I felt some panic at first, mostly for my XBox Live account. Was someone out there pretending to be me and hassling my online friends? Maybe they were dressing my avatar in sports clothes! I couldn’t log in to my account via my XBox. So I called up tech support and explained the situation. The guy immediately went into triage mode, calm but urgent. The patient had a few bullet holes, but this was nothing he hadn’t seen before.

It took about 15-20 minutes to give all the details. Fortunately the idiot hacker had left his email address behind. Even so, the guy told me that there was a backlog of investigations and it could be a month before I heard anything. During that time I couldn’t use my Xbox Live gamertag or my Windows Live ID. Fine. I had enough to keep me occupied on other consoles.

A month goes by and I don’t hear a word. Not even an automated email telling me that I had a case open with Microsoft. So I call them back up to see what is going on. Turns out my case was “not escalated properly” and nothing had been done at all. My case had just sat in a file, ignored. The tech told me we’d have to start over from the beginning. I tried not to completely lose my shit on this guy, which I managed to do. Although I did make it clear that I was disappointed with their performance. The tech told me he would add a note to fast track my case as it had been neglected for so long.

Fortunately, that worked. About a week later I received a call that I would receive an email within a week detailing the results of the investigation. Another week later I received a series of emails explaining how to get back online with my XBox Live Gamertag. I was also notified that I would receive a full refund for the charges made on my account. Additionally, Microsoft was giving me two free months of XBox Live. I was able to get back online with my original gamertag and found nothing amiss other than all my friends were gone. I’ll have to add them all back again.

So, other than the massive delay in processing the case, Microsoft set things right in a professional manner and I am pleased with the results.

For the amusement portion of the evening, we returned to the bridge of the Artemis for a few hours of space exploration. This time around, we set up a network of laptops in the office. The laptops were then paired wirelessly with iPads which controlled the laptops remotely. That way we could all stand on the bridge with nothing but a slick Star Trekky-looking slate and play the game.

We had all six stations in play: Captain, Helm, Engineering, Comms, Science and Weapons. It was great to see how quickly everyone fell into using the bridge communication patter we’ve all been trained to use by Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. Even though the Artemis was destroyed more often than not, everyone seemed to have a really good time.

I’m amazed that Artemis is not more widely known. Thom Robertson could be the next Markus Persson, bathing in money. Artemis is the Rock Band of sci-fi games, hours of fun. If you have a couple of Windows computers, a large screen, $40, and some buddies, I definitely recommend you check it out.

I don’t like to leave things unfinished, no loose ends. But now I have this frayed blanket of partially read books, half-watched shows, unfinished video games, barely messed with apps, and board games still in shrink wrap. At one point these things were rare and hard won. As a child I created an impromptu garage sale to fund the purchase of the BattleTech board game, shutting the sale down the moment I could afford to buy. And then I played BattleTech for ages. Now everything is so easy to obtain, effortlessly plucked from the ether. But I feel like it takes a greater force of will to slow down and appreciate a single thing, knowing there are thousands more awaiting my attention. It is like touring the Louvre in a formula one race car.

I’ve decided I need to shift my perception of all this media, or at least to try. I’m trying to see it as another planetary ecosystem, something vast and ever present. In the same way that I do not need to play with every breed of dog on the planet, I do not need to play every game. If I see one I like, I will pet it and enjoy that moment. I’m really happy just knowing that all those things are out there and that sometimes my path will intersect with some of them.

Braid, Limbo and Bastion all come from a place of perfection in terms of art design, story and game mechanics. I have nothing ill to say about any of these games. Each one drew me in with its own particular style. But what I really want to talk about is the emotional payload of each. I’m going to spoil the ending of each game, so stop reading if you care about what happens.

Braid’s opening scene sets up the classic video game tale: your girl has been captured by the villain and you must rescue her. As the game unfolds, you are presented with a series of interior monologues filled with longing for a girl, presumably a real person the designer was pursuing. They seem to have little to do with the game until the end. The main game mechanic in Braid is the ability to alter the flow of time, moving it backwards and forwards to solve the puzzles. So, at the very end, when you think you are about to rescue the princess, you are instead treated to a shocking revelation: The opening scene of the game was playing in reverse. Now it plays again, in the correct direction, and you see that the girl wasn’t captured by the villain. She is in fact running away from you into the arms of the knight who will protect her, the one she really wants to be with. You spend the entire game so self-assured and self-absorbed that you never consider that the princess doesn’t want you to rescue her. Masterfully done.

Limbo had a similar twist, although a more ambiguous one. In Limbo, you are trying to find your sister and perhaps rescue her. It is never really clear how the two of you came to be in Limbo. The game leaves a lot up to interpretation. You encounter your sister on two occasions. Each time she is sitting in a sun-dappled glade, blissful and in no apparent danger. On the final occasion, the last moment of the game, she hears you approach. She turns and gasps. That gasp was an ice dagger in my heart as I realized that she was probably never in Limbo and now she sees the ghostly apparition of her brother looming towards her.

I finished Bastion a several days ago and it still sticks with me. I want to hear that narrator all the time, telling the story of my daily life. And the music! I bought the soundtrack the day it was released so I could listen to those gorgeous songs again. There are two big decision points in the game. The first one just seems like a Voight-Kampff test to determine if you were human. You can either hold on to this devastatingly overpowered weapon that annihilates your enemies, or you could set it down and pick up the broken form of Zulf, your enemy (who had every right to want revenge), rescuing him. I picked up Zulf and moved, slowly, without any defense or means of fighting, out into a battlefield full of enemies. But they all stopped attacking and stood in silence as I carried Zulf past them and to the exit. It was such a moving scene. The second decision you have to make is to either reset the world so that the Calamity did not occur or to move the Bastion and fly into an unknown future. I chose to reset the world, and, of course, the Calamity happened again and I began back at the beginning.

I think I’m drawn to these games because there is romance in having a singular purpose driving you forward from the left side of the screen to right. And while having a goal is great, sometimes you realize in the end that your goal is not what you expected or wanted. And, of course, appreciate the journey instead of the destination. Once you reach the destination, it’s over.

Then I went over to Nick and Amanda’s where I and their friend Ryan were meeting to go out hiking. We stopped and grabbed yummy kolaches first and then went to the park. I can’t remember the name of the park, but it was a great hiking trail.

Then we went to see Cop Out at the Alamo. Pretty silly movie. It could have been directed by anyone. As Kevin Smith didn’t write it, it didn’t seem to have anyone signature on the film.

After the film we went back to their place and watched Amanda play Heavy Rain for a few hours. Totally different game than what I experienced in the demo. I’m really looking forward to playing the game on my own. I can see what changes by making different decisions than Amanda.

I had to leave and go to Great Hall as I was playing in a Dominion Tournament. This was a slick operation. Everyone got personalized name badges to wear. We played three rounds, with three different load outs. They had these funky tournament rules where you played until 45 minutes were up or you ran out of *all* Victory cards. At first this sounded crazy, but it totally worked. You totaled your scores from each game and that was your tournament score. I ended up in 3rd place with 121 points. 1st was 125 and 2nd was 123, so it was close. Plus, the guy who got first place was taught by a guy that I had originally taught to play the game. Overall, it was a blast to play. It was like being in a geek poker tournament. Everyone was standing around, talking strategy, how each game had gone. Super fun.

I have come up with a Theory of Player Freedom vs. Narrative Cohesion (working title): The scope of a player’s freedom to explore a game world and choose courses of action is inversely proportional to the cohesiveness of any overarching narrative structure.

Example #1: Oblivion (The Elder Scrolls IV) – A vast open world where the player might have ten or more open quests at any one time. The player is free to follow the main storyline or simply wander off to muck about in a dungeon. The impact to the narrative is that, though the immediate fate of the kingdom depends on you having a conversation with the captain of the guard, you can go off adventuring for weeks of game time and return to the castle to find the captain waiting for you as though only moments had passed. The credibility of the narrative is sacrificed somewhat in order to grant the freedom of an open world.

Example #2: Uncharted 2 – Were one to take the 3D mesh of any level of the game, remove all of the textures and objects, and stand it on its side like a big grey unpainted diorama, you could drop a ball from the top opening (the start of the level), and it would fall, rolling and bouncing, all the way through to the bottom opening (the level’s end). There is a single correct path through the entire structure. Yet, because of this, the designers have tighter control over the narrative’s choreography, which, in this case, is masterful.

Because Uncharted 2 is so well constructed and so well presented, I didn’t mind that I did not have as much freedom to explore or solve problems. Had the writing or the production quality been sub-par, I would not have finished the game.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is balanced between these examples. The next objective is always clear and the narrative always supports it. But you are always free to explore Arkham island, pursuing other challenges. The narrative always channels you in a particular direction, but the architecture of the game rarely shifts in such a way that you have no choice but to move forward. Also, within each stage of the game, you have multiple vectors of approach to solve various dilemmas.

Giving the player much more agency over how they will use their gadgets and skills creates a stronger connection to actually being Batman. In Uncharted, I always felt like I was watching Drake do his thing; I never became Drake.

I will approach the full version of Heavy Rain with a cautious optimism. If my theory holds up, what promises to be a very controlled, linear “game” may offer a spectacular narrative experience.

So I think it might be helpful to recollect the things I have achieved. Not in a boastful, resting on my laurels sort of way. But to remind myself that I am the same person who did all of those things. Try it yourself when you are feeling somewhat less than.

Here are some of the things I have accomplished so far:

1. Learned to program in BASIC when I was 8 years old
2. Wrote a computer game when I was 10 and sold one copy
3. Learned to ride a bike
4. Learned to play the trombone
5. Wrote and directed Welcome to the Real World during my senior year of high school
6. Wrote and performed skits and monologues in front of hundreds of people
7. Learned to drive a stick shift
8. Was class Treasurer and class Chaplain
9. Was a National Merit Scholar
10. Read the entire Bible
11. Graduated high school
12. Won best supporting actor for my performance in Off Kennedy’s Yacht
13. Won best playwright for All We See and Seem
14. Helped make the short film K
15. Wrote a thesis on Interactive Fiction
16. Ran a massively multiplayer interactive fiction game as my senior writing project in college
17. Saw Pink Floyd in concert
18. Drove across the U.S. both East to West and North to South
19. Learned how to build my own computer
20. Filmed, directed and edited the documentary Goodbye, Hello
21. Graduated college
22. Survived six car accidents, unscathed
23. Convinced someone to marry me
24. Created presentations for the biggest company on earth
25. Owned a house
26. Survived a divorce
27. Taught myself Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, Poser, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects
28. Won a short fiction contest with my story The Numbers Game
29. Published a chapbook of poetry called Poem-Shaped Lies
30. Solved Myst III without any hints
31. Adapted The Warlock of Firetop Mountain into a module for Neverwinter Nights. It won a contest created by the publishers of the book. (The British) Steve Jackson played it and wrote me a letter of congratulations.
32. Checked in to a mental institution
33. Checked out of a mental institution
34. Made love to beautiful women
35. Stood naked on top of a volcano
36. Adopted a pregnant cat
37. Won a Telly award for my piece on the New Mexico Jazz Workshop
38. Had a crisis of faith
39. Learned how to break up with girls
40. Dual-wielded .45mm pistols
41. Published another chapbook of poetry called From the Ashes of Puppets
42. Won a fiction contest with my story My Strychnine Valentine
43. Sued the DEA and won
44. Learned how to make friends in a new city
45. Lived in at least 9 different cities
46. Performed slam poetry in five major cities
47. Created and published a board game called House of Whack
48. Created a web comic called Dream Job
49. Held my own with John Hodgman
50. Was a guest columnist for Secure Immaturity
51. Created and organized a film festival for women filmmakers called Something Real
52. Learned how to practice authenticity and integrity
53. Helped create a bumper for Fantastic Fest called Lollipop
54. Created a board game and beer meetup called Boards ‘N Brews
55. Performed improv comedy
56. Had an existential crisis
57. Beat Mischa in Wiz-War
58. Published The Stork
59. Filed my taxes in January
60. Saw the last night launch of a space shuttle
61. Designed hundreds of web sites
62. Avoided ever breaking any bones in my body
63. Have, at one time or another, lost everything I thought I needed to survive
64. Did what was right instead of what was easy

Every month it seems that there is some event, some newly awakened need, which siphons away whatever extra money I might have. This month it will be the projector lamp.

The VR games were actually pretty cool. You strap on a bike helmet and then this huge HMD on a trunk cable slides down from the ceiling and gets snapped over your face. Very Matrix-y. We played “Ride the Comics”, which was essentially a re-themed lightsaber simulator, and Aladdin’s Magic Carpet ride where you fly around collecting gems.

There was a white water rafting simulator where you got into an actual raft and paddled to avoid dinosaurs. The Pirates of the Caribbean VR game was great. A team of five players goes into a room which has a ship’s steering wheel and six cannons. The walls are all giant screens. One player steers the ship while the others run around the deck firing the cannons at enemy ships.

There are arcade games on every floor, all set to “Free Play”. The classic arcade had Discs of Tron! Dave and I played this Land of the Lost-style shooter where you sat in a jeep for about half an hour shooting giant spiders.

My favorite part of Disney Quest was Cyberspace Mountain. You got to design a roller coaster a la Rollercoaster Tycoon. I laid out all these crazy loops and jumps wending their way through the canyons of a lava planet. Once you design the coaster, it gets uploaded to a rollercoaster simulator, which you then ride. It was a fully enclosed capsule on hydraulics, and it even went upside down.

The tickets for Disney Quest were half off ($20), probably because we went there in the evening and it was off season. If you get a chance to go to Orlando during the off season, it is definitely worth checking out.