What I've Been Playing

Summer is one of the toughest times in the childhood of a video gamer. Even back when I was in elementary school, I remember lamenting the cutting irony of the fact that summer vacation arrived (a) well after I had thoroughly exhausted all interest in whatever game I'd gotten for Christmas, (b) well before my autumn birthday (at which time I would inevitably recieve gifts of clothes and school supplies anyway), and (c) at a time of year when hardly any new games were released. In the end, I suppose all these barriers to gaming were likely of little real consequence; even if I'd had a stack of unplayed cartridges at my disposal, my fascist parental overlords probably still would have forced me to play outside.

As an adult, I find summers to be much more palatable. Sure, I don't get two months of contiguous vacation, but instead I have disposable income, free will, and air conditioning. And even though there aren't many triple-A game releases this time of year, there's a nearly endless supply of cheap downloadable fun to be consumed via Steam's Summer Sale (which just ended) and Xbox LIVE's "Summer of Arcade". Here's what I've been playing...

Diablo III (PC / Mac)

Released this May following a 12-year hiatus in the franchise, Diablo III has been the preeminent time-sink for something like 10 million people this summer. Despite its success on paper, the game itself has traveled kind of a bumpy road, one rife with server issues, bizarre gameplay limits, and game hacks and exploits. In a typical video game, these issues would be less of a problem; however, Diablo III incorporates a "Real Money Auction House", which (for those of you who don't know) is a virtual marketplace that allows players to buy and sell in-game equipment and commodities using real-world currency. Apparently, the lesson to learn here is that if you create a virtual economy that is already incredibly unstable because of its implicitly artificial nature, piling a bunch of additional problems on top of it yields results that are somewhat of a total clusterfuck.

Is there someone out there willing to drop $200 on a "Focused Beating"? Only time will tell.

Being one of those crazy people who doesn't play games so I can farm loot to sell on the Internet, I tended to approach Diablo III as... well, a "game". While Diablo III is undoubtedly highly-tuned, expertly polished, and addictive as hell, even after my first 30 hours of gameplay I'm still not sure if it's actually "fun". It's entirely possible Blizzard has simply figured out an algorithm for directly triggering the pleasure centers in my brain via randomized loot drops.

Resonance (PC)

Eventually I took a break from Diablo III and returned to my traditional summer practice of snapping up old titles and indie games in bulk off of Steam. One of my first purchases was Resonance, an indie point-n-click adventure game in the old-school pixel art style.

Resonance: why wrestle with Diablo III server issues when instead you could be riding the subway as a particle physicist?

Compared to staring at Battle.net error codes, I much preferred Resonance as a way to pass the time. Although the puzzles aren't terribly mind-blowing and the voice acting has the kind of stilted, canned quality that is hard to avoid in adventure games, Resonance is still well-executed in many ways. Not only does it build on the traditional adventure-game formula with a few interesting gameplay innovations, but its plot and character development were more than enough to make Resonance worth a few hours of my time.

Penny Arcade's On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 (PC)

I really enjoy the webcomic/blog/Internet institution Penny Arcade. I think one of the reasons I like Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik's commentary so much is that it spans the full dynamic range of the human experience from the existential to the profane, in much the same effortless manner of comedians like Jon Stewart or Louis C.K.

It's because I enjoy the eccentricities of the Penny Arcade world view so thoroughly that I've continued to play their "Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness" series, despite the fact each installment thus far has been decidedly middling. Granted, this newest offering is a departure from the two previous Hothead-produced titles, rendered instead in the style of a 16-bit console RPG by the qualified retro enthusiasts at Zeboyd Games. However, the end result is still a mediocre role-playing game that could (and should) be ignored by anyone who isn't a Penny Arcade fan.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations (Xbox 360)

As I've mentioned before, seeing the Assassin's Creed III gameplay trailer at PAX earlier this year really got me getting back on the AC bandwagon. After playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, I decided to ride the sequel train right on through Assassin's Creed: Revelations, the third part of the "Ezio Trilogy". This (hopefully) final chapter follows Ezio's exploits in 16th-century Constantinople, where despite being well into his fifties, he somehow manages to keep free solo climbing, base jumping, and serial murdering as though he was still a teenage assassin.

Apparently three decades of jumping off rooftops and stabbing dudes in the face really ages a guy.

Unless you are deeply fascinated by the lore of the Assassin's Creed universe, AC: Revelations is a sequel that could easily be skipped. While it is certainly as expertly crafted as other entries in the series, its more-of-the-same gameplay and its insistence on extending the already overdrawn Ezio plot line offers more exploitation than revelation.

Double Fine Happy Action Theater (Xbox LIVE Arcade)

Recently my kids and I had a playdate with a friend of mine and his two children. After a three-hour maelstrom of toys, tears, and bathroom mishaps, we were starting to run out of hope, as well as beer. Enter Double Fine Happy Action Theater, an Xbox LIVE downloadable arcade game for the Kinect that also seemed to be a safe and legal toddler narcotic. Although it's little more than a tech demo of 20 or so minigames, Happy Action Theater includes some of the most innovative uses of the Kinect sensor I've seen thus far, and each is delivered with trademark Double Fine flair. If you have young children I highly recommend it... at $10, it's one of the cheapest and most effortless ways you'll find for wearing out your offspring.

Terraria (PC)

The first time anyone hears about Terraria, it's always the same description: "It's 2-D Minecraft." To be fair, it's an accurate description; Terraria not only borrows Minecraft's core gameplay concepts (i.e. "mining" and "crafting"), it also borrows almost everything else. However, it's a testament to how genuinely well designed and innovative Terraria is that it can plagiarize so heavily while ultimately delivering an experience that is quite different from that of Minecraft. While life in Minecraft is an exercise in solitary exploration that occasionally borders on survival horror, Terraria is like Legend of Zelda would be if after conquering a dungeon you could lug it up to the surface and use pieces of it to build yourself a kick-ass fortress.

Now if only I would put this much effort into my real house.

My only gripe about Terraria is that the difficulty curve is steep. Even with heavy coaching from online walkthroughs and FAQs, after 20 hours I still couldn't beat the first boss. In the end, I decided just to be happy with the fact that I had built another sweet residence to my long list of virtual properties.

Well, that pretty much wraps up July's gaming exploits. God and Amazon Prime willing, this time next month I should be writing about one of my most-anticipated games of 2012: Darksiders II.

Aftermath

Originally this post was going to be about something else—perhaps a discussion of the screen in video games as a boundary object in the realm of imagination, or some other equally urgent topic. However, as I'm sure was the case for a lot of people, the horrific events that occurred in Colorado on Friday got me thinking about other, more somber things.

Police tape blocks off a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where a gunman attacked movie goers on July 20, 2012.
(Credit: Thomas Cooper/Getty Images)

First of all, whenever a tragedy like this happens, I'm always struck by how completely it dominates the media. During the days and weeks afterward, torrents of analysis wash over us as talking heads rehash every moment of the event in excruciating detail. As each incremental bit of new information is uncovered, the reporters and pundits absorb it immediately into their continuously-streaming narrative of the tragedy, doing so with a zealotry that can't help but come across as macabre. (Don't worry, the irony of me contributing to the avalanche of press by complaining about it is not lost on me.)

A generous person might say that the media frenzy isn't about ratings and morbid curiosity, but rather that it's about getting people the information they need to process this tragedy and perhaps find some closure. I understand that a lot of people need someone or something to blame, because answers like "there are insane and dangerous people in the world" and "shitty things just happen sometimes" don't really cut it. However, the problem I have with this approach is that everything I see or hear or read about an event like this makes the whole thing seem more surreal and detached from the human experience, not less. I'm not sure if this is true for the family, friends, and community of the victims, or if they're to busy grieving to watch Fox News. Regardless, I can't imagine that all of this coverage really helps them or anyone else all that much.

Perhaps part of the problem is that like most of the people I know—and like most of the people talking at me from the television—there is very little in my life experience that allows me to understand this kind of reality in any tangible way. I don't know anyone who has ever been murdered, or anyone who has murdered someone else. I've never killed anyone myself, at least not that I know about. I've never fought in a war or engaged in mortal combat with another person. In fact, I've been in very few life-or-death situations of any sort, and most of these were pretty firmly under my control. Pretty much every experience I could potentially use to begin to comprehend something like this has been absorbed through a screen in the form of television, movies, and video games, and nearly all of it has been fiction.

Of course, I'm not complaining about this state of affairs; ultimately it's a good thing that I don't have a more intuitive understanding of how to cope with the fallout from a mass murder. However, a barrage of media analysis coming from people who probably don't have much more perspective on these matters than I do doesn't provide much insight either.

Eventually, once the dust settles a bit, people will really start to dig for the "cause" of this tragedy. Discussions will ensue regarding family values, mental illness, gun control, the perils of life in a free society, and a host of other issues. Video games and other violent media will enter the conversation, as they always do. Perhaps some reactionary legislation will be passed regarding sequels for movie franchises based on comic books—stranger things certainly have happened.

People will continue to talk about this terrible event for years to come, while still thinking about the ones like it that happened in the past, and dreading the next one like it which will inevitably happen at some point in the future. My point is that whether we're the man on the street, a television personality, or just some jackass posting his ramblings on the Internet, those of us who have so little perspective on these matters would do well to remember that.

Distilled Reality

I don't like to brag, but I own a lot of video game houses. I'm the owner of five residences in the province of Skyrim alone, and in Albion anything bigger than an anthill has my name on the deed. Some of my many electronic properties were even built with my own two thumbs, like the mansion I designed for my Sims or the low-res countryside villa I constructed in Minecraft (from cobblestone I mined myself).

I still own my 300,000-gil mansion in Costa del Sol, one of the first video game properties I ever bought.

Given my depth of experience in the arena of virtual home ownership, I wasn't terribly concerned when (back in the real world) my wife and I recently bought a single-family house for ourselves and our two children. Moving into our new home, however, I quickly realized two things:

1. We own a lot of crap, and most of it is very heavy to lift.
2. The countless hours I've spent playing games like The Sims and Minecraft have led me to very seriously misjudge the amount of time, expense, and effort required to establish a suitable residence for oneself and one's family.

In other words, it appears that owning all these video game houses has done fairly little to prepare me for buying an owning a house in the real world. Upon reflection, I've realized part of the problem is that certain key parts of the homeowner experience have not been adequately represented in gameplay.

Hey, if it can hold up a Honda Civic, then it should be able to keep my cabinets from falling off the wall, right?
(Yes, this is really how I fixed my kitchen cabinets.)

For example, despite the province of Skyrim's incredibly low real estate inventory (which apparently consists only of five houses), I didn't have to engage in any multiplayer battles against other prospective buyers who were all competing for the same property. When playing Fable III, buying a property in Albion never involved filing a mountain of paperwork in order to get a mortgage, whose underwriting inevitably would have unlocked entire new dungeons full of paperwork for me to navigate. And don't even get me started on the lack of a plaster repair game mechanic in Minecraft.

I suppose what we're really talking about here is a question of immersion. Video games often talk about being more "immersive", but to be honest I'm not always sure what that means. In a truly immersive version of Skyrim, for instance, upgrading the blacksmithing perk would have required the Dragonborn first to complete a five-year apprenticeship, and exploring the frozen mountains of Winterhold would probably have involved less enchanted loot and epic battles with dragons, and more crushing loneliness and frostbite. With these changes, I'm not exactly sure what kind of game Bethesda would have ended up with, but somehow I doubt it would have sold 10 million copies.

Here's an MLS photo of "Breezehome", a little place I own in Whiterun. It's an historic Scandinavian-style cottage in a great school district, provided you don't mind your children occasionally being eaten by dragons.

My point is that people like video games not because they provide some sort of alternative "virtual" version of reality, but because they provide something far better than any virtual reality: distilled reality. Like the corresponding physical process, the distillation of reality that video game designers perform removes the impurities of the real world (like taxes and wallpaper removal), leaving us with an invigorating aqua vitae chock full of action, mass murder, puzzles, instant gratification, and bizarrely athletic plumbers.

Regrettably, like any libation, distilled reality must be consumed in moderation, lest its side effects lead to unfortunate consequences. In my case, getting drunk on booze or reality both result in similar kinds of behaviors, including (but not limited to) unpredictable fits of anger, horniness, and the firm belief that I would probably be able fight a dragon. Nevertheless, there's nothing like a bourbon Manhattan and some Gears of War deathmatch to take the edge off at the end of a tough day... and like my distilled spirits, I don't expect I'll be giving up my distilled reality anytime soon.