Things that make you go vroom

Game engines are a necessary evil. Still, they're a lot like the Associated Press. When all papers have the same news stories, every newspaper is the same and it doesn't matter where you live. The journalistic integrity is unanimous. When all first-person-shooters share the Unreal engine, all first-person-shooters feel the same. No game company, not even EA, can afford to create every single new game entirely from scratch. The development tools are the same. The graphics are all created from the same basic polygons. Physics are physics. Game conventions exist and become cliche because people in general are afraid to try something new, something unique. Mirror's Edge bombed. Okami single-handedly destroyed Clover Studios. Every Tim Schafer game is critical gold and commercial dookie. RPG's still employ the same S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system (strength, perception, endurance, intellect, agaility, luck) 20 years after it was created, with relatively few tweaks. People still play RPG's. They cry for a new, original game (Viewtiful Joe) but then nobody buys it when it's released. Consumers are destroying video game ideas like they destroyed American pop music. Thanks, movie licenses.

(Virtual) Reality

Computer graphics are getting too good. Once, your onscreen representation was nothing more than a monochrome bar against a black, endless background in the Pong universe. Now, computerized ninjas look almost indistinguishable from real ninjas. Scratch that, we'll go with football players. If a person across the room sees his buddy playing Madden, he might easily confuse it for a real football game on TV. What happened to the days where games were easily separated from reality? Now that Call of Duty finally has the technological prowess to look just like Jarhead, the lines are blurred even further. In the original Super Mario Bros., you only controlled Mario - you weren't actually Mario. Now, when you play Mirror's Edge, you are Faith. You control her and look out of her eyes; you feel when she's hit and you die when she dies.

It makes the whole experience feel more immersive, and yet... I am not a young, supple Japanese girl. I'm a tall white guy with no real athletic ability. I am not Faith, and there's always going to be that distinction in the back of my mind. I can't relate to a free runner parkouring all across Tokyo rooftops. I can relate to Pac-man. In the words of D.B. Weiss, author of Lucky Wander Boy, "Pac-man is just a mouth. I have a mouth. You have a mouth. Everyone has a mouth." Mario is the everyman plumber type. Jesus was a carpenter. See the similarities?

Another recent trend in games like Metal Gear Solid 4, God of War II, and pretty much any FPS is the whole "ugly is the new pretty" motif. With the enhanced graphics on the PS3 and Xbox 360, you can see scars, stubble, and all sorts of imperfections on main characters' faces. Remember back in the day? Mike Tyson's Punch-Out - Little Mac was the pretty boy good guy facing off against the big ugly behemoths like King Hippo and Bald Bull. Very Ayn Rand-ian. The good guys are pure and beautiful; the bad guys are obviously immoral. It's a fun concept, but games are only recently coming to discover all the small nuances of what actually constitutes good and evil. It's not as clear-cut black and white as Saturday morning cartoons and The Fountainhead lead us to believe. Maybe that's why the ug-ifying of main character anti-hero types? To show that they are human too, that Solid Snake also lies on his taxes and leaves the toilet seat up? Maybe. Maybe people just want to do the bad things in games that they can't do in real life. Yet 9 out of 10 people still pick the good guy path in Fable. People don't know what they want.