while talking with them to gather information on the situation it became clear that this issue was one that someone would definitely walk away unhappy from and there was no middle ground that would be the "best" solution. One piece of information allowed me to finally decide. While the military wished to keep the wife's body they also had a few other subjects with similar wounds from the battle. They would have preferred a larger sample size, but I saw them as being able to sacrifice one subject. Granted I will not call my point of view necessarily correct and I would understand anyone who took the other side of the conflict, but it still was one of the tougher choices the game threw at me.

Fig 10: But really, there is no wrong answer.

Of course this does not disregard the other tough choices in the game. From the fate of the Rachni to the outcome of the Genophage to many others that I won't describe to avoid spoilers, Bioware really put a lot of work into making a game where the decisions could be realistically chosen and truly impact the world around you. Bioware has other games that have good moral choice systems as well, hell, look around you, tons of games nowadays do, but the Mass Effect series is easily the best implemented and... well, it's probably time to switch topics before this blog turns into a big advertisement for how excited I am for Mass Effect 3.

Fig 11: And now for something completely different.

Now what makes a game stick with you? What are those memorable moments that you never forget made of? Other than making something completely unique, it's hard to say, otherwise they wouldn't be special, those moments would be in every game. What I can give, however, is a list of moments that have stuck with me. What are my gaming equivalents to the Matrix bullet dodge, the dementors stopping the train in Harry Potter, or finding out the future changed in A Sound Of Thunder? How about I just have a list of pictures where my fellow gamer readers can reminisce? (I will try, but probably not succeed in avoiding spoilers.)

Fig 12-22: In order from top to bottom we have: Bioshock, Killer7, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Braid, Portal 2, Cave Story, Minecraft, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

 If you have played any of these games, that rush of nostalgia you just felt signifies how great these works are and keep in mind that no matter how many less-than-wonderful games the gaming industry pumps out, eventually there will be another moment worthy of adding to this quite incomplete list. Just like any medium, there are many creations that fail to meet our standards while there are many others that truly blow you away. One thing you must keep in mind though, is that video games, like all media, are created for entertainment. If they are not enjoyable, they will not be experienced properly and they have, overall, lost there sense of purpose. Too many people seem to separate what is fun and what is good in their minds and forget that often times fun is good. We need media in our lives due to human nature. Looking back to our earliest ancestors, even they got bored and made paintings and put on performances.

Fig 23: The Prehistoric Equivalent of The Simpsons

And yet, for some reason media seem to have a hierarchy in society. A rough scale from most socially acceptable to least goes something like this: theater, books, music, film, television, video games. This scale is something hidden from obvious view in society and yet continues to pervade ruthlessly. It seems to be based not on the content of the media, but rather more on which has been around longest and has the least "taint" from modern counter-cultural or otherwise different-from-the-norm mentalities. When put through the viewpoint of looking at actual content, I can tell you that I have seen some terrible plays and have seen some great TV shows and, of course, as shown by this post, I have played tons of awesome video games. Overall, every media has its ups and downs, its bland mass appeal works and its artsy-to-the-point-of-complete-confusion works, and they all have their truly amazing works that sit on the throne of awesomeness.

Fig 24: A Google Image Result For "Throne of Awesomeness"

I guess my point is that I love video games and I hope to see them continue to grow as a medium and also to continue to gain the respect they deserve in our world because for every bucket of shovelware out there, you will find an absolute gem that makes it all easily worth it. Granted you have to dig hard sometimes to find your "Beyond Good & Evil"s or your "Doukutsu Montagari"s, but this medium will continue to grow and, as I see it, go on to produce some of the greatest pieces of art that humanity will be able to offer when we're all said and done. I am more than happy to experience what's out there and I hope you are too.

Playlist of the Post:
1) Everlasting Light - The Black Keys
2) Tenderoni - Chromeo
3) A Good Man Is Easy To Kill - Beulah
4) That's All - Genesis
5) Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine - The Killers