It’s nice to get a day off, because it’s a hell of a lot easier to sit in front of a blog editor and pontificate about how games should be made than it is to actually make a game. (Even one that’s already been plotted out and designed for you, and you just have to make with the comedy jokes.)

So back to my ill-conceived quest to dispel the myths of videogame storytelling. Spoiler note if you haven’t yet played BioShock: I’m not going to explicitly say what the game’s big plot reveal is, but I am going to come just short of it. So if you want to go in unspoiled, avoid the rest of this post.

I still say that Half-Life 2 is the game to beat when it comes to videogame storytelling. BioShock does an outstanding job of raising the bar in writing, music, art direction, and getting at genuine meaning in a game’s story, but by the end, it’s dragged down by the weight of videogame conventions and a final act that invalidates the game’s climax.

By contrast, Half-Life 2 is completely, unapologetically linear, and it tells a much simpler and more straightforward story. But because they put so much energy into immersion, you’re more engaged in the story. The interface fades into the background, and the cutscenes and encounters seem to grow from the environment instead of being triggered by unseen level designers. Because the world surrounding you feels so real, your brain fills in the gaps and invents backstory for these situations.

Of course, whenever you put forward Half-Life 2 as a great videogame, you’re countered with the claim that it’s not a game at all. Because it’s completely linear. And as we all know,

Myth 2: Videogames are all about choices.

It seems trivially true: videogames are an interactive medium. Interactivity means choices. Therefore, the best games are the ones that give you the most choices, the ones that let the player completely shape the experience.

All of the pre-release hype around BioWare’s new game Mass Effect emphasizes the game’s choices. A marketing video released last month had the 1up.com crew getting all excited about how gloriously open-ended the game is going to be. In particular, there’s one playable character who has his own back-story of an alien race, leading to a crucial climactic decision that affects the final outcome of the game. But you could ignore him on your first meeting and not see that entire storyline at all! What tremendous scope!

When I hear that, my first thought is, “What a tremendous waste of time.” Why go to all the effort of modeling, animating, and voicing a character, much less coming up with a back-story and lengthy passages of dialogue to support it, if that story is so superfluous it can be completely ignored by the player without harming the overall game?

Now, Mass Effect seems like a very cool game, and I’m very much looking forward to playing it. And BioWare’s put an emphasis on choices and branching narrative in all of its games — that’s their gimmick, and it works for them. I enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic a lot, even though I thought its light side/dark side choice was pretty trite and shallow, but there are plenty of other players who’d point to that choice as their favorite aspect of the game.

I’m not against the choice. I’m against the idea that branching narratives, multiple puzzle solutions, and multiple endings, are the holy grail of videogame storytelling. The idea that all storytelling games would offer this kind of choice, if only they had enough budget and time. And the idea that a linear game fails to be a “game” because it doesn’t offer this kind of choice.

Rescue, Harvest, or (c) None of the Above

Most of the time I spent playing BioShock, I was divided between being impressed with everything I saw, and patting myself on the back for being smarter than the developers. All of the effort put into making an immersive game world was undermined by having bright colorful buttons over everything you could interact with, and a plot that dragged you forward with a big flashing yellow arrow telling you exactly where to go. And all that talk about moral ambiguity was silly, when your central moral choice was a simple binary “good” or “evil”, each with its own button and its own ending cutscene.

What a shame, I thought, that they built the game around something as clumsy and unsubtle as that. And how frustrating, since you don’t have any real choice apart from that. Over the course of the game, I developed more empathy for the Big Daddy characters, the lumbering guys in diving suits who trudged around the levels making whale songs, who wouldn’t harm you unless you harmed them first, and who were completely altruistic, existing only to protect these little girls left in their care. And no matter whether you chose the “rescue” or “harvest” path for the Little Sisters, you always have to kill the Big Daddy.

How insightful I am, I thought, for realizing that the most interesting choice in the game is the one you’re not explicitly allowed to make. It’s like the theme of morality that’s central to Shadow of the Colossus, but in a game set in an underwater city with robots and magic spells and weapons and people who actually talk. Over and over again, you choose to kill these characters, without having any real idea of the implications; in fact, you’re probably coming up with more and more clever and efficient ways to do it.

(And as should be obvious by now, it turns out I’m not all that insightful; that’s one of the main points of the game.)

It Could Happen to You!

So I say that the greatest potential for videogames as a storytelling medium doesn’t come from choice, but from agency. The plot and themes of the game have importance because you are the one driving the story forward.

I’ve heard the complaint that a linear videogame might as well be a movie, since what you do in the game doesn’t affect the final outcome. But what separates the alien invasion story of Half-Life 2 from the one in War of the Worlds is that in Half-Life, you’re not just watching things happen to someone else, it’s all happening to you.

And what separates the climactic reveal of BioShock from the one at the finale of The Sixth Sense is that the reveal has significance only because of the things you’ve been doing in the game up to that point.

If it can be compared to any movie, it’s most similar to the scene in Rear Window when Torvald finally discovers he’s being spied on. At the beginning of the scene, he’s a threat to Grace Kelly’s character, who we’ve been getting more and more attached to throughout the movie. But then he looks up, not at Jimmy Stewart’s character, our protagonist, but directly at us in the audience. It breaks right through the fourth wall, and injects the movie’s main theme right into your soul. It’s not a cheap-shock violation like The Tingler, but leaves you feeling simultaneously vulnerable and guilty for taking part in all this voyeurism. Being able to compare a scene from a videogame to one of Hitchcock’s finest moments is high praise for BioShock, and the effect is even stronger because we’ve got eight or nine hours invested in the experience at that point, instead of just one.

I’ve also heard the complaint that a linear game might as well be a book, which is interactive only in that the player decides when to turn to the next page. But in a game that’s designed well, the player has to know how to turn the page before he can continue. In the ideal book or movie, the “A-HA!” moment comes after something’s happened in the story.

But in the ideal narrative game, the “A-HA!” comes first, and only then can the story continue. For that to happen, the player’s got to be so immersed that he no longer feels that he’s being told a story, but that he’s the one doing the telling.

That can mean a branching narrative and multiple endings, sure. But it’s not a requirement — each ending you provide discounts an infinite number of other endings, so how is that really any less artificial than just providing one? Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run and “Choose Your Own Adventure” books all have their own audiences and succeed or fail to different degrees, but they’re all basically based on a gimmick.

If I have to decide between a game with 12 different but equally shallow story paths, and a game with a single, genuinely compelling, complex, detailed, and well thought-out story, the choice is clear.

I’ve been reading Rain’s updates on the new TV shows that are coming out, but for some reason it still didn’t click with me that there are new TV shows coming out. It must’ve seemed relevant to me at some point, since my faux-TiVo has been recording all this stuff. The cat only records the “Lengths of String Moving Slowly then Very Quickly” documentary series on the Discovery channel (and, for some reason, “CSI: Miami”), so I must’ve been the one to set it.

Still, it was a surprise to come home from work and find a big chunk of programming begging to be watched. There’s no point in mentioning “How I Met Your Mother,” since that series has built up so much goodwill with me that they’d have to make an entire episode of the cast just making fun of me specifically and showing naked pictures of me while they point and laugh before I’d quit watching. I’ll never understand how a show that’s so relentlessly likeable could always be on the verge of cancellation, so I just hope that people keep spreading the word and it stays on the air. At least until we find out who the mom is, or until the slap bet runs out.

There’s not much point in mentioning “Heroes” either, since I just don’t get what’s going on between me and that show. Just like it was with most of last season, I watched the whole pilot rolling my eyes. And just like it was with last season, I’m compelled to keep watching. (Announcing that Veronica Mars is going to be on it just made it completely inevitable). I just hope that they don’t try to make the guys with the Worst Irish Accents Ever into recurring characters.

The first new show I saw was “Reaper,” which answers the question that’s been bugging every human for decades: What would it be like if Kevin Smith directed “Dead Like Me?” As it turns out, it’s not bad. I’m not jumping up and down or starting the local chapter of the fan club or anything, but it’s interesting enough, reasonably entertaining, and the writing and the performances are all above average. I don’t know if a show can just be “solid” and survive without a huge marketing campaign behind it, but I’d like to think so.

For a show with its concept (a slacker’s parents sell his soul to the devil, so he’s forced to send escaped souls back to Hell), it was surprisingly straightforward action/comedy. Still, it had just enough clever bits to stand out: Ray Wise as the devil, an interesting take on the battle between Heaven and Hell from the devil (”I’ve seen how this plays out. God wins.”), and a (bad) guy getting sucked under a zamboni and leaving a long trail of blood on the ice. It’s laughably obvious that they originally wanted it to be darker than it turned out — a friend of the leads is badly injured halfway through the episode, then the episode ends with the two leads giving a recap and setting up the rest of the series. But then the very last shot clumsily inserts badly-injured guy, as alive and kicking as LL Cool J at the end of Deep Blue Sea, as if he’d been standing there listening to the entire conversation but not saying anything. That actor must have one hell (hey, funny!) of an agent.

And speaking of wanting it dark, how about that “Bionic Woman?” After watching the pilot, I’m a little creeped out at how accurate prediction from a year ago turned out to be. It’s not dead-on, of course, but there are eerie similarities, which leads me to one of the following conclusions:

1. I have untapped psychic abilities;
2. The makers of the show have been reading my blog;
3. There’s only so much you can do with “The Bionic Woman” and a guy who likes digging up TV series from the 70s and “reimagining” them darker and edgier.

The third is the most likely, which puts me in an interesting position, because I can’t decide whether I’d rather see a darker, edgier version of “The Love Boat” or “Fantasy Island.” (Extra-credit challenge to Mr. Eick and his production house: “Three’s Company.”)

I liked the pilot well enough, and even though I wasn’t blown away, I’m hoping the series lasts a while. I’m not all that intrigued by the Black Mesa Secret Military Ops stuff, or all the predictable drama they slathered on, but I do like the cast. Bionic Starbuck is 1000 times more interesting than the main character, but the rest of the cast is still interesting enough to keep me watching. And keep me hoping for more bionic catfights.

I’m still wondering what it is about NBC that makes people look so weird, though. The aforementioned Bionic Starbuck kept reminding me of Heath Ledger as the Joker, for some reason. And Michelle Ryan is so beautiful it hits eerie, then wraps around to being beautiful again but oddly off-putting. (Plus, she does a dead-on perfect American accent.)

That’s all I’ve seen so far, and likely all I will see until the heavy-hitters of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Lost” start up again next year. Everything I’ve seen has been fine, but it says something that the best TV I saw tonight was a year-old episode of “The Venture Brothers” that I’ve already seen four times, and it still had me laughing out loud.

YouTube user StSanders has been posting some rare concert footage of the world’s finest guitarists just tearing it up. I may not be all that excited to see the new Van Halen in concert again, but there’s no denying that back in the day, Eddie was a god of the axe:

Carlos Santana isn’t bad either, but that’s mostly because of his backup band.

Also: Aa-HAAA!

I don’t know what got up the butts of the Rotten Tomatoes people, because I liked Resident Evil: Extinction an awful lot. It’s exactly what I was hoping to get out of a Resident Evil movie. There are a lot of reviews which dismissively compare it to a videogame, to which the obvious responses are: 1) No shit! It’s called Resident Evil; and 2) that might not be such a bad thing.

This one feels more like a videogame than any other movie based on a game that I’ve seen, and a lot of the stuff works for exactly the same reasons it works in games. There’s the save point at the beginning, a little dirt race sequence, lots of walking through nondescript interiors with guns drawn, and then walking through a dark cluttered medical lab surrounded by messages scrawled in blood and bodies impaled on spikes before the big final boss fight.

And for a movie about zombies, it seems a lot more like a Frankenstein’s monster creation stitched together from scenes and ideas out of other movies. There are the expected bits taken out of the first two Resident Evil movies, but they’re entitled, they picked the best parts, and it ends up feeling like closure to a series instead of just repeating the same old thing.

But as it goes on, it turns into a game of “Name that Movie” when you keep seeing set-ups that are eerily familiar. It hits on the obvious, of course — there’s a couple of scenes at a gas station that are straight out of Dawn of the Dead, then a couple of sequences lifted almost verbatim from Day of the Dead. Then there’s the sequence that’s like The Road Warrior, then The Birds, plus The Empire Strikes Back. And if you look real close, you get hints of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Akira, and kind of almost Enemy of the State. I’m sure that people who’d seen more cheesy action movies than I have would be able to spot more.

That all makes it sound completely unoriginal, and it mostly is. But I’ll take a movie that’s solid, exciting, entertaining, and unoriginal, over one that thinks too much of itself and fails.

One weird thing that kept bugging me: I couldn’t tell if they went in and airbrushed/photoshopped the lead actresses’ faces during close-up scenes. They all had this really weird much-too-smooth look to them, and it was distracting. I couldn’t tell if it was over-compensating desert make-up, or if they really did go back and edit the move in CG to make all the women look freakier.

I was genuinely disappointed to read online that this is the last in the series. Because the end of the movie sets up for a sequel that would be one of the most awesome action movies ever made. I was ready to just sit in the theater and wait for them to finish making the fourth movie.

In any case, I hope they can come up with another franchise for Milla Jovovich as good as the Resident Evil movies. Because she’s just fantastic in these, but keeps winding up in garbage that doesn’t take advantage of what she does best — which is playing a beautiful woman who doesn’t put any effort into or value on looking beautiful (unlike Ultraviolet), who has a handle on what’s happening (unlike The Fifth Element), and could totally kick your ass.

I don’t think I need to remind anybody about the significance of this weekend, but just in case: it’s the opening weekend of Resident Evil: Extinction.

I haven’t been reading or watching anything about the movie except for the trailer, because I don’t want no haters dragging me down. If I’d listened to the kind of people who go on about “bad” movies that “suck” “hard,” then I would’ve missed out on the laser-grid-slicing, zombie-dog-jumping, nipple-flashing, Michelle-Rodriguez-shooting magic of the first Resident Evil.

So what if that first movie could rightly be called “barely tolerable” by anybody watching it objectively, or that it seemed like it managed to be good purely by accident? This movie has even more hot women shooting guns and kicking zombie dudes in mid-air, which means I’m guaranteed to be there sitting right next to Front-Row Joe.

If I’m lucky, the shooting and kicking will be done to really loud thumping techno music. A guy can dream.

I’ve been hearing about the series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” from multiple places for over a year now. I tried watching a couple episodes when I first heard of it, and hated it. I tried the other night, because they’re building up buzz because of a new season or something, and still hate it.

But wait. There are dozens of terrible TV shows on these days, and several more series that plenty of people love but just don’t work for me at all. And we’re living in a society, after all, that not only allows but encourages Dane Cook to keep making movies. So why single out this one series?

Because for a long time now, I’ve been bitching about how lame and uninspired it is to be “all edgy.” And all this time, I’d thought I was protesting against an abstract concept; I had no idea that there existed an actual physical manifestation of everything I hate about entertainment.

I’ve watched four episodes now, to give it a chance. The closest I ever came to laughing was when I started to notice the barest germ of a clever joke about Stockholm Syndrome, but that was quickly buried under attempts to over-tell the joke and a 5-minute-long sequence where one guy tricks another into smelling his fart. If the series somehow becomes the only surviving record of the early 21st century, I’m sure that future anthropologists will be able to detect that there was some kind of comedy present, but in the same sense that biologists can detect the remnants of vestigial legs in killer whales.

The series has no use for actual comedy, when it can just repeat “AIDS child abuse racism alcoholism homosexual panic” over and over again and have people applauding it for being so “irreverent.” It’s not evil, which is the heartbreaking part. It really really wants to be offensive, but it just comes across as appallingly lazy.

I’d be discouraged by the fact that so many people are going on about how hilarious it is, except for the fact that “Flight of the Conchords” is getting a ton of great buzz too, and it’s a genuinely hilarious show. So it’s not that the world has horrible taste and civilization is ending; it’s more than the world just isn’t all that discerning.

I wish it were legal to marry a videogame, because then I’d marry Team Fortress 2, and I wouldn’t feel so guilty about how much I want to have sex with it.

A game that’s that much fun to play shouldn’t need to look as good as it does. There’s a video from some of the Valve team explaining in exhaustive detail all the steps that went into designing and rendering the characters in TF2, and the number of steps is almost comical. It’s like the old “Anal Retentive Chef” sketches on Saturday Night Live; who would possibly put that amount of effort into what is essentially a Half-Life 2 mod?

Apparently, the company that made two of the best-selling titles of the last decade would. And even more surprising than the fact they’d do it at all, is the fact that it really makes a difference. The claims they make in that movie aren’t just over-intellectualized design-wankery; you really can tell the character types apart from each other instantly. And even in an unfamiliar map, you know which side you’re on. (Even if you forget which team you’re on). It seems a lot more like theme park design than game design.

When you’ve got these great-looking and well-animated characters interacting in bad-ass looking levels with clever voice work and a stylized UI, it all works together to make the game more fun than it deserves to be. Because I’ve only played for about 2 hours total, and I’m already pretty familiar with the available maps, and I’ve tried every one of the characters, and I’m still eager to play it again. (I’d be still playing if it weren’t past my bedtime already).

And even more tellingly: I suck at the game. A lot. I’ve never been particularly good at first-person shooters, and with every little bit of complexity they add I just get worse. But if I can play this badly and still be having a blast doing it, they must have done something right. I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to refer to Valve as “the Pixar of videogames,” but this game makes the analogy fit even better. It’s ludicrous amounts of technology and manpower in the service of art and fun.

I was really impressed with the current version of “Doctor Who” when it started airing on the Sci Fi channel. It’s funny to read about just how huge it is in the UK, since it came as a total surprise to me that I’d enjoy it at all, much less think of it as must-see television. I already knew a ton of trivia about the show, but only through that mysterious process of nerd diffusion, the same process that means I can tell you character names and major plot lines from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” even though I’ve never made a point of watching the show.

But the new series started out amazing. It was like looking into a world that until now, only the most obsessive fans had been able to see. Ah, here’s the amazing show people were talking about, when I was only able to see cheap sets and terrible costumes and interminably dull “action” sequences. Finally I could see the potential of the premise and the characters. And not only that, but they frequently had single-story episodes that rank among the best television ever made — fighting zombies with Charles Dickens! Weird gas-mask wearing children in London during the Blitz! A spaceship with mirrors that lead to 18th Century France! And even the DOOM rip-off had a genius opening, with a bunch of demon-like aliens attacking our heroes chanting, “We must feed…”

The show started to wear thin, going from an excellent series punctuated by brilliant episodes, to a good series with the occasional very good episode, to about what you’d expect from “Doctor Who” but with very clever moments throughout. (And it seemed like there was some weird quota for every single episode to emphasize how much they embrace alternative lifestyles in the more enlightened future. We get it, already, Mr. Davies). It reminds me of “The X-Files” in around the end of the third season — there was still the occasional flash of genius, especially when Darin Morgan wrote an episode, but it had stopped being appointment TV and started being obligation TV. If the Doctor or Martha ever start droning on about their cancer, I’ll know it’s time to jump ship.

All that preamble was just for this: the episode that aired tonight in the US, “Blink”, is easily one of the top 10 best episodes of a television series I’ve ever seen. The kind that excites every nerd molecule in my body and makes me run to the computer to say, “Hey internet, did you just see that?”

I’m blissfully ignorant of all the fan stuff surrounding the series, but it feels like this is the UK equivalent of a “clip show.” It’s designed to let the Doctor & Martha appear very infrequently, but ends up using that to tell a story you just wouldn’t be able to get from the “normal” show. It helps a lot that it’s carried by an astoundingly beautiful and charming (and pretty young) actress; I was hoping through most of it that they were planning another spin-off based around her.

But the real appeal is the story, and the fact that they did everything right during production to make the story work. The show prides itself on being scary, and there’ve been several creepy and tense moments throughout the entire series, but this is the first one that I thought genuinely scared me when it was supposed to.

As for the story itself, all the components are familiar if you’ve read any time-travel stories, or played a Mario game. But it all just works: even when you’re sure you know what’s going on, and even when you’re right, it’s paced so well and presented so well that you dutifully suspend and restart your disbelief at all the right moments. The script is just a marvel, a suspense/horror/mystery story that unfolds through time. It does all the things I’ve always wanted time travel stories to do, but I’d never seen one pull it all off successfully.

And the most impressive thing about the script is how it uses a suspense/horror/mystery story, apparently done without the benefit of the series’ stars, to say exactly the message the series has been trying to convey for the past couple of years. The show frequently has the Doctor making a comment about his fascination with humans, and the value of human life. But it never seems to have all that much weight in the context of their usual stories (the previous episode, where the Doctor disguises himself as a human in the years just before WWI, did a pretty good job with it, although it was a little stretched out and maudlin).

This episode drives the message home as part of the horror-that’s-not-really-so-horrible. And then it all comes together by the end, when you realize that the message is in the double entendre of the title, saying “Blink and you’ll miss it.”