The Games We Play

Now that I have showered some well-deserved praise on BioWare for Dragon Age II, and also engaged in the almost 60 hours that it took me to get to the bitter and mind-wrenchingly disturbing end, I have a few thoughts. For all of my waxing poetic about how fabulously progressive BioWare has been with their slick political messages and wiggling new ideas into the way we consume and play video games, there was this thing tugging at me as I took my Hawke faffing about Kirkwall.

Please take note Gentle Readers: This post contains some fairly significant end-game plot spoilers for Dragon Age II. If you do not want to have this roller coaster ride ruined for you, please consider moving on. You have been warned.

The Dragon Age games are some of my favorites, and while they are not without flaw, I have played my money's worth of them for sure. Part of what has endeared them to me is the progressive feel of the character interaction and the way that they smartly raise political issues within story lines. Attentiveness to QUILTBAG issues is, in my mind, a welcome and refreshing thing to see and hear from the industry.

Gaming is interactive, and I would like to hit the pause menu and turn back to all of you, the faithful who have come 'round to engage me in these discussions (don't worry, I won't let the Deamons' Souls get you, this pause works, go answer your phone!). Consider this the cut scene before Act II or whatever.

People with disabilities have long had difficulty accessing video games for various reasons and with varying degrees of limited accommodations. Game play details ranging from color schemes in darker settings to story lines and fight scenes that can overwhelm cognitive understanding have left many games out of the question. Controllers have been too difficult or impossible to use, and the mechanics too fast or the quest chains too long and tangled. The canyon of hardcore games almost seemed, at times, to bar disabled gamers from their guild.

The concern that casual games are going to ruin the gaming market plays on a couple of assumptions: 1) That "hardcore" means "difficult," something that only a veteran gamer of many years should be able to play intuitively, and should only appeal to that certain narrow demographic. 2) That hardcore and casual gamers are two ends of a wide canyon and they shall never cross the divide into local co-op mode.

I wanted to make sure that my voice wasn't the only one droning at you during this series, so I bestowed some fangirl love upon some prominent pro-gamers in exchange for interviews. I was really honored that Anna Collier, one of the most well-known in the field agreed to humor me.

You can't see me! Ha!

The Age of the Internet has brought many advances in the way that we play games. It usually breaks down into three categories, and I like to chunk things neatly for the sake of paragraphs. The Internet has brought we the gamers The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. The Good is that it has opened up a whole world where we can interact with other game enthusiasts and engage in our favorite games together from miles away. Bungie Games has banked on this for years now. The Bad, I would say, is lag. Lag kills, and as wired as South Korea is, they haven't solved this problem for me yet, as too many times I am looking for my corpse in some Azerothan forest. The Ugly, however, would be the freedom that so many feel that anonymity permits them to ruin the experience of online gaming for the rest of us.

If you are a service member on deployment or stationed overseas you may find yourself limited in the ways that you are able to spend your free time. You could spend your time doing PT (physical training), studying for exams, doing PT, maybe doing college work online, doing PT, or, if you are a gamer, spending some quality time with your console or computer and your choice of n00bs to pwn. But that can be difficult when the higher brass decides to limit what games you can purchase.

Kaos' Homefront starts with a very real line of succession, Kim Jong-Un, the actual named successor to DPRK's current dictator. Dave Votypka from Kaos describes the two Koreas as the fourth largest military power in the world and one of the most technologically advanced countries in existence, explaining that this is the foundation of the future history that they have engineered. While I love the idea of a First-Person Shooter that doesn't have the U.S. attacking some ambiguous foreign power overseas, I am wary of using real-time events to create another panic based on Korean mistrust.

One of these things is not like the other...

Many game designers and developers deliver games that meet the minimal requirements to make me happy, but there are certain game delivery elements that always ruin it for me. The lack of diversity in many games is one of these, and I often see it when I walk down the store aisle or rummage through my collection...