You know what I love? Rough games. The games that have a personality bigger than their budget. The games that are by no means ‘perfect’ but which are full of great ideas. The games that, instead of being polished to a fine sheen, still have some jagged edges and, consequentially, a unique shape and a personal feel.

It has really only been in the last five years or so that rough games have even stood out. Before the current generation of consoles, there was a whole spectrum of quality and budget among videogames, from multi-gazillion dollar triple-A to shovelware to everything in between. But as production costs rose, the middle-ware became increasingly locked out of the game. Either you were a perfectly polished studio blockbuster, or some little indie game. There was little room left for anything in-between.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the middle-ware has maybe always still been there, but just became completely dwarfed by the omniscient presence and marketing of the big games.

Indeed, my favourite rough games of the past few years have been those games I play long after they came out. The games I’m most likely to play when they are are new are those with the biggest marketing budget when they first come out. Quite simply, those the games I’m inevitably most aware of. A year later, I think maybe I should try out those other games I heard of at the time but then quickly fell off the radar. Almost without fail, these games are far more interesting. I’m impressed by the their ideas and the goals they aim for, even it the implementation is imperfect.

Sega’s Binary Domain is perhaps the best example. In this Japanese cover shooter, the controls are janky to the extent that it is almost impossible to aim at a head. At first, it just feels like another goofily translated Japanese game, but as it progresses you realise it is splendidly written and full of fascinating, confronting ideas. A conversation system at first feels like an arbitrary window-dressing until, towards the end of the game, the way you have used it greatly affects how the story plays out. In battle, shooting different limbs off the enemy robots makes them act in all kinds of delightful and amusing ways. The characters are as individual and memorably as they are cringeworthy stereotypes. By the story’s end, the game has communicated more thoughtful and challenging themes than all the Bioshock games combined.

Or Dragon’s Dogma, which Im just now catching up on. At first it just felt like a poor man’s Dark Souls. Combat was button-mashy, and all my weapons float about ten pixels away from my character’s body. Everyone speaks like Englishmen from the 1500s mocking Englishmen from the 1300s. But the game has incredibly deep systems and gives you all the time in the world to explore them without forcing you in any one direction. The ‘pawn’ system is inspired, allowing you to take a friend’s NPC with you on a mission who has already done that mission before with another player, and thus is able to give you extra support. Night time in the wild feels oppressive in a way that I’ve only ever felt in Minecraft or DayZ.

Both these games lack the polish of a Crysis or a Tomb Raider, but each is better for it. It’s not that I enjoy Binary Domain or Dragon’s Dogma in spite of their flaws, but I love them because of their imperfections. The clunkiness of Binary Domain and the floating weapons of Dragon’s Dogma each add a particular character, a particular flavour, to that game. Each says to me that this is a game punching above its weight, more interested in trying out interesting ideas than being perfectly polished. On each game, the grubby fingerprints of someone who made it is still visible.

And that’s why I love rough games. They have a personality in their rough edges. These aren’t perfectly polished and sterile consumer products. These are creative works as beautifully imperfect as the people who made them.

Our very scathing review of the Binary Domain PC port can be found here.

You know what I love? Acting. I love games that encourage me to treat the world like a stage and my playable character like a role to perform. I love not using my character as a mere tool to do what I want to do, but doing what I think my character would do.

When a game makes me feel like I should act out the role of the character, it gets me out of the mindset that I should play in the ‘perfect’ or ‘most efficient’ way, and instead makes me feel like I should play in the way that best strengthens my own version of the story.

Not many games are able to make me play like this. Most playable characters, even the most well-rounded ones, are designed in a way so that by just doing what I want to do, they act how they should act. An easy example: Master Chief is a superhuman cyborg soldier because that is exactly how the player of Halo is going to act within the game’s mechanics.

But some characters have a broader spectrum of ability and ways to be enacted that encourage me to perform them in certain ways.

This is probably most explicit in role-playing games like Skyrim that allow the player to heavily customise the character to be how they want them to be. My wood elf assassin that I take with me through every Elder Scrolls game has a clear skillset and ideological leaning. I make certain choices in those games based on not what I would do, but on what I believe that character would do.

But in these games, the character is still someone I created nearly from scratch. The games I find really interesting are those that give me an already well-rounded character, but one with just that little bit left open for me to decide how they would act.

The game that has most recently got me thinking about this is the latest Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is clearly her own character with a long history that has been developing for decades before I even press the ‘New Game’ button. In the most recent game, the story and mechanics are clearly trying to convey a sense of gritty survival against all odds. There is a desperation in Lara’s movements, in the way she moves around each battlefield.

For the opening hours of the game, the only weapons I had were the bow and the pistol. It created this tension where I would get confident with the bow, stealthily taking down enemies without being seen. But then I would screw up—like the novice that Lara is. Then I would change to the loud, messy, imprecise pistol, blasting away frantically in a panic. At first I would carefully aim for headshots, as I would in any shooter, but it just felt wrong. I didn’t feel like in this story that the character Lara Croft would carefully, calmly aim for the head. So instead I would perform her how I think the character would act: being scared, wasting ammo.

Later in the game, I obtained a machine gun. In the next room, time slows down as I am asked to gun down about seven men with my new tool. It felt so wrong. The machine gun was too powerful. It was out of character with the way I wanted to enact Lara as a character in this story. So I put the machine gun aside, and refused to use it ever again, forcing myself to stick to the bow and the pistol (and, later in the game, the loud, messy shotgun).

The game gave me the Lara Croft that the designers thought would fit the story, much like the script writer of a film or theatre play already has ideas for a character before the actor comes along. But then, like any actor, I brought with me my own ideas of how this character should be acted. When I entered the world — when I got on the stage — I brought my own ideas to the story. By choosing what weapons my Lara Croft would use, I created my own performance.

And that’s why I love acting in a game. It’s not about finishing the game as efficiently or perfectly as possible. It is about letting a story pick you up and carry you along so that you care about nothing other than participating in that story. Tomb Raider lets me feel that. The story might be fairly cliché and typical, but by being able to perform Lara Croft the way I want the character to be acted, that cliché and typical story feels just a little bit more personal, and a little bit more meaningful. Like something I helped to bring to life.

You know what I love? Simulated physics. I love watching objects fall and tip and fling and crash and crumple in dynamic and believable ways. Simply by implementing a believable (not necessarily realistic) system of physics and gravity that affects the objects in the game word, a game is given a literal and figurative weight, and is opened up to all kinds of dynamic and exciting outcomes.

Half-Life 2 is nine-years-old. Nine years! Since then, simulated physics have become so common-place as to hardly be noticed.

We don’t notice anymore when a slab of wood pushed just a few pixels too far will slowly tip and fall. We don’t notice when a barrel rolls down a slope, then spins out of control as one side of it clips a pole. It’s just objects acting how objects act. It has become normal.

But when I first played Half-Life 2, one of the first games I ever played that tried to simulate realistic physics across all its world’s objects, I was mesmerised. I spent hours literally picking up objects and dropping them again, mesmerised at all the ways they behaved. I’d pick up a bottle and drop it so it just clipped the side of the table. I’d pick it up again and drop it so it landed on the table and rolled off. I didn’t need massive explosions or spectacles. Just watching the infinite number of ways that objects could tumble with a real weightiness felt like the biggest leap in videogame technology since I first played a game with polygons (it was Starfox, if you were wondering).

Most interesting was how it affected my relationship with the numerous people and aliens I was shooting. I had become so used to enemies having pre-scripted death animations when they die that there was something shocking and impactful about how the Combine soldiers just crumpled under my bullets, the way headcrabs just crumbled under my crowbar. It made them feel real. It made them feel heavy.

Several years later, a similar commitment to gravity and physics made Grand Theft Auto IV my favourite game in that series to date. While I certainly enjoyed the comic, cartoon tone of the previous games, there was something heavy about Grand Theft Auto IV. Not just in Niko’s mopey narrative, but, again, in the way bodies would just crumple. The way cars felt like they were a ton of metal beneath the earth’s gravity. In Grand Theft Auto IV, gravity felt like an omnipresent beast, always there, always making things heavy.

But that isn’t to say that a game’s physics and gravity have to be realistic. If you’ll excuse me mentioning Just Cause 2 (like I am legally obliged to do every column), I loved the way that the physics were made to simulate the world of an action movie rather than the real world. The way a car would explode if it hit another car just after you jumped out. The way wrecks would tumble and slide an impossible distance.

And that’s why I love simulated physics, even as they have become so normal to be unnoticed. A world’s physics is its personality: a sense of something that you never actually see, but which you feel through the way you interact with its objects.

City 17 and Liberty City had heavy, sombre personalities with gravity pushing down on them. Panau had the bombastic personality of a movie that is so bad it’s good, with a carefree ignorance of how the world is meant to work, as long as it looks cool.

You know what I love? Having a body in first-person games. I love looking down and seeing legs. I love feeling like I actually have a body inside the virtual world, like I have a material presence.

In most first-person perspective games, I just feel like I am a camera flying effortlessly through a space. The movement is usually frictionless, determined to make the translation of my intentions as direct and transparent as possible. In multiplayer shooters, this makes sense, as the competitive play is all about my skill as a player. But in a single-player game, I want to feel like my character has a real presence in this world. I’m more concerned about feeling like I am part of something than I am with being able to play ‘perfectly’.

There was this idea for the longest time that first-person games were ‘more immersive’ because they put the player closer to the action. But this often was (and still is) conflated with this notion that the player ‘is’ the character. Because of this, the characters of first-person games were often pushed to the side: rarely seen and rarely heard. They were all silent Gordon Freemans and Doom Marines so that the player could, supposedly, feel like it was you in this world.

But even in the earliest first-person games I played, I always loved getting a glimpse of the character that was supposedly me. I particularly remember playing Duke Nukem 3D and Deus Ex, spending ages in front of any mirror I could find, just to see how my character ‘actually’ looked when I pressed a button and performed an action.

Later, on my Playstation 2, I loved the slow and chunky feel of Killzone. I couldn’t see my character’s body reflected in mirrors, but through the friction of the controller I could feel the weight of his body, the heftiness of his machine gun. I didn’t have to be able to see my body to feel its presence.

And in the years since I played Killzone, plenty of games have drawn my attention to this body of my character in different ways, either by rendering it visible in mirrors (or simply when I look down) or by rendering it tactile in the controls. But more than any other first-person game, it is Starbreeze’s shooters—particular Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness—that have made me most aware of my character’s body.

Something feels ‘different’ in Starbreeze games, something that is really hard to pin down. In Starbreeze’s games, I don’t feel like I am flying a camera through a world; I feel like I am piloting a giant body of meat from the cockpit of its head. When I play as Riddick in Escape from Butcher Bay or Jackie in The Darkness, I never feel like it is me in this world, but that I am very much just looking through the eyes of these characters. I get the sense that my character’s body is ‘actually’ there in the world, colliding with other objects and casting its own shadow. When I get too close to a wall, my character’s arm actually bends and moves. When I look down, I can see my character’s legs.

I imagine that the reason it very much feels like my character has a body in Starbreeze’s games is because one of those characters relied heavily on the celebrity status of its actor to make an impression on the player. In Escape from Butcher Bay, the player needed to know that this wasn’t ‘them’ in the world; it was them-as-Vin-Diesel-as-Riddick. By constantly drawing attention to Riddick’s virtual body, the game constantly drew attention to Vin Diesel’s body as a celebrity, and the weird relationship between them and the player in that game.

Most significantly, drawing attention to my character’s body as I played these games meant that it hardly bothered me when the camera pulled back out to third-person during conversations and cut-scenes. It wasn’t jarring because I never felt like I was that character to begin with—I was just occupying their body for a while.

And that is why I love first-person bodies. Whether they are explicitly ‘there’ like in Starbreeze’s games, or just present through either an actual, audible voice (like many recent, talkative protagonists of first-person games are) or chunky, meaty controls , I feel far more committed and attentive to the game’s story by having a sense of the character in the world who is someone far more interesting than simply ‘me’.

You know what I love? Unreliable narrators. I love stories where I can’t trust the storyteller. I love how such stories draw attention to the way they are presenting me information, the way they insist that I be critical and suspicious, and the way they show me that every story is presented from a particular point of view. In videogames in particular, I love how this unreliability of the narrator (usually the playable character) feeds into everything I experience in that world.

I love being forced to wonder if I am seeing this world as it really ‘is’ — or just how my character wants me to see it.

Most videogames try to make the relationship between the player and the playable character as synchronised and transparent as possible. Ideally, in most cases, you are meant to feel like you are the character. Ideally, in most cases, the character is almost meant to disappear. They are meant to just be this gateway through which the player can make their intentions tangible in the game world.

But increasingly, we are seeing more games play around with this relationship, with the inevitable distance between the player and the playable character. This is most explicit in those games where the playable character is someone who, for one reason or another, you can’t completely trust.

Unreliable narrators are a literary device that have been around for about as long as literature itself. In novels, it’s not rare to find out that the objective view you thought you were getting on the events were being skewed by the very narrator narrating them to you, that your view onto this world was partial. In films, we might discover at the end of the film that events that we took to be objective fact were figments of the protagonist’s imagination.

In videogames, this can be translated to how we understand the world around us through the playable character: through either what they tell us about the world, or simply how the world feels as we navigate the character through it. It doesn’t have to be something as simple as the character ‘lying’ to the player. Maybe the character doesn’t even know that they are lying.

Bioshock is probably the most well-known example of this, where certain things about the character are revealed halfway through the game that paint the player’s every choice made in Rapture in a different light. More recently, games like Far Cry 3, Spec Ops: The Line, and Hotline Miami call into question our character’s sanity. We aren’t just looking at a character on screen who can’t distinguish between real and fiction, we are that character. Our only window into this world is filtered through the mind and body of someone we can’t trust. The unreliability of our main character makes us question the authenticity of the world we are moving through.

Then there are the literal narrators, such as Bastion’s Rucks. In videogames, Rucks is an exception as he is the narrator but he isn’t the playable character. Often, he isn’t around while I’m off with the Kid having adventures, and I’m led to wonder if this is what ‘really’ happened, or if it is just what Rucks imagined must have happened. Indeed, towards the end of the game, Rucks’s narration doesn’t actually match what you are actually doing, and you have to wonder what else he got wrong.

Or, more recently, Max Payne 3 is played as a series of snippets of something that has happened to Max in the past tense. From his constant narration, you get the sense that everything we are going to do has already happened, that Max is telling us about this adventure after the fact. Max never lies to the player, per se, but he still withholds important information — who betrays who — for the sake of the story. In this way, Max becomes unreliable in the way any good storyteller must become unreliable. But then there is another layer of unreliability with Max, as an alcoholic and drug addict. Did these events really happen the way he is telling us they happened? Even if they did, am I approaching them in a different light because of how Max has framed them? At every point of Max Payne 3, Max has the chance to offer his excuses for the violence he commits before he/I commits them.

And that is why I love unreliable narrators: subjectivity. Our ability to move around freely in a videogame world often leads us to assume we are getting an objective view of that world, seeing it from all angles. Unreliable narrators and playable characters challenge this. They show how we are always anchored to the particular point-of-view of our character, and that we are always seeing things how they want us to see things. They force me to be critical. They force me to think and to wonder what I’m not being told, what I’m not being shown, and—most importantly in videogames—what I’m not being allowed to see.

You know what I love? Finding journals scattered around a game’s world that reveal fragments of a story and help me better understand that world and its inhabitants. These days, such journals are most commonly audiotapes of some kind, but they can also be written material like emails or newspaper clippings. When implemented properly, I don’t just feel like I’m exploring a physical space as I move through it, but I also feel like I am discovering a lived-in place as I come to understand the relationships of the people that live — or used to live — there.

Environmental storytelling is an excellent thing. Many games (from Half-Life to System Shock 2, from Morrowind to Dear Esther) embed some or most of their stories in their world, waiting for the player to stumble across it rather than stopping the player and forcing them to sit and listen to a chunk of story between each level. It can allow for a really organic unfurling of the story for the player where it can feel like you are discovering the story as you move across the world. It feels like the story is just what is going on around you, something you are experiencing and observing now, in the present tense.

The difficulty or weakness of such an approach to storytelling, though, is that it can prevent the game from being able to tell something specific to the player. The Half-Life games, trying to avoid exposition as they do, have incredibly vague stories. It’s clear that there is something concrete going on in this world that the developers have clearly thought about, but we as players only ever get to skim the surface. With the games’ reluctance to just sit us down and tell us what is happening, we can never really get to the core of it. This works for Half-Life; to be sure, one of the biggest attraction of the series is its ambiguity; but not every game wants to do that. Some want the player to be able to really get to know their world even while they want to stand back and not explicitly tell you anything.

This is where piecemeal bits-of-story scattered around the world in journals of one kind or another are useful. Just like our real world, most videogame worlds are covered in a veneer of information, and journals allow us to explore that different layer of an environment, the web of communication between citizens that can not only tell us something specific about a person, but hint at broader cultural or political aspects.

When I’m in a totally foreign virtual world — be it somewhere fantastical like Dishonored’s Dunwall or somewhere uncannily familiar like the near-future of Deus Ex — I love rummaging through emails or newspapers, slowly piecing together my understanding of that world. It feels like an extension of what I am already doing in these games as I move around an environment, figuring out how to use it to my advantage and how to better fit into it. The piecemeal stories available as various types of journals helps me to understand the context of that broader world deeper and more intimately.

But context is key. If journals are to make a world feel more real, more believable to the player, then I have to be convinced that the journal should have been where I found it. Otherwise, it can just feel like a gamey info-dump in itself. Audio-diaries are one example of this that bothers a lot of people. It’s implausible that all these people of Bioshock’s Rapture just left their most personal thoughts, confessions, and passwords recorded on audiotapes scattered around the city. The ones that are written as messages to someone, addressing some assumed listener make sense. They feel like leftover remnants of a lost civilisation that I’m now prying through. But the ones addressing nobody, the ones just conveniently lying there for the player, are nothing more than just pre-recorded exposition machines, doing exactly what environmental storytelling tries to avoid.

Which is why, often, I find myself more attached to those journals that are written, not spoken. Reading newspapers in Dishonored or emails in Deus Ex. The idea of these fragments being left lying around their worlds is something that is far easier to believe than an audiotape. I remember especially enjoying running around the UNESCO offices on Liberty Island in Deus Ex, following email chains from one computer to the next, seeing each person’s replies to the original email sent out to a broader group. These bits of data felt embedded in the world, not just sitting atop it. I could trace threads through them that made the world feel alive and deep and rich.

But on the other hand, reading can be jarring, forcing the player to pause the world every few minutes to read a business report or a diary entry. In a faster-paced shooter like Bioshock, the audiotapes probably make far more sense for the game’s tone than stopping to read a newspaper page every five steps, as they don’t interrupt the pacing. For slower, more considered games like Dishonored, you are already meant to be taking your time, carefully considering your every move, so stopping to read a newspaper to better understand your surroundings feels more appropriate. And then other games exploit this in another way: I’m currently playing System Shock 2 for the first time. While most of the information is still in audiotapes, occasionally I pick up something that requires me to read it. The thing is, the game doesn’t pause while I am reading, so I have to bunker down in a dark corner and read it quickly while mutated monsters are breathing and muttering just around the corner. It not only lets me understand this world in an organic way, it also adds to the atmospheric horror System Shock 2 is going for.

So ultimately it’s all about context. Journals can give a world context for a player, but they also have to be contextualised within that world. Each type of journal has to fit the world and the context it is placed in. If it doesn’t, it can feel like the very exposition that environmental storytelling is trying to avoid. But it also has to fit the tone and the pace of the game. It’s a tricky balance, but if done properly, it enriches the world even more for the player. Not just through what it tells about the world, but its very existence in the world can make that world feel more believable and present.

And that’s why I love journals. As I move through a game with a heavy focus on environmental storytelling, I come to understand that world as a physical space. As I read the bits of information convincingly scattered through that world, I get a sense of the invisible networks of communication and culture that makes that physical space an actual, lived-in place.

You know what I love? Grinding. Sometimes. It depends on the game, obviously, but I don’t think grinding is as inherently bad as we often make it out to be. Repetitive tasks can be enjoyable and relaxing. They can be meaningful in and of themselves, not just for the promise of a reward. Sometimes the fun is in the process.

Those gameplay activities we call grinding are usually those that ask us to repeat the same actions over and over for some small, incremental reward that will allow us to keep repeating that same action for a little bit longer for another small, incremental reward. Usually, it’s the role-playing games that most often get called out for grinding. The player is often expected to run around in circles for hours to farm experience points and money before moving on. But then enemies get rougher, gear gets more expensive, and you have to run around in circles all over again.

It’s a carrot on a stick, dangled in front of the player: a promised reward delayed. We’ve seen grinding embraced and abused by free-to-play models, with games made deliberately grindy and monotonous, and then the player is given the option to spend money to cut straight to the reward. Such pay-to-not-play models clearly use grinding in an exploitative way, but I’m not sure grinding itself is inherently evil.

If grinding is fundamentally bad because it persistently puts off rewarding the player for their actions, then that implies that we do things in games for the reward, not for the process of playing itself. But why do we need to be rewarded? As long as we are happy to do a repetitive task simply because we find enjoyable in and of itself, is that bad? Sometimes it can be relaxing and therapeutic and, well, fun, to just mindlessly do the same things over again. Sometimes, grinding is exactly what I want to do.

Borderlands is often accused of being a grind, with its infinite guns acting less as coveted treasures and more a constant stream of ultimately forgettable rewards. For me, though, the constant new weapons aren’t shiny, material rewards I want to hoard. Rather, they are variations, for a time, on what I can do. I enjoy constantly doing the same things over and over in Borderlands because that ‘same thing’ has a different flavour to it every time I pull out a new weapon. I don’t enjoy the reward of obtaining new weapons; I enjoy the process of using them. It’s the grind itself that is the reward in Borderlands.

Another game that makes grinding feel good is Dark Souls. To be sure, once you know what you are doing in Dark Souls, once you know where to go, you don’t really have to grind at all. But newcomers (myself included) will often spend hours going up and down the same paths, as much to farm souls as because we are unsure what way we should actually go next. Yet, going up and down the same few paths over and over again in Dark Souls never really feels repetitive or empty. I think it is because of how the game-world treats time. Somehow, I always feel like I am progressing, even if I am killed and lose thousands of souls. I still feel like I’ve learned something, and I still have all the items you picked up.

In Dark Souls, you’re never not progressing. Not just because it is literally impossible to pause the game, but because as you improve your character by grinding you are also improving yourself as a player. By grinding in Dark Souls, I have intimately learned how to use my different abilities—when to block, when to parry, when to strike. As I grind, I feel like I obtain real-world skills. Grinding in Dark Souls is itself a real reward.

But, by far, the game that I’ve most enjoyed grinding in of late is Little Inferno. Little Inferno is clearly meant as a very cynical and self-aware satire of mindless, grinding gameplay, and of micro-transactions and casual game design generally. The whole games takes place in front of a fireplace. The player buys toys and other worldly objects and throws them into the fireplace to watch them burn. These objects drop money as they burn, so the player can buy more more toys to burn.

It’s a deliberately empty endeavour. The game explicitly says, at one point, “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace was designed to not matter”. The game is trying to say that this kind of repetitive gameplay is meaningless, that you never really gain anything by burning everything to ash. You can go for as long as you want, but you have nothing to show for it. This kind of gameplay doesn’t reward you, it steals your rewards away.

But the thing is, burning stuff in Little Inferno is really, really enjoyable. More enjoyable, I dare say, than simply hoarding the game’s rewards ever would be. More than the emptiness of just sitting in our lounge rooms, looking at our televisions or fireplaces, burning time or possessions, Little Inferno shows us how to liberate ourselves from the need to hoard possession. Sometimes, the process is meaningful in itself.

And that’s why I love grinding when it is implemented in the right way. More than a carrot on a stick, it show me that I don’t need a carrot at all to just enjoy the walk. Grinding can be (and often is) used poorly in games, asking the players to repeat themselves over and over for some kind of reward later on. But in some games, the process of grinding itself is meaningful. I enjoy grinding in these games not because of what I will the game’s promised I will get later, but because the repetitive acts themselves and the time I spend doing them feels meaningful. Sometimes I just want to watch things burn.

You know what I love? The Goliath enemy in Borderlands 2. While initially it might seem like just a slightly larger bullet-sponge than all the other bullet-sponge enemies in the game, the Goliath allows several unique engagements from the player that greatly mixup Borderlands 2’s base gameplay.

Perhaps more accurately, the Goliath demands the player engages with them in unique ways. They force the player to think, and they can become an embodiment of the player’s self-defined goals.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the first Borderlands for all its original and surprising guns, there were very few enemies that were actually interesting to shoot. You spend half the game fighting the terribly uninteresting skags, and the other half fighting bandits whose only real variation is whether they shoot you or hit you. When the Crimson Knights turn up way later in the game, they finally mix up the battles with a variety of enemy types, forcing you to think on your feet a little more, but for most of the game you can just stand there and shoot and hope your gun is bigger than their gun.

Apart from a couple of hours at the start spent fighting bullymongers (think snow skags), Borderlands 2’s skirmishes often throw a greater variety of enemy types at you at any one time, often forcing you to move around and constantly change weapons to deal with different enemies at different distances. It’s still a grind, to be sure, but a grind that has you thinking on your feet just that bit more. You might have a suicidal bandit running at you with a grenade (perfect for a shotgun) while another one is hiding behind a giant shield (asking for something with explosive shells); another one’s electric backpack will start draining your shield if you get too close (certainly not perfect for a shotgun), while an armoured air vehicle is firing rockets at you (asking for something with a quick bullet velocity).

For most enemy types, its a simple case of looking at what enemy you need to take out next, and picking the right gun from your inventory to deal with that enemy. But by far the most inspired and interesting enemy of the game, the Goliath always demands a bit more than that. The Goliath always demands that you pay attention to them, that you always stop and think about how you are going to deal with them. Or, how you won’t.

At first glance the Goliath just looks like a towering, musclier version of a typical bandit, carrying two guns. Like all humanoid enemies, his weak spot is his head. But if you shoot the Goliath in his helmet, all you do is make him angry. Very angry. He throws down his guns, his spine and skull burst out of his mouth to coil above his torso like some cadaverous snake, and he regains all his health. The Goliath rages out, going berserk and attacking any target he can get close to.

As he rages, killing his own allies, the Goliath levels up, much like the player levels up. Every time he levels up, he gets all his health back, much like the player gets all their health back when they level up. The more powerful the Goliath gets, the more EXP and rarer loot it will drop when it is eventually killed. On the other hand, the more powerful the Goliath gets, the harder it will be to actually kill it.

Every time a Goliath marches out onto the battlefield, you have to think about how you are going to deal with it. Are you going to try to kill him without enraging him, determinedly shooting him everywhere but his weak spot? It’s the safest best, to be sure, but what if a stray bullet accidentally clips his helmet? Then he will recharge all his health and all those bullets will have been wasted. Usually, I find it best to just go straight for the helmet and get the rage over and done with. It’s going to happen sooner or later, so it might as well be soon.

But then, once he is enraged, do you let him just fight on and, more than likely, eventually get killed by all the other bandits? Do you help the bandits take him down while he is distracted? Or do you help the Goliath take the bandits down, to get more powerful and drop more loot and exp—and then pray that you will be able to deal with him when you have to?

It’s not that the Goliath is impossible to deal with. Like all enemies, you know which of your weapons will put it down quickly if you have to. It’s a rare occasion that a Goliath actually becomes too powerful to deal with—but it could happen. Ultimately, unlike all the other enemies in the game, every time you see a Goliath, you have to think about how you are going to deal with it, about what you want this Goliath to do for you. And there is always the slight chance that things will get out of control. Maybe the Goliath will kill one enemy too many and that dreaded skull will appear next to its health bar, warning you that you might want to consider running away.

To top it all off is the attention to detail Gearbox have clearly devoted to the Goliath. From the way the Goliath’s name changes every time it levels up, to the sheer absurdity of its skull waving around above its head as it runs at you (seriously what is with that?!), to, most important of all, the “CLUNK” of a single bullet hitting its helmet and the shrill violin sound flagging its enragement.

And that’s why I love the Goliath. In a game where I expect to be able to just zone out and go through the motions without having to think about anything, the Goliath constantly forces me to wake up and take notice, to pay attention to what is happening and to think about what I want to happen. It plays with my thirst for more loot and tempts me to gamble with my life. The Goliath is exactly the kind of enemy Borderlands 2 needed.

You know what I love? Cinematic games. For all the times that we say the best videogames are those that are “games first” (whatever that means), I love the games that aren’t afraid to take a lesson or two from film in their representation of my actions and the world they’re happening in.

Videogames aren’t movies. That’s a statement so obvious that it shouldn’t even need to be made. But just because they aren’t movies doesn’t mean we should ignore all the similarities that both film and videogames have in common. Sure, videogames are about what we ‘do’ by pressing buttons and engaging with systems and all that, but a large part of how we understand those systems and interactions is through the way things are depicted on the screen: what things look like, and what angle we are viewing them from. Both videogames and movies rely, in varying degrees, on the depiction of moving images on a screen.

Which is why it makes no sense to me when I hear it said that it shouldn’t be a positive thing to call a game ‘cinematic’. Why not? Cinematic stylings have been helping create intimate relationships between audiences and images moving around on screens for decades. Why would we ignore all that when it comes to the relationships with screens that videogames fostered?

It was the Playstation-era Final Fantasys that first helped me to appreciate what cinematic style can contribute to a videogame. I remember, as young and impressionable as I was, watching the opening movie of Final Fantasy VII as the camera lifts up over Midgar and then swoops back down onto the train station to meld seamlessly with the opening action of the game. Final Fantasy VIII did even more with this merging of video and gameplay in its first major mission, where the player is chased by a giant robot spider through some city streets. There would be no cut from the chunky characters running off screen to the full-motion video starting. It created a breathtaking cohesion to the world between the scripted, cinematic sequences and my own actions. It didn’t just feel like I was watching an action movie; it felt like I was a part of an action movie.

Around the same time, my friends who owned Nintendo 64s were being handed control of the camera itself. Using four little ‘c’ buttons, they were moving their own virtual cameras around fully-3D worlds, setting up their own, personalised cinematic sequences as Mario jumped around the princess’s mansion. I was enjoying being a part of an action film; they were being a part of an action film and its camera crew.

For me, though, this wasn’t something I really embraced until I owned a Playstation 2 (though, I did spend hours in Driver’s replay director but that is kind of detached from actually playing the game). Playing Grand Theft Auto III, every time a car caught on fire, I would walk away from it slowly, holding down the reverse-view button so the camera would be in front of my protagonist, watching him swagger slowly as the car explodes and everyone panics (something I still do today with Niko Bellic). Or in Ico, I would hold down ‘R2’ to zoom the camera in and adjust the right analogue stick to create these cinematic sequences as Ico and Yorda walked through the castle. It looked nice, and that made it feel nice to play.

Whether the player or the game has control of the virtual camera, videogame’s have a long history of being, in part, cinematic. More contemporary genres like the sticky-cover shooter (and over-the-shoulder third-person games generally) depend on the fact that the action on screen is as enjoyable to look at as it is to participate in. That doesn’t just mean it requires more polygons to be more ‘realistic’, but that it needs to be depicted in a visually stunning and captivating way.

And that’s why I love games that embrace being cinematic—be it a scripted kind of cinematic or one that I can control myself. Just because videogames aren’t movies, doesn’t mean we should ignore the ways they are similar. Just because videogames are about ‘doing’ doesn’t mean we should ignore the role ‘watching’ plays in the virtual acts we are doing. When I am playing a game that can be described as ‘cinematic’, I don’t feel like I am merely watching a movie; I feel like I am acting in a movie, like I am bringing a movie to life, and that is something only a cinematic videogame can do.

You know what I love? Short games. Games that aren’t bloated with content simply because games are apparently meant to be long. Games that know they can say what they want to say in a matter of hours or, sometimes, a matter of minutes, and are all the more powerful for it.  I love the games that are only as long as they need to be.

I don’t know when it was decided that a good game must be a long game. I can remember reading game reviews when I was a kid in the 90s that rated a game’s “lastability” or similarly ghastly made up words. The longer a game is, the better it must be. The shorter a game, the worse it must be. This isn’t judging a book by its cover; this is judging a book by its thickness. I guess when a single game is going to cost several months of pocket money, you want that game to last for a long time. That makes sense. The problem is that over the years this has translated into an idea that a game’s length is synonymous with its quality.

But this clearly isn’t the case. Some of my richest gaming memories of the last year are from games I could finish in one sitting. In the past week, I’ve played two games that have each taken me less than fifteen minutes to get from start to end: Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia, and Blendo Games’s 30 Flights of Loving. Each of these games, in its own way, offered an incredibly rich experience that I won’t soon forget regardless of (or, perhaps, thanks to) the brief length of time it took me to play them.

Anthropy’s Dys4ia uses a retro, WarioWare aesthetic to tell the player a deeply personal story about something that Anthropy herself has gone through. Over four very brief chapters, the game sets up a conflict that the player can comprehend, challenges and anguish that the player can feel, and, finally, a sense of hope that the player can share in.

30 Flights of Loving, meanwhile, uses filmic cuts to tell an equal parts simple and confusing story of a heist gone wrong. It throws the player from scene to scene, across space and time in a confusing and disorientating way. It doesn’t waste time telling the player what order the scenes are meant to be in or who these people are or what this world is. It wants you out as quickly as it pulled you in. But for all its haste, I was still able to feel a connection to this world and its characters. I felt my avatar’s relationship with his woman accomplice far more strongly than any dozen-hour-long romance option I’ve had to slave away over in a AAA game.

What’s special about both of these games, I think, isn’t that they are incredibly short. Rather, it’s that they are exactly as long as they need to be to do what they want to do. Both are capable of doing what they want to do in minutes, so why bloat them with hours of unnecessary content?

‘Long enough’ is going to be different for each game. Dear Esther takes me about ninety minutes each time I play. The Unfinished Swan takes me about two hours. Both these games are perfect at this length. Dear Esther could always add more jaw-dropping scenery, or The Unfinished Swan could have more mind-boggling puzzles, but they don’t need to. Each is just long enough to do what it wants to do.

Of course, all these examples are independently developed games with smaller price tags. What about the big AAA games that still cost upwards of $60? Should we be able to demand that these games have a certain length? It’s something I’m in two minds about. On one hand, I’d like to think I was paying money for quality, not quantity. But on the other hand, if I finished a $100 game in fifteen minutes, I’d be pretty disappointed.

Yet, one of my favourite AAA games of the past year, Spec Ops: The Line, only takes about five hours to complete. Again, it is just the length it needs to be and doesn’t waste any time with content that it doesn’t need just for the sake of being longer.

Ultimately, it is a case by case thing. There will always be games that we will rightly expect dozens (maybe hundreds) of hours of gameplay out of — our RPGs and our open-worlds and our MMOs. I love having a single, massive game that I can absolutely lose myself in for days, weeks, months on end. But it’s the other end of the scale I’ve really come to appreciate in recent times. The games I can just sit down with and play and be done with after one session. The games that aren’t a slow submersion but a sudden splash of cold water to the face.

And they are all the more memorable for this. The suddenness of these experiences, the immediacy of them, ingrain them onto my mind, giving me memories and sensations that other games take dozens of hours to engrave. That’s why I love short games. As I grow up and find myself with less and less free time, I love that there are developers exploring the other end of the spectrum, getting straight to the point and seeing just how much can be done with so little.

You know what I love? Endings. I mean real endings. Not just that point where the game peters out before the credits roll, but proper conclusions that actually wrap everything up, grabbing the narrative loose ends and tying them together in a pretty bow. A proper ending to a game can increase just how significant all my actions up to that point felt. It can give them meaning: “This is what I was fighting for all this time.”

But so many modern videogames don’t end. So many videogames have to leave the ending open for the inevitable sequel that will be made when it sells well enough. Consequentially, so many videogame stories render my actions throughout them meaningless. Not because they are bad stories, but because they lack endings. They lack finality. In the end, I wasn’t fighting for anything.

It’s for this reason that I am kind of angry at myself for playing Halo 4. I loved the ending of Halo 3. Absolutely loved it. It had this amazing finality to it that so few big, franchise games have these days. Master Chief had saved the universe and, in the process, created a world where he was no longer needed. It was powerful and bitter sweet. He just went to sleep in a dead space ship drifting through space. That was that.

It had such a powerful finality to it. I had been working towards this point for three whole games, and now all those actions had paid off, saving the world and rendering my character unneeded. Further, it felt like a promise from the developers: we have wrapped this up; it over; what you did mattered.

But then, of course, Microsoft wanted to make more money, so five years later they forced the Chief to wake up again. It’s not that Halo 4 is a bad game. On a purely mechanical level, it is an entirely commendable Halo game. The gunfights are as enjoyable as they are in any of the previous games, with the same focus on choosing the right combination of weapons for the right enemies.

The problem is that the game never actually feels like you’re doing anything other than going through the motions, as an excuse to give Microsoft more money. Halo 4 exists solely because they wanted to make another Halo game. And, in the process, it posthumously destroys one of the strongest endings of a franchise in recent years.

Halo 3’s great ending will never again feel the way it did. Next time I watch Master Chief go to sleep at the end of his struggle, I’ll know that this isn’t ultimate, that he will just be woken up again in a few years. With the existence of Halo 4, the previous game’s ending—and the three games of actions that lead up to it—was rendered meaningless.

Some people might just shrug at this. It’s inevitable, surely. Our industry is one where known franchises are the ones that sell copies. Big publishers need to turn new IPs into massive franchises, selling more and more titles on the same universes, mechanics, and characters. Generally speaking, we often can’t have strong, conclusive endings because for most games that isn’t financially viable. There will always be another game in that franchise. It always has to be left open.

But just because a franchise might be extended forever doesn’t mean that franchise has to keep tacking onto the end of the same narrative thread. Before Halo 4, Bungie and 343 alike had extended the franchise in all kinds of meaningful ways with prequels and other characters and stories in other parts of the world. In such a broad universe with so much potential, so many worlds and characters, why destroy the one strong ending you have?

Plenty of franchises have already figured this out, of course. Final Fantasy has been starting entirely new stories in entirely new worlds for decades now. Though, with their ‘-2’ games, even they have been tempted to destroy solid endings to make more money. The Elder Scroll games, meanwhile, manage to extend a world’s narrative but jump forward enough in both time and place to not step on the toes of the previous games.

So I don’t buy that the capitalist-driven, franchise nature of triple-a videogames as a good excuse for the general lack of strong, conclusive endings. Clearly, a good ending is not easy to create, and I’m not one to lecture developers about how to do their job, but when a good, conclusive ending comes by, it always makes everything feel worth it.

It’s part of the reason that I think Spec Ops: The Line has been as critically acclaimed as it has been. Whether or not the story was any good (which is certainly arguable), each of the possible endings felt final. We might get more Spec Ops games, to be sure, but this game sealed off the end of its own narrative. It’s done. Final. Any new games in the series will have to introduce new characters or locations.

Another game I recently finished was Gravity Rush on the Vita. Without spoiling anything, it had a particularly odd ending. Enough was left open for a sequel to cash in, but it was also conclusive enough in its own right that it felt like the conflict the characters faced in this game was dealt with.

Ultimately, Gravity Rush was able to tie up the right threads for me to get that sense of narrative finality, but also left some other threads dangling me to entice me on to a new game.

Currently, whenever I play a triple-a game, I play the final stages in fear. I am terrified that the game’s hunger to have a sequel is going to ruin everything. I’m afraid that the game is going to leave me drifting through space like Grayson Hunt in Bulletstorm, twiddling my thumbs and waiting to be rescued forever, not conclusively going to sleep like Master Chief in Halo 3. And even if a games does have a good ending, I have to live in constant fear, still, of the publisher coming back and ripping it up again, untying the bow and frazzling the narrative rope just to make more money.

It sucks. Which is why I love the strong endings we do have. The ones the punctuate the games more concerned with their own quality than their sequel potential. There is a direct relationship between how much my actions feel to matter in a game and whether or not the game ends in a conclusive way. Hopefully, in the future, more franchises realise they can have it both ways: universes can be extended and more money can be made without having to wake old heroes from their slumber.

You know what I love? Violent videogames about videogame violence. I love the trend over the past few years (and the last year especially) to examine the various ways that violence functions in videogames. I love the way that these games aren’t so much trying to claim that videogame violence is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but the way they simply want to understand it better, the way they simply want to respect its power more.

Of course, I am talking about games like Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, Far Cry 2 and, more recently, Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja, Hotline Miami and the still upcoming Far Cry 3. All of these games, in their own way, ask questions about the ways violence is both depicted and deployed in videogames — the way violence is used against the player, and the way the player uses violence. They want to help us as players have richer and more nuanced understandings of just what violence is doing in these games.

What most of these games show, each in their own way, is that in videogames we will happily perform violent actions unquestioningly. Sure, we know they aren’t ‘real’, and often we’ll even acknowledge how problematic and sociopathic what we are being asked to do really is, but we’ll do it anyway because, deep down, we find it really enjoyable.

Importantly, they aren’t trying to make us feel like we shouldn’t enjoy it. Instead, they want us to realise that what we are enjoying is, truly, complicated and problematic. Not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Just weird. Weird and complex and deserving a bit of consideration.

But a lot of people seem to disagree. Many people, such as the author of this recent post on Kill Screen seem to think that a violent videogame couldn’t possibly deliver an “anti-violence” message. A lot of people think games like Spec Ops: The Line are hypocritical for trying to say something profound about violent videogames while failing to offer a ‘solution’, for depicting the same old shoot-a-stack-of-bros gameplay.

Well, I think the problem here is, simply, that games like Spec Ops: The Line aren’t anti-violence or anti-shooter or anything like that at all. These games aren’t simply trying to say that violent videogames are ‘bad’ or a problem that requires fixing. That would indeed be hypocritical. Rather, what these games are trying to do is to simply explore what is happening in these videogames where we gun down hundreds of virtual human beings without a second thought. What is going on there? Why do we enjoy it so much?

These are really important questions for games to ask, and for us as players to ask ourselves. Not because we shouldn’t enjoy videogame violence, but because we should be more conscious and critical of what we do enjoy. It’s always nice to be intellectually challenged by the media you are consuming, and games that raise questions about just how and why we are doing the things we do in videogames are a great way to achieve this.

The player’s encounter with Andrew Ryan in Bioshock, for example, gets laughed at a lot these days by critics and players alike who are (understandably) sick of reading articles about it. But I still remember what it was like playing it. I remember just sitting there with my controller in my hands, realising I had never really made a decision in any videogame that the game had not already made for me. It totally changed the way I think about the role of my intentionality and agency in the games I play.

More recently, Spec Ops: The Line had an incredibly powerful affect on me. It didn’t make me want to stop playing shooters. That’s not the point. Instead, it made me realise just how horrific the things depicted in these shooters I enjoy really are. It made me realise that any playable character that has to gun down hundreds of men can never hope to be a ‘good guy’. To be sure, I will undoubtedly still enjoy shooters in the future, but I’ll also be thinking about them in a slightly different way, thanks to my experience with this game.

Videogames are not going to become less violent any time soon. But as players and developers alike grow more mature are critical of what they are playing and producing, it’s crucial that we have games that critique our own media form. These games can’t just pass meaningless, futile value judgements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Such judgements are terribly boring. Instead, we need games that question and examine. Games that draw attention to the complex and paradoxic pleasures we get out of shooting virtual people in the face, and try to understand what is going on there. This understanding won’t lead to more or less violent videogames, and nor should it. Instead, these games will help videogame violence itself mature into something more meaningful, something more capable of evoking different meanings and emotions through its depiction.

And that’s why I love violent videogames about videogame violence. Far from being hypocritical or pompous in passing value judgements on their own kin, they challenge us to better understand and respect just what we are doing in these games that we enjoy so much. Rather than trying to state that their fellow violent videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they show us that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are entirely incapable categories for the complex engagements we have with videogames.

You know what I love? Pinball mode. It’s a power-up in Carmageddon that practically breaks the game for as long as it is active. I love the absurdity of pinball mode. I love that this ability is so unruly, so unpredictable that every time it is activated it might just break the game. Basically, I love a game that is not afraid to be broken.

Carmageddon is old and, let’s face it, a little bit horrible. It’s the poster boy for everything that is still wrong with video games to this day: a dependency on cheap humour and over-the-top violence and controversy just to sell a few copies. It was always fun. But it was always kind of terrible.

So when I returned to the surprisingly playable iOS re-release this past week, I was surprised (and just a little bit embarrassed) at just how much I still enjoyed it. Apparently, part of my mind is still a thirteen-year-old boy who just wants to run down some pedestrians.

But beneath the crass humour and the still quite shocking violence, there is actually some really interesting game design happening in Carmaggedon. Much like more modern games like Just Cause 2, Carmageddon isn’t interested in seeing the player fail challenges but, rather, in just allowing cool stuff to happen.

Each ‘race’ is on an open map. You have opponents, but you can’t lose the race. You win by either finishing all the checkpoints, splatting all the pedestrians or, most likely, from wasting all the enemy cars. You can’t die (the worst you can do is spend more credits on repairing yourself than you gain from causing havoc, but that is highly unlikely). You can’t lose. You just play around until you decide you want to win.

Each race is really just a playground where you muck around, be a terrible person, and laugh at what happens. In this framework, pinball mode fits perfectly.

Pinball mode is one of the game’s many random powerups spread around the levels. While it is active, objects will bounce away from a wall at a higher velocity than what they hit it at. This can easily be taken advantage of in amazing, game-breaking ways. If you find two walls fairly close together, you can bounce between them to build up your velocity exponentially. Your car bounces and smashes between them, getting faster and faster, until a line of code under the game’s bonnet eventually snaps and your car shoots right through a solid wall or launches itself so high in the air that, for a moment, the entire stage is visible below you. By this stage, your car is probably as flat as a pancake and spurting flames everywhere — but it’s nothing a quick repair can’t fix.

It allows all kinds of absurd scenarios to play out that could only ever happen in a video game that doesn’t mind being broken. In one game, this particularly magnificent scene played out. (As a side note: Carmaggedon clearly knows it is a game people play just to make cool stuff happen as it includes the ability to save and share videos easily).

On another race, after bouncing all over the map, I landed in an alleyway on the wrong side of a solid stone wall that you are not meant to be able to get past. Behind me was white nothingness, and driving that way tipped me off the edge of the world. The game would recover me… but still place me on the wrong side of the wall. I was trapped. The only way out was to quit the race.

But instead of being angry, I just kinda chuckled at myself, like a teenager who just got in trouble. Yeah, I kinda deserved that when I smashed into that first wall on purpose in the football stadium, but whatever, it was worth it.

More than having broken the game or wasting my time on that stage that I would now have to restart, I felt like I had successfully escaped. I had taken pinball mode and I used it to smash through the cell that is the developer’s intentions of what I do with the game. While I am up there in the sky or flipping all over the map, I am totally out of control and, paradoxically, totally free. I might be doing exactly what pinball mode is meant to do, but I am also doing what the game is not meant for. Pinball mode intentionally and magnificently breaks the shackles the game holds me down with.

The difference between Carmageddon and other games with easy exploits, I think, is that Carmageddon was always asking to be broken. The developers always left the key to my cell just within arms reach. The game’s very existence pushed at people to see how far it could push them until they snapped. It deliberately courted controversy with its crass, immature content, and indeed manage to be one of the first games banned in the UK (before SCI successfully appealed) — although somehow it managed to enter Australia unchanged.

And, really, pinball mode is just an extension of this. A mechanic that the developers deliberately left open, deliberately allowed to potentially break the game. Just as I was asking for it when I launched myself out of the map, the game’s developers were asking for it when they created pinball mode, and they knew it.

And that’s why I love pinball mode. Today, even the openest of open-world games go to great lengths to ensure we can’t actually break anything while we are visiting them. Carmageddon, on the other hand, is just curious to know how badly we can trash the joint.

You know what I love? Nostalgia. I love it when a new game makes explicit or implicit nods to a previous generation of gaming, be it through subtle references or blatant, pixel-art aesthetics. I get an immense satisfaction from playing these games and suddenly being reminded of not just what those games were like, but what it felt like to play those games ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Not because games were any better or worse back then, but just because it was different, and I was different.

I’ve spent the last week playing Retro City Rampage. As the very first word in the title suggests, Retro City Rampage is about old games. It’s an ode to gaming past, with every single pixel of the screen filled with another subtle (or blunt) nod to a different time and place of gaming. There are Atari jokes, NES references, 80s sci-fi film references, everything. The entire game is in an 8-bit aesthetic and plays likes an old-fashioned Grand Theft Auto.

There is nothing ‘new’ about Retro City Rampage other than the way it mashes together old references. While plenty of indie games get a lot of slack for relying too much on NES references and aesthetics (like Fez did with its various Zelda references), Retro City Rampage revels in it. It exists purely so people who played the games it is making nods to can get those nods and feel… something.

For me, playing Retro City Rampage using the overlay that makes the game look like it is running on an old CRT TV, what I felt was an intoxicating blend of memories. I could remember what the lounge room of my family’s house was like when I was growing up. The old brown lounges and Dad’s rocking chair—both of which I couldn’t sit on because the cord for my SNES controller was too short. The particular way the Central Queensland sun felt on a Saturday afternoon through the windows (one of the only times of the week I could get uninterrupted time in front of the TV, as long as there was no car races on). These are all the things that Retro City Rampage and many other nostalgia-dependent indie games evoke for me when I play them. They don’t just remind me what old games were like. They remind me what my life was like when I played them.

But it’s not just pixel-art indie games that can trigger such a sense of nostalgia for players. This past week also saw the release of X-COM and Dishonored, two games that also evoke a sense of nostalgia for some players, albeit far less bluntly than Retro City Rampage, perhaps.

X-COM, a relaunch of a series that thrived predominately in the 90s, has been thoroughly enjoyed by those on my Twitter feed who grew up as PC gamers, as much for its quality as a new game as for how it reminds them of what it was like to play the original series. Dishonored, meanwhile, has captured the excitement of those I know who loved immersive sims like Deus Ex and Thief, be it in the general way the game players or with explicit easter eggs and mechanics.

Both of these games are doing new things, of course, and from all I’ve read (I’m yet to play either of them myself, sadly) are phenomenal games in their own right. But both, too, tap into this sense of nostalgia. Not just of what games used to be, but who we used to be when we used to play those games.

‘Retro’ games often cop a lot of slack for not being innovative, for relying on tried and tested methods and milking nostalgia instead of doing anything new. Certainly, some games do this, and it certainly works. It’s why we have HD rereleases, and it’s why there are Megadrive collections on Steam that we’ll buy but, really, we probably won’t ever actually play. It’s why every other Kickstarter promising to make an old-school RPG/shooter/adventure game is so popular. Not because games used to be better than they are, but because they used to be different, and we used to be different.

But the very fact our nostalgia is something that can be milked for money suggests there is something powerful and meaningful there. Nostalgia might depend on the past, but it is something we feel in the present, and what a glorious feeling it can be.

I twiddled with Retro City Rampage’s overlay and filters until it looked like I was playing a Gameboy: the screen was just a few shades of dark green, and was framed by a device that looked just like the old brick I used to own. I played like this for a while, and I thought: “Man, imagine if I had played this game on an actual Gameboy back in the day?” It probably isn’t even possible for this game to work on a Gameboy, of course, but seeing it simulated, I can’t help but think back to what I was like back then, and how much I would have FLIPPED OUT if I had seen this game working. It makes me smile just thinking about it.

And that’s why I love nostalgia. Alone, it isn’t enough to carry a whole game, and more often than not it is exploited by lazy or greedy publishers to make a quick dollar. But nostalgia is still such a powerful and meaningful feeling that a game can evoke, as much for how it makes you remember the past as for how it makes you feel in the present.

You know what I love? Dying. In those games where death is both probable and permanent, death might not be the victory I was striving for, but its inevitability gives a sense of intensity and foreboding while I still live, and a powerful narrative closure once it overcomes me.

Several games of late (and countless games throughout the years) have depended on the inevitability and permanence of death to create powerful, gripping experiences. Most recently, I’m thinking of DayZ and FTL.

In one of my first sessions of FTL, before I really knew what I was doing, boarders teleported onto my ship and took out my ship’s oxygen supply. I dealt with the boarders and, subsequently, with their ship. It was the toughest battle I’d yet fought, but I came through mostly unscathed. It felt overwhelmingly good. But then I noticed the red haze across my ship — the oxygen supply the boarders took out at the start of the game had not been fixed yet, and my ship was now nearly out of oxygen.

My four crew members ran across the ship to the O2 room, their little green health bars slowly depleting as they pulled out their spanners and desperately tried to fix it. But they were never really going to make it. One by one they died. I watched as my one last crewman just fixed the O2 system before he too suffocated and died. I was left with nothing but an empty, useless, practically unscathed ship just floating through space, silent and dead.

In DayZ, every single second could be my last. I am constantly on edge, waiting for the sudden sniper shot to end my life faster than I can blink. I can spend dozens of hours with a single character, scrounging around for beans, worrying about every spent bullet, and then it can just end like that. Sometimes, though, the deaths are less quick. Once my brother and I entered a city to look for a box of matches, but the horde of zombies we stumbled into had other plans. We managed to get out of town, and turned to finish them off. But little did we know we had run right up to another zombie-infested building, and more zombies heard our shots and flanked us.

My brother went down, and I fired two whole clips at the zombies piling onto his corpse before the game told me he was dead. Then I turned and ran, leaving him. I camped out on an apartment stairwell and used the last of my clip as the zombies piled through the door. As one finally got to me and knocked me down, I saw I was standing on a box of matches: exactly what we had ventured into this damn city to try to find in the first place.

In both these games, death is ultimate. It is the end. When I die, that is the end of that experience and everything I achieved during that session. I go back to square one — washed up on the beach, piloting an underpowered ship across the galaxy.

But far from rendering the time spent with each game meaningless, the fact that I am almost certainly going to die eventually is what makes each of these games so much more satisfying to play. It is death that, typically, is the story that I am left with that I want to tell people. I don’t play FTL or DayZ because I expect to ‘win’; I play them because I expect to die in a way interesting enough that I will always remember it.

FTL and DayZ are both interesting story simulators—they create experiences that I want to tell people about. And any story is only as good as its ending. That is why I love dying so much. It is the crescendo of the story, the narrative closure that posthumously gives every action up to that point a certain gravity. Dying doesn’t simply abolish my accomplishments; it immortalises them, tying up these little narrative arcs with a start, middle, and, most importantly, an end.

You know what I love? Guns that feel chunky. When I pull that right trigger or click that mouse button, I want each and every bullet fired to feel like a fist attached to a rocket. The simple feel of a weapon in an FPS could make or break the game. Ideally, every single gun should feel like a kick in the chest whenever you fire it. But how does a virtual gun ‘feel’ like anything? Feel is impossible to really pin down (Steve Swink makes a good attempt, though, if you are interested). It’s a combination of a range of things, of mechanics and audiovisuals and physical control. When these three are combined rightly, a gun—an entire shooter—can just feel so good.

This is why console shooters were so bad for so long: the guns just didn’t feel chunky. Once we figured out the two thumbsticks thing, aiming wasn’t a problem anymore (for some of us, at least), but even then so many shooters still felt terrible. If I want a chunky gun that felt like it was firing rocket-propelled fists, most PS2-era shooters felt like I was blowing safety pins out of a drinking straw. There was just no ‘oomph’ to them.

But then Halo came along with some of the chunkiest weapons to ever grace a console. Now, I’m not saying there were never chunky weapons on PC games before this—of course there were.

But the stark contrast between the dreadful-feeling shooters I was playing on my PS2 at the time and the chunkiness of Halo provides a pretty great example of what I am talking about. All of Halo’s weapons felt gloriously chunky, from the weakest little plasma pistol to the mass-destruction of the rocket launcher. These guns didn’t shoot little laser beams or skinny bullets, but massive wads of melting plasma and hot lead that tore chunks out of the world.

Specifically, it was Halo’s standard, default assault rifle that remains the most memorably chunky weapon I have ever handled in a videogame. The ridiculous Xbox controller sat in my hands like a pair of potatoes, already giving the game a tactile bulkiness. Then the gun would fire and fist-sized bullet holes would be torn into the Forerunner buildings and Halo dirt as the controller purred in my hands like a lion. The shape of the crosshair (an area, not a dot) made the power of the gun feel hardly restrained, like it could break its leash at anytime. It was just inaccurate enough to feel insane and just accurate enough to still be powerful. The way the gun would roar and chew through sixty of those bullets in no time. The way I always somehow had SIX HUNDRED more of those bullets remaining so that I could just chew and chew and chew. Halo’s assault rifle wanted to be fired, and it wanted to be fired a lot.

It remains, to this day, one of my favourite weapons to fire in a videogame thanks to this perfect storm of chunkiness. The way it looked, the way it sounded, the way it worked against the world and against the Covenant, the way it felt in my hands through the xbox controller. Sure, it can hardly compare to the earth-shattering cacophonies of its contemporaries in games like Battlefield 3, but for its time it had a meatiness to it that so few guns did back then, especially on consoles. A chunkiness that has hammered its way into my heart.

Pin-blowing guns are far less common now than when Halo came out, but they still pop up time to time. As much as I love Bulletstorm, the assault rifle you are stuck with for the entire game really just does not feel chunky at all. The way you have to aim down the iron sight at that little orange dot, and the way enemies just shrug off bullets just feels the exact opposite of chunky. Though, to be fair, Bulletstorm is trying to tempt you away from shooting your enemies in lieu of finding a more creative way to kill them.

Elsewhere, my beloved Halo assault rifle has been sidelined by that franchise’s evolving focus on more accurate scoped battle-rifles. The assault rifle in the later Halos no longer feels chunky, just unwieldy. It has become the gun you pick up because there is no other choice, not because you just really want to fire it, which is sad because in its hey day, in the first Halo, just sitting back with an Xbox controller and unleashing a clip of the assault rifle was one of the best feeling things in a videogame.

Few games have guns that feel ‘bad’ anymore, but it is still the special game whose gun feels great. You know a shooter the moment you fire that first shot and feel that virtual kick to the stomach—or, sadly, when you don’t. That’s why I love chunky guns so much. You start playing a new shooter, you fire that first, fist-sized bullet, and you just know you are going to enjoy the time you spend with this game.

You know what I love? Dawn and dusk. Sunrise and sunset. I love games with persistent time, with a sun and a moon that circle the sky without a care in the world for my character’s petty little actions. I love that contextualisation that makes the world and its universe feel so much bigger than my little actions. When I play a videogame, I don’t want to feel like the centre of whatever world I enter; I just want to feel like one more visitor in a world that would continue on with or without me.

But most of all, I love the romance of a digital sunset or sunrise. That golden/purple glow of the sun just peaking over or flirting under the horizon before the wonders and the dangers of night come out.

To be sure, there are plenty of good dawns and dusks in games not tied to an open world or persistent time — perfectly authored environments designed to intentionally catch the dying sun rays — but it is the sunrises and sunsets of those worlds with persistent time that I love most. There’s a poetry to the happenstance of it. They can happen at any time, in any place. They aren’t tied down to a certain mission that always happens at sunset and which is designed to look perfect. A sunset of a persistent world can happen anywhere and might not be the most perfect sunset ever because of this, but it’s that natural imperfection that makes them all the more beautiful.

Playing Skyrim recently for the first time in months, I came out of the fog-drenched gullies of The Reach onto the plains west of Whiteguard. It was still dark, but the sun was just starting to peak through the dissipating clouds beyond that giant, distant mountain, The Throat of the World. As the world slowly woke up, segments of stone wall lining the northern path before me caught the sun and glowed like bars of gold in the early morning. I looked east, and the sun was just peaking out from behind the mountain, beaming as its light tried to escape that jagged stone monolith.

It was truly magnificent, and all the more so because it was not made just for me. The game didn’t know I would be walking down this path at this exact time in these exact weather conditions. But because I was, because I was standing in just the right place for the mountain to conceal the sun for just long enough, the world and my vision and the sun and the clouds created this perfect medley of scenic poetry. It was all the more powerful for its fickle, fleeting nature.

There are countless different styles of sunrises and sunsets in games, bringing a different tone with a different tempo. Some come and go fast, like those that border a ten minute day in Minecraft, burning a thick orange from north to south through the leaves of the forest or over the blue of the ocean.

Some come on a bit slower, like those around the twenty-four minute days of Grand Theft Auto IV, washing the entire city in a dulled yellow and the sky a washed out blue as the skyscrapers paint silhouette clock hands across the city. Or the even slower Far Cry 2 sunsets blasting the African setting in a deep orange light and long shadows as an evening breeze picks up and rustles the grassy plains.

And then there are DayZ’s real-time sunsets, less uplifting and more choking, slowly sapping all the colour out of the world, leaving you engulfed in a harrowing blackness.

What makes each of these sunsets so special is that, conversely, they make me feel less special. I am just another person in these worlds. It doesn’t matter if I want the day to end or not, that sun is going to go down. Maybe I’m inside or underground—the sunset is going to happen anyway, even if I’m not there to see it.

Some of my favourite videogames aren’t about me (either as a player or a character) but are about the world the character lives in. Liberty City, Chernarus, Skyrim, whichever of the infinite Minecraft worlds I am currently in. As the sun turns the path to gold before me or has me panicking and rushing back to my house before the zombies and creepers come out, my presence in a world feels all the more special in its insignificance. Stumbling across a stunning sunrise or sunset in a world with persistent time reminds me that I’m just a visitor in a world that would go on without me. My presence within them is as fleeting as the sunrises and sunsets themselves, and the time I spend inside of them is all the more meaningful because of it.

You know what I love? Music, visualised in games. I love it when a game renders bits of its own music visible in the space of the game world—or when that game world is a visual representation of the music. I love being able to comprehend a song on an intimate level that I simply can’t just from listening to it with my ears alone. I love being able to move through the music, move with it, watch it unfold around me and be unfolded by me. Often, it feels like the closest I’ll ever get to being any kind of musician. Or music critic. Or dancer. Or anyone who has anything to do with music, really.

I love listening to music, but I am absolutely terrible at both understanding and producing music. I know, theoretically, how to read sheet music, but I don’t see songs on a page; I just see black lines. I know how a guitar works, but I can’t ever make one do anything more exciting than play a stumbling, slow-motion version of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”. I know what songs I like, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why I like them. I simply do not have the vocabulary or the skills to understand what music does.

But I do understand games. I can ‘read’ a world set out before me and know exactly what the designer wants me to do. My fingers can perform all kinds of minutiae acrobatic stunts across a controller or a keyboard that my brain simply can’t keep up with. More so, I’ve spent my entire life playing games and a few years now learning a vocabulary with which I can understand them critically. It is through this vocabulary and proficiency of videogames that I can actually experience music on some deeper level. Through the games that represent their music visually as part of their worlds, I am able to use a language I understand—that of games—to understand a language that I do not: that of music.

Of course, there is no single best way for a game to represent its music, and there is no single element of the music best represented. Some games represent music’s rhythms and beats, how the song flows; some represent an overall ‘feel’ of the music, evoking similar emotional responses in their playing as the songs themselves do; and other games use visible, spatial relations to show how all the different sounds fit together to create music at all.

The most straightforward way I can experience this intimacy with music is simple rhythm games. Games like Guitar Hero where I simply just tap along in time with the music. I know I’m not doing anything nearly as complicated as actually playing the songs, but seeing the multicoloured things I have to tap stretch off before me in multi-coloured zigzags, I can get an actual, tactile feel for the rhythm and the flow of the music. It’s not so much that the five coloured markers rolling down the screen in different combinations accurately depict all the different notes and chords of the song, but the gaps between the markers give me a simplistic sense of transition. I wouldn’t know if one note is an octave higher or lower than another note, but in comparing how they are represented on the screen in relation to what my fingers do on a fake guitar, I can get a sense for some difference even if I can’t specify it.

But a song’s rhythm isn’t everything. Guitar Hero and its ilk show me a simplified way that the song progresses, but they don’t give me any insight into what a song really ‘feels’ like on an emotional level. Like, why this song gives me goosebumps or that song makes me smile.

For that I need Audiosurf and the way it renders a song’s emotional rollercoaster into a literal one. Audiosurf, as I am sure you are already aware, can take any MP3 file and produces a path to be surfed down with multicoloured blocks to be collected or avoided in in a simple match-three puzzle game. Every element of the rollercoaster is determined and constructed by a part of the MP3’s music. Sections with slow tempos go steeply uphill while faster tempos plummet you downhill at lightning speed. Noisy segments of a song are cluttered with blocks while the quiet parts glide along peacefully. When I ride a song in Audiosurf, I feel like I am getting deeper into the song than I could ever hope to in any rhythm game. I am engaged on a far more intimate level than just the rhythm or the beat, it’s the themes and the tone of the song that have my attention as I flick the mouse left and right collecting blocks and doing corkscrews and plummeting off cliffs. In Audiosurf, I am literally ‘playing’ the song.

Audiosurf is the paramount of being able to take any song and render it gamelike, but other games create a symbiosis between original worlds and original music, tightly coupled experiences where seeing the music is just as vital as hearing it. Traditionally, of course, we have Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez and its sequel Child of Eden. In these games,  key notes and sounds are played as you paint enemies in targets and send off the shots. Handclaps and keyboard notes are not merely rendered visible as they fly across the screen; they are created by the player’s actions. By aiming and shooting and causing enemies to die in cymbal crashes, always on the beat, I am partially creating the music.Even the sections of the music that are just ‘there’ in the background are visible, throbbing through the character and the world like heartbeats. What these games offer is a synesthetic clashes of colour and noise. But they don’t really offer much clarity to explore the song itself, instead it creates this hybrid monster where sound and sight mash together in this messy, sensorial blob.

There are slightly less abstract games, then, that tie their world and their music together. Ed Key’s Proteus has an interestingly reflective ambient soundtrack composed by David Kanaga (who also did the audio design on DYAD). Proteus is kind of like a mix of Dear Esther and Minecraft—a world is procedurally generated and all you do is walk over it, checking it out. There is a linear progression but it is subtle and requires uncovering.

There isn’t much to ‘do’ in Proteus but explore the little island. As you move around, a quite ambient track plays in the background, but can be added to as you explore the world. Everything sounds musical: a frog’s jumps, a crab’s scurries, the way a tree jingles as it drops its leaves, the way the stars distort into blobs as you stand in a circle of weird statues for too long. The visuals for the sounds aren’t abstract colours or shapes but tangible creatures and objects. In Proteus, I can see how the different sounds contribute to and blend in with the music as clearly as I can see a frog jump across a field.

But none of these games, not even Audiosurf have allowed me to visually comprehend a song like Queasy Games’s recent Sound Shapes. The sounds, rhythms, themes, tones, even the lyrics are all rendered visible on the screen. There is no background music; every sound is produced by a tangible, visible element on the screen. A scuttling spider is setting the tempo; a chimney pipe is laying down a beat; a swarm of missiles stutter across the screen with the strums of an electric guitar. In a clear 2D plane, I can see exactly what is making what noise and how it all goes together. More so, unlike the above games, I can use what I learn about music from Sound Shapes to then, finally produce my own music.

Behind the beautiful platforming worlds of Sound Shapes is hidden a digital Tenori-on, a grid of notes on two axes. The y-axis determines pitch (higher notes are higher, and lower notes are lower) while the x-axis is the beat, going from left to right. No matter which notes you turn on on a Tenori-on, chances are it is going to sound good. Here, try this flash version of one yourself. Sound Shapes, with its pseudo-Tenori-on, translates music production into a language I understand: spatiality. I can see the music. I can see how different notes and instruments are going to engage with each other, and even someone as musically inhibited as me can put noises together that actually sound like music.

And ultimately that’s why I love all these games and countless others that render music visible and tangible. Videogames and music have a lot in common, and many people who comprehend both music and games have used this commonality to create all kinds of interesting projects. But for me, as someone who loves both games and music but who can only really comprehend the former, games that visualise their music on the screen—games that don’t allow me to play music so much as play with music—give me a way to better understand an alien media through one I feel completely at home with.

You know what I love? Ledge grabs. I love playable characters that, when they can’t quite make a jump, can grab onto a ledge and lift themselves up. It’s such a simple, ubiquitous skill that passes with hardly a notice these days—we just expect our characters to have enough upper body strength to lift their entire weight. It opens up the potentiality of a space by an exponential factor, giving a heightened sense of freedom and agility to a world.

I’ve always been strangely intrigued by ledge grabs. Every time one of my characters just locks onto a wall and pulls herself up onto a platform she never could have reached with a jump, I feel an immense satisfaction. I can still remember the first time I played a game that allowed me to grab the ledge of a platform as I fell past it. It was Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. I was at a friend’s house, playing Playstation games before I owned a Playstation. Already marvelling the incredible graphics and this weird, futuristic controller in my hand, I jumped across a chasm, realising just too late that Abe wouldn’t make the jump. But then, Abe grabbed the edge of the next platform and pulled himself up.

I was amazed, stunned. Back home, on all my old Super Nintendo platformers, I could do no such thing. I’m sure there were Super Nintendo platformers that allowed you to grab the edge of a platform, but I know I certainly couldn’t in Donkey Kong Country, Super Star Wars, Mario, or the other platformers I owned.

Watching the pseudo-3D models of Abe grab a ledge and pull himself up, while my 2D, pixellated sprites couldn’t, filled me with a sense of ledge grabs as something advanced and next-generation that I still can’t shake to this day. It is a thing that PlayStation characters could do when I didn’t own a PlayStation. At that young, impressionable age, ledge grabs came to be a sign of a more advanced game. The fact that my first Xbox 360 game, years later, was Assassin’s Creed probably didn’t help this impression much.

But what is it that ledge grabs actually do that made me so impressed by them? I think, largely, it is how they greatly expand the actions of your character and the way they can relate to their world. It adds a whole heap of verbs to your inventory. You can’t jump this gap, but you can jump to that ledge, grab it, and pull yourself up. That ledge above me is too high, but my hands can reach it. I can’t fall this far without dying, but if I dangle over the edge first, I should be right.

We relate to our playable characters through their bodies. Maybe we get to know their personalities and feelings and loves and hates, but it is their bodies that we move through their world, doing with it what their body lets us do. It is through this body that we don’t only relate to the character, but to the world through the character. We understand the world with what we can do with it. That’s why, in most platformers, an agile and acrobatic character that can bounce around doing all kinds of things in the world’s space feels so good. Through them, the possibilities of the world open up.

Recently, I have been playing a lot of Spelunky. In Spelunky, death is usually sudden and disappointing. Knowing your character’s body and what it can do is paramount to survival. Playing it has reminded me just how much I love the ledge grab, just how versatile it can be. In Spelunky, it does just allow me to jump further or higher; often it allows me to drop down lower. A drop that could plummet me so far as to lose precious, precious health, might have a horizontal shaft coming off it just a bit down, allowing me to grab it as I fall past, halving the distance I have to drop to land.

As parkour has inspired gameplay more and more over the last few years, we’ve seen ledge grabs become both more ubiquitous and more complex.

Fumito Ueda’s Ico and Shadow of the Colossus built their gameplay mechanics centrally on different variations of ledge grabbing. More recent games like Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and inFamous have taken this to its extreme conclusion with characters that can scale a wall vertically with just the tips of their fingers. But it’s no longer just third-person platformers that use the ledge grab; first-person games, too, like Mirror’s Edge and even (to a far lesser extent) Crysis 2 allow variations of the ledge grab to open up their play potentials.

Doing things with a character’s body in a world is how we understand the world. Jumping has been around since the dawn of platform gaming, and the addition of the ledge grab, when I first encountered it, seemed like a massive leap in helping players form an intimacy with their world. To this day, when I clutch onto a cliff as Nathan Drake or a colossus as Wanda or a mine shaft as the Spelunky man, I get a little spark of that feeling when I first saw Abe (or whoever it was) grab that ledge, like I’ve just seen something so momentous despite being so very typical.

You know what I love? Songs. I love when instead of ever-looping ambient music that continues forever, a game figures out how to implement an actual, voiced, start-to-finish song into a scene. It’s so rarely done and so difficult to pull off that when a game does it properly it can be incredibly emotive, adding a whole heap to an otherwise typical or uneventful sequence.

There’s no hard-and-fast way to put a song into a game, but a variety of games have experimented with it in meaningful and evocative ways.

Along with (I imagine) most game players, I first encountered ‘songs’ in gameplay as opposed to background music in Rockstar’s games, specifically in Grand Theft Auto III.

As you play the Grand Theft Auto games, the only music in the games comes from the car radios. This music takes the form of specific, progressing songs that actually end. I remember it being a noticeably weird thing when I first played Grand Theft Auto III, that songs ended and new ones start.

I was so used to music that would just loop forever, patiently waiting for me to do something that would forward it to the next type of music. But in Grand Theft Auto III, the songs never waited for me. They would end and a new song would start, regardless of what I was doing. It helped to create a sense of the world being larger than just me. Liberty City wasn’t just there to be my playground; it was a living and breathing city that I was just a single inhabitant of.

In Red Dead Redemption, where the cars were replaced with horses, diegetic songs on the radio wasn’t really an option as, well, there is no radio. But Rockstar San Diego still managed to use songs instead of endless looping ambient music to great effect at several key moments of the game. The first is when José González’s “Far Away” plays as you first ride into Mexico. The song’s lyrics along with the lonely guitar plucks gives this real sense that Marsden is going further and further away from his home.

And then, even more powerfully, is when The Law finally tell Marsden he can actually return home to his ranch. Jamie Lidell’s “Compass” plays, with a hesitant but uplifting tone that mirrored my own “No way I am actually going to see my family. Right? Wait. Maybe I will.” I galloped so hard through the woods of Tall Trees, wanting to get home as fast as possible. The song died off just as I was galloping up the road to my porch. It was perfectly timed so that if you did exactly what the game wanted you to do at that point, it just worked.

Of course, that is the problem with relying on specific, non-looping songs. If the player doesn’t do exactly what is expected of them for one reason or another, the song just might not work. I have heard people complain how while riding into Mexico, a pack of coyote killed their horse, leaving them to run for their life into the desert while González plays them off. It sounds hilarious, I suppose, but it would be infuriating if it happened to you.

Other games that use songs overcome the pacing issue by kind of cheating and creating a looped version of the song. In most cases, you would think this would completely lose the effect of using a song in the first place, but occasionally it works.

On one of the final missions of the gloriously absurd Saints Row: The Third, Bonnie Tyler’s “I Need A Hero” plays as you drive across a city engulfed in a three-way war and then shoot your way through a whole heap of enemies. At first, you expect the song to end but it just keeps going forever. Yet, it is so perfectly mixed that the song was going for a good ten minutes before I even noticed it was looping.

Here, even though the song was looping like the most typical videogame music, the fact it was still noticeably an actual song complete with lyrics just gave the mission a kind of tongue-in-cheek faux gravitas and just made it an absolute pleasure to play.

The most interesting game I have played this year, Spec Ops: The Line, tries something similar but it doesn’t quite work as well as in Saints Row: The Third. The game uses a variety of songs throughout the game to great effect, such as protest-era pieces from the likes of The Black Angels and Deep Purple, to add a discordant kind of irony to some of the skirmishes. It works excellently but, strangely, the developers decided to loop the songs rather than have them just play once.

This worked in Saints Row because “I Need A Hero” was cut in a way that the endless looping just sounded like one continuous song. In The Line, the song fades out, ends, and then just starts again. The songs themselves are great, but I would have much preferred these songs to have just faded out and ended, forcing you to finish your skirmishes under a heavy silence.

Still, the fact they are there at all creates a powerful atmosphere that contributes beautifully to the game’s themes. Using songs instead of ambient music isn’t simple, but it opens up entirely new avenues for the ways audio can contribute to the experience of gameplay. I love that more and more titles are experimenting with songs, and I’m excited to see how they are used next.

You know what I love? Diegetic HUDs. That is, when the heads-up display (your health, ammo, and all that information) that sits there flat against the screen in most videogames is incorporated into the game’s fictional world. When done well, it draws the player deeper into the game by dismantling that conceptual wall of the interface that is always there between the player and the game’s world.

Around the seventeenth century, baroque painters experimented with methods that would hide the fact their paintings were just flat surfaces. When painting on the ceilings of cathedrals and the such, they started to extend elements of the real world into the world of the painting. Stone pillars and walls that reached up to the ceiling in the real world would be painted to continue into the world of the painting. Instead of just a painting of angels and clouds and whatnot, the effect was to make it look like these scenes were actually playing out above the building.

In each new media throughout the centuries artists have played with that boundary between worlds, between the world we view the artwork from and the world the artwork projects back to us. Some try to make it stand out, but many others want to blur it, to make the experience of the artwork more immediate to the user.  Yet, each new media brings with it its own challenges that make that boundary between worlds more explicit.

In videogames, one of the main challenges is the interface of the HUD. The health bars, ammo counters, and countless menus give vital information to the player that can’t easily be removed – but which also risk setting up a wall between worlds, reminding the player they are really just looking at a flat screen.

They are an artifice that we generally just have to accept. Yet, several games have made interesting attempts to render the HUD diegetic, to incorporate its flat information into the world itself.

These Diegetic HUDs are most common in first-person shooters that really want the player to feel like they are sharing the body of the character. The later Halo games, Crysis 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and many others present the HUD components as not simply things stuck to your monitor or television set, but things actually projected in front of the character’s vision, as visible to them as to the player. In the later Halo games and Crysis 2, there’s a sense of depth to the HUD elements; they are slightly curved as though they are actually projected onto the inside of the character’s helmet.

In Human Revolution, the HUD isn’t just projected in front of Jensen, but is incorporated into his very body. For the first level of the game, while Jensen is still fully human and unaugmented, the player has no HUD. They can’t check how much ammo they have left in their gun, how much health they have, or where enemies are. It is only after Jensen receives his optic implants that the player has access to this information. This gives the game a greater sense of embodiment, constantly reminding the player that they are not simply a floating camera with some data stuck to it, but actually inside of Jensen’s body and perceiving the world from within it.

I especially love the little details that Human Revolution adds to remind you of this, like when an EMP grenade actually jams the HUD. By playing with the HUD as an actual, material element of the world, Human Revolution is able to reinforce its themes that Jensen isn’t entirely human anymore as his very existence is affected by weapons only meant to disrupt machinery.

It’s relatively easy to present a diegetic HUD in a first-person game, but it becomes vastly more challenging when the player and the character don’t share the same viewpoint. How do you convince the player that these things pressed against the screen are ‘actually’ there in the world when that screen isn’t the character’s perspective?

Well, simply, by not pressing the HUD against the screen. Dead Space is perhaps the best known diegetic HUD in a third-person game (so well known that I know all about it even though I haven’t even played Dead Space!). Isaac’s suit projects all the necessary information the player needs into the game world, either through the lights on his armour or as holographic projections. What the player can see, Isaac can see.

Of course, there is also the option of getting rid of the HUD altogether, but this only works in some cases. It works beautifully in ICO, as there really isn’t any information that the game needs to communicate to the player that isn’t there in the world.

But in a game like The Getaway on Playstation 2, it does more harm that good. The Getaway was obsessed with realism. To a fault. Instead of a HUD, the game insisted that all information would be presented to the player in the world itself. This worked in some cases (such as the character leaning over and looking like they are in pain when they are severely hurt) but just made things confusing in others. When driving across London, instead of a radar pointing to your destination, your car’s indicators would turn on, telling you which roads to turn down. This worked horribly, and you could spend forever doing laps around an obscure lane way you were meant to turn down. In this case, the problem would’ve been solved simply by having a HUD.

Nevertheless, I love diegetic HUDs. It’s the perfect compromise between not enough information and that information putting up a wall between player and experience. Just as the baroque painters turned the flatness of the cathedra ceiling into a deep, extended space overlapping with the actual world, games with diegetic HUDs conceal the flatness of the television screen or computer monitor by taking the information normally pressed up against it and incorporating it into the world, bringing the player along with them.

You know what I love? When game designers are jerks. Not so much when they hold back key features to release as day one DLC, or when they force me to be online even to play single player, but when they design a game in an intentionally jerky way so that my role as the player is, essentially, to be the butt of a practical joke. I love it when a developer knows exactly what I am going to try to do in a game, and uses that against me.\r\n\r\nIt’s not something everyone enjoys, quite understandably, and perhaps there is something slightly masochistic in the pleasure I get from such games, but I simply enjoy sitting back and appreciating the effort that was put into setting up the joke for me to fall for.

Perhaps the most consistently jerkily designed game is Playdead’s Limbo. While many loved the artsy indie platformer, many others despised it. They called it poorly designed. They claimed the game failed to communicate what is expected of the player. This is true in a sense, but the designers (I believe) did this on purpose. You don’t solve Limbo’s ‘puzzles’; you fall for Limbo’s traps, and then you know where they are and avoid them next time. It’s completely understandable that some players hated this. What’s the point of playing a game that doesn’t teach you how to play? That just kills you off and expects you to repeat it?

Playing Limbo, I was reminded of a game my brothers and I made up when we were children. It was called Traps. Two of us would go around the yard constructing an obstacle course. We’d hide broken twigs in little ditches covered in leaves, we’d jam toys above doorways, and the such. Then, the other one of us had to walk a path through these traps. That was it, really. The trap-setters told the trapee where to walk, and watched them fall for the traps.

It was far from the most exciting game, but it was fun for a time, and I feel Limbo does something similar. Especially, it exploits its silhouette visuals to play all kind of tricks on the player by concealing objecting or playing with perspective. There is a puzzle close to the start of the game where a giant crate is hanging in the air above a button on the ground. Obviously, the button will drop the crate on you, so you delicately walk up to the button, planning to jump over it. But then you realise the ‘button’ is actually a safe island and the actual button is around it; the ground you are on sinks, triggers, and drops the crate on you. You respawn and this time jump onto what you now know is the safe island and continue on your way. After not too long you come across an identical setup. The game won’t fool you twice, so you jump onto the island, but this time it really is a button and it kills you again.

Some people hated this, absolutely hated it. When it happened to me, I chuckled, nodded, and mumbled, “Well played.” For the rest of Limbo I felt like I was playing a game with the developers, like they had set up traps that I had to try to preemptively avoid. Often I didn’t avoid them, but I rarely felt cheated. I felt satisfaction in simply understanding how I had been exploited.

I had a similar (though perhaps less explicit) experience of jerky game design in Dark Souls. After the game’s introductory segment, the player is dumped by a campfire on the edge of the game’s world. You are not told where to go apart from the broad goal of ringing two bells, one somewhere ‘up’ and one ‘down’. From the campfire, you can easily see two pretty clear paths. One leads up through some ruins and down into a graveyard. In the graveyard are skeleton fighters. In most fantasy games, skeletons are pretty generic enemies, right? In Dark Souls they are brutal. They killed me over and over and over. Worse, when you do manage to kill them, they don’t even give you any souls, the experience and currency of Dark Souls’s world.

The other path takes you down into a dank cave. At first you fight some easy zombies but not too far in you are destroyed by really powerful ghosts and are respawned back at the campfire.

I spent ages hitting my head against the brick walls that were these two paths. I had heard Dark Souls was hard, so I assumed this was just my fault. I kept dying, over and over. I slowly got a bit better at fighting, but not so good to defeat the skeletons or the ghosts.

Eventually, someone on Twitter vaguely alluded to me that there was another path I was missing. I searched forever and finally found the stairs that wrap around the edge of the mountain up to the Undead Burg, where the enemies are much easier to fight for a new character (and an inexperienced player). I couldn’t believe I had missed this path. How? It was so obvious!

The thing is, if you sit at the campfire where you spawn in this area (and respawn over and over as you keep dying) and try to look at the path, there is a dead tree whose skeletal branches almost perfectly conceal the entire staircase as it wraps up the mountain, rendering what should be an obvious path almost invisible. Thanks to that one tree, I wasted hours trying to go the other directions, and I know I’m not the only one.

Again, many think this is bad game design, not communicating to the player where they should go. Maybe they are right, but I think it is exquisitely good game design. Just putting that tree there had to be an intentional choice of the designer. They had to have known what they were doing. They want you to go the other ways and fail before you find it. It teaches the player that failure is a thing that will happen in Dark Souls, and it will happen a lot, and you have to learn to live with that. By being jerks, the developers taught me an important message that actually made the game much easier and tolerable when I eventually found the right path.

But everyone’s tolerance has a limit; mine lasted longer than some people’s, but less than others. I put up with Limbo’s traps and Dark Soul’s level design for a time, but others couldn’t stand it. Towards the end of Limbo, the developer’s jerky design finally pushed me too far. There is a puzzle where you have to turn gravity sideways. At no previous time in the game have you had to turn gravity sideways, and the switch to turn the gravity just looks like a sign with an arrow on it, telling you to go right.

I wasted hours trying to jump across a chasm you are not even meant to try to jump across. A silhouette of a cable dangled just beyond some buzzsaws and I was certain I was meant to try to grab onto it. I was so angry that I couldn’t do it that I refused to play the game for weeks until someone told me that sign, that stupid sign I had run past hundreds of times on my way to my death, was actually a switch.

I got angry. I claimed this puzzle was ‘poorly’ designed, that it didn’t communicate to the player what was expected of them. Every criticism that other people had directed towards the jerky bits of the game that I claimed to love, I then said about that puzzle.

So I guess what I love about jerky game design is that a game doesn’t have to be welcoming to the largest possible group of people, just to be counted as ‘well-designed’. It could fly right in the face of what ‘good’ design is, intentionally, to create a uniquely hostile experience. Players get to live out their power fantasies in every other game; sometimes it’s nice just to be the butt of a well setup joke. Sometimes.

You know what I love? Having a companion in a game with me—a human companion. Be it the built in co-op mode of a shooter, chilling out on a Minecraft server with my girlfriend, the sympathetic loneliness of Journey, or finally locating my brother in DayZ, sometimes its nice to just have someone by your side.

Traditionally, I’ve never really enjoyed playing multiplayer games. There’s just something about the pressures of playing with other people that has always bothered me—or, perhaps more accurately, that I couldn’t be bothered with. In single-player, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, without worrying what other people are doing. You don’t have to worry about opponents that might be (okay, probably are) better than you. You don’t have to spend ages finding a server or dealing with lag or squinting at your half of the split-screen. Single-player is just easier.

But even in my entrenched, introverted ways, I can’t deny the glorious experiences that can only arise when you are playing with other people. There are some experiences that just can’t be programmed. But still, I tend to stay away from competitive game types (if you exclude my obsession with topping leaderboards, that is). It is the cooperative experiences of having a companion that I love. Not a whole heap of companions, mind—I’m still wary of MMOs and the such—but just one or two friends to see me through.

First Steps

Back in the day I first learned to appreciate multiplayer with Halo and its co-op mode. This was the first time I’d ever encountered a multiplayer mode that didn’t involve killing each other. I would spend hours with friends or my brothers playing on Legendary and forming far-more-complex-than-necessary tactics so we could flank the Covenant. Or, even more regularly, we would just gather all the grenades on “The Silent Cartographer” and launch warthogs over the island. Those were the days.

Then there was Half-Life’s under-appreciated PlayStation 2 version with its own exclusive co-op campaign. On these levels, you played as two other scientists dealing with the fallout of the resonance cascade in other parts of Black Mesa. Unlike Halo, these levels were designed exclusively for two players, and could only be completed with coordinated teamwork, much like the Portal 2 co-op campaign Valve would design many years later. Again, my brother and I would spend ages together on these levels, one of us slowly pulling some giant heavy thing while the other defended them with the shotgun.

Many, many shooters followed in Halo’s footsteps with co-op modes, but I’ve learnt the value of a companion in other games, too. When I first discovered Minecraft, I spent countless hours playing by myself. I visited a friend’s server once or twice, but mostly I liked playing my single player games and keeping to myself. I never really built anything, just the most simple of square structures to put all my treasures in. I was an explorer and a hoarder. A reclusive loner in a forest cabin.

That was until my girlfriend and I finally bothered to figure out how to get our own server set up, just for the two of us. This changed everything. Suddenly, I had a reason to build things. When I was by myself, what was the point? No one was going to see it. But here, in this world that was for just the two of us, we built majestic homes that fit into the landscape with secret entrances and farms and kitchens and bedrooms. After trekking off into the unknown and building new homes, we would then spend hours building railways to connect our various homes.

All of this, I could’ve done in a world by myself but it just seemed so… pointless. But with a companion, the ways I experienced Minecraft multiplied tenfold.

Then there is Journey’s enforced and anonymous multiplayer that isn’t so much cooperating as it coinciding. Coming across another small figure across the vast, agoraphobic lands is a heart-lifting, emotional experience. You never talk to them, never really do anything with them other than be together, but just being there with them adds something deeply affective to the game. Even knowing someone else is out there that you might meet down the road makes playing Journey feel different from any straightforward single-player game.

Zombies bring people together

More recently, I have been playing DayZ. I had played the game for about twenty-five hours, largely by myself. While others were forming posses or grouping together, I would head inland, alone, scraping together enough resources for me and me alone, then disappear into the woods.

I did pretty well like this for several lives, but eventually either ended up sniped by bandits or mobbed by zombies when I inevitably made a mistake in a town.

Finally, I convinced my brother to start playing. The problem is, you can’t simply ‘play together’ in DayZ. You spawn somewhere randomly along the dozens of kilometres of coast. If you want to play together, you have to stumble around, figure out where you both are, and make the slow treacherous walk to each other.

We died many times trying to get to each other on the coast—too many bandits waiting to pick off people as they spawn. So we set a rendezvous inland and made our own ways there, talking over Skype as we went. Still, it was several play sessions and many more hours before we actually found each other. Bandits and zombies messed with us; the 1.7 update put us both back randomly on the beach; and we may have been walking in opposite directions for a good hour.

But then, we were right near each other, excitedly talking over Skype: “Can you see me yet? What about now? What about now?” We met beside a dam in the woods, and spent ages just standing there looking at each other and sharing supplies. Finally, we were together. Never before have I had to put in so much effort just to play a game with someone.

But it was worth it. Crawling through towns together took an entirely new tensions. Now we had two stomachs that needed filling. Two guns that needed ammo. Two bodies that could easily stumble into a zombie and screw everything up. But as we walked down a long dirt track between towns, things just felt… calmer. I had a companion now. There was no rush to make a suicide-dive into the next zombie-infested town. There was a reason to live now.

And then, sometime later, we bumped into a zombie while searching a house for food. We ran for the hills with about half a dozen zombies on our tail, trying to get away from the infested town before we started firing.

Atop a hill, we counted to three, stopped, turned, and made a stand. Me with my AK and my brother with his shotgun. We aimed our shots carefully as they came hopping and running up the hill, and we dropped them meticulously. It was my first encounter with zombies where I escaped without a scratch. It was such an overwhelmingly satisfying experience, to have stuffed up but then survived – only because the two of us worked together. Suddenly, those many hours spent stumbling in the dark trying to find each other were totally and completely worth it.

And that’s why I love having a companion. Most of the gaming I do still is—and probably always will be—in single-player games. But even though I sometimes hate the effort required to play with other people, I’ve come to learn that there are experiences and feelings you just can’t have when you are alone in a machine’s world. There’s a sense of meaningfulness when someone is standing there beside you, going through it all with you.

You know what I love? Sliding into crouch. In some games (too few games, sadly), if you press the crouch button while you are running, your character doesn’t just stop and crouch, but dramatically hits the ground sliding like they are trying to get onto the Classic Catches segment of the cricket. It is such a small thing; you wouldn’t expect it to make much of a difference, but it adds so much to the drama of the proceedings and to the rhythm of gameplay.

Sliding into crouch has, arguably, been around ever since the Super Mario Brothers were getting run-ups to slide under low blocks, but more recently it was Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 that popularised the move. Far Cry 2 is all about carefully thought-out plans going wrong, which means you are quite often running for your life and/or cowering in fear. Combining these two things, running and cowering, into a single sequence of actions is perhaps the greatest of Far Cry 2’s many great contributions to this fine medium.

Perhaps you are walking down a dirt road when you hear a jeep around the next bend, the engine getting louder and louder. You dash off the side of the road, into the long grass, and slide into crouch just as the vehicle rolls into sight, the machine-gunner looking right over you as they drive past.

It can be intense stuff. But imagine the same situation with some more typical controls. You run off the road, stop, then crouch. It might be just as quick, but it is missing something, something small but crucial to the feel of the game. The actions would be more distinct, one ending before the next starts. It would be more jarring and less flowing. By merging the actions into one fluid action, Far Cry 2 adds a rhythm to the game, a more dramatic flow to the action rather than a disconnected series of inputs.

Since Far Cry 2, the slide into crouch has, bafflingly, yet to become standard across all first-person shooters, but a few different titles have done their part. Battlefield 3 implements a slide-into-prone version that sits perfectly with that game’s focus on fluid movement. Slightly more surprising, the 2010 Medal of Honor allows a brief slide into crouch. Even in Medal of Honor’s slowly, clunkier bodies it still feels good to quickly slide behind a rock, out of the line of fire—especially on the later levels where you are constantly being overrun and forced to fall back.

Several non first-person shooters have flown the slide into crouch flag, too. Least surprisingly, perhaps, is Splinter Cell: Conviction, another Ubisoft game worked on, in part, by the same team as Far Cry 2. Very much a ‘cover shooter’ (much to the disgust of some Splinter Cell fans), Conviction used the slide-into-crouch excellently alongside its sticky cover system. Not only would Fisher slide if you crouched while running, but if you pressed the cover button while you were still some way from the wall, Fisher would dive at the wall and smash himself against it. Just like the first-person shooters, it adds a frantic rhythm to the game where it feels like you are always just making it without getting caught/shot. You didn’t run over to the cover then stop and crouch, you threw yourself behind it just in time. It all merges together seamlessly.

It’s a shame—nay, an offence—that sliding into crouch is not as common to first-person shooters as crouching itself. Crouching is functional; sliding is fun. The two belong together! Thanks to the many, many hours I spent with Far Cry 2, I still expect to slide in most games when I press crouch during a run. My character just stops and ducks. That’s why I love sliding into crouch. It just feels so natural, so organic, so fluid, that even though most games don’t do it, I expect them to just because it feels like they should.

You know what I love? When cool stuff happens in games. As an aspiring videogame academic who is largely concerned with how and why we enjoy videogames, I read lots of articles that try to pinpoint the exact, all-encompassing feature of videogames that makes them meaningful and pleasurable. Is it mastery? Exploration? Socialising? Narrative? Many games feature many of these attributes to different degrees, but the primary pleasure of all videogames, I would argue (and do excuse my high-brow academic lingo) is that in all games, sometimes cool stuff happens.

And when it happens, it is awesome.

An anecdote: several years back I was playing Left 4 Dead with some friends. We had just taken out a horde and were walking down the silent, empty street when a lone zombie knocked down a door and started running at me. I pulled out my pistol and shot a single bullet into his head. He kind of stopped, stunned as though he had been slapped, and stumbled three feet sideways to topple feet-over-head into a trashcan, feet sticking straight up in the air. It was amazing. I laughed until I cried, and my friends had to fend off an entire second horde as I tried to get a hold of myself.

This is what I mean by ‘cool stuff’. Sometimes the game, its underlying algorithms, player choice, and plain old luck combine to create these surreal moments that are sometimes absurd, sometimes hilarious, sometimes grim, but always brilliant.

Of course, cool stuff can happen in everyday life, too, but a game is like a Cool Stuff Pressuriser. With imposed rules that are more rigid than normal life, reality gets distilled in games so that cool stuff is more likely to happen more often. Take soccer, for instance. If there was no rule preventing players from touching the ball with their hands, cool stuff like incredible goals (or saves) would happen far less often. Or in cricket, if there was no rule stating a batter is out if the ball is caught on the full, there would be far fewer amazing catches. Sports fans are happy to watch several hours of largely repetitious behaviour because, occasionally, something really cool is going to happen. Likewise, videogame players are happy to put up with largely repetitious gameplay not just because that gameplay itself is usually enjoyable, but also because some cool stuff is eventually going to go down.

This could sound like I am belittling the cultural significance of videogames. What about narrative and player skill and exploratory worlds and the such? All of these make huge contributions in different ways to different games, absolutely. But it is through such features that cool stuff plays out differently in different games. It could be an amazing kill-streak in Battlefield 3, an impossibly good plasma-stick in Halo, a lap in Gran Turismo or a course in Trials Evolution so perfect as to be sublime, a carefully crafted narrative event no less cool for being authored, or simply a jaw-dropping cavern in Minecraft.

In all these examples and countless others the player’s actions, the designer’s intentions, and the game-world’s probability come together and cool stuff happens.

Perhaps the game that has focused on and harnessed the power of ‘cool stuff’ more than any other game, is Angry Birds. The formula is perfect. You slingshot the bird, and then just observe as it rains destruction on those pigs and their homes. You interact with the game, and then just focus on the cool stuff happening. There’s no competition for your attention between the actual ‘playing’ of the game and watching the cool stuff happen. You do one, and then you focus on the other. I am convinced this is why Angry Birds has found such a broad audience among those that typically don’t play games; the cool stuff is just so much more accessible.

In a very different way, Just Cause 2 also masterfully harnesses the power of ‘cool stuff’. The rules embedded in its open-world is practically a cool stuff simulator. Its physics and the things it lets you do in it assure that cool stuff is going to happen, and it is going to happen a lot. Most obviously, there is the fact that your primary goal is always to blow stuff up, which can’t help but escalate situations. But Just Cause 2 works in more subtle ways, too. The cleverest thing it does, I think, is that a vehicle will explode on a much slighter collision once you jump from it, than while you are still in it. This means that while you are driving around, you don’t just explode every time you bump another car, but if you leap from a moving car, it will more-often-than-not explode against the first tree or wall or army jeep it comes across – which is, naturally, awesome.

But, truly, cool stuff happens in every game, in one way or another. Linear and nonlinear. Single player and multiplayer. The best games are those that understand the power of cool stuff and are designed in a way that ensure cool stuff will happen often, but no so often as to longer be cool.

Another anecdote, simply because when cool stuff happens in a videogame you want to tell everyone: I was playing LittleBigPlanet 2 with my girlfriend and brother. My girlfriend was in the same room as me, and my brother was playing with us online. We had no headsets and could only communicate through typing commands out slowly on the controller or through the gestures of our sackboys and sackgirl. We were playing a level that required extensive use of the grappling hook.

We came across a massive gorge with deadly spikes at the bottom. I went first, swinging across the chasm with my grappling hook and landing on the platform on the other side. My girlfriend went next, landing beside me. My brother swung, but let go with his grappling hook too soon, and missed the platform by mere pixels. Without thinking, my girlfriend pressed ‘R1’, sending her own grappling hook out to cling on to my brother. It slowed his fall, but his weight dragged her towards the edge. Just in time, I shot my own grappling hook at Helen and, together, we were able to pull my brother back to safety. We made our sackboys and sackgirl smile and dance and hug and jump around, even bothering to open the speech function and type “OMFG”.

It was amazing and, easily, one of my all-time favourite memories of playing a videogame. Everything just came together to make this spectacular, beautiful moment. I remember just sitting there after it happened thinking “Man. I love videogames.”

So perhaps “I love when cool stuff happens” isn’t saying it strong enough. When cool stuff happens, I remember just why I love videogames.