The last game I finished was the PS2 version of
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, from a couple of years ago. I came to it kind of late. But I'm a busy guy, behind on my gaming. Basically, I loved it. Some of the most beautiful level design and production design I’ve ever seen in a game, good voice acting and music, decent puzzles, and gimmicks that fit beautifully with the story. I commented to someone that the fact that I play games more for the plot than anything else makes me sort of a girly gamer. But thinking about it more, the choice of adjective is at least somewhat unjust.
I also play games for the "manly" reasons--I love the thrill of the fight, bloodier the better, for flaying and dismembering and slaying my enemies and seeing them cower before me before I deliver the final, killing blow. And the action, the sheer poetry of making a leap across an unleapable chasm 20 stories up with nothing but clouds and birds below me and just barely, barely, succeeding. And the joy that comes from entering a room full of traps and enemies late in a game, where I wouldn’t have lasted 2 minutes at the outset, and thinking “no sweat.”
As in so much that defines me, the better adjective to describe me as a gamer, and what it is about games I like, is “thinking.” People who don’t play games don’t understand this, but a player’s active participation as a character in a game, combined with the sheer amount of time it takes to play a modern game (
PoP took me about 10 hours, which is pretty normal for an action game—RPGs can demand 50+ hours of your life to get through them entirely), leads to a remarkable amount of identification with the story the game is trying to tell.
This gives the medium potentially a huge amount of power, assuming game designers choose to take advantage of it. And that’s what I look for, more than anything, in the games I play. The best game I’ve ever played is maybe a little known PS2 title called
Ico. At the end of
Ico, when the credits rolled, I almost cried, the total experience was so beautiful and so sad. And then after the credits, there's a tiny little moment--less an epilogue than a coda--that pushed me over the edge. As with other art forms, it doesn’t happen all the time, or even most or some of the time. But those few times when it does make all the rest well worthwhile.
But back to
Prince of Persia: what makes it a game on this exalted level? It comes down to just a few things, really: a compelling and unexpected narrative (and actually unexpectedly well told as well), a beautiful and consistent and believable world (you haven't seen a sunrise until you've seen a sunrise while hanging hundreds of feet up from a flagpole projecting from a parapet on the Tower of the Dawn), and characters who were interesting, with just the right spark of self-awareness. You play the Prince, of course, and for most of the game you’re paired up with a princess, whose father your father killed, both of you trying to escape from hordes of evil sand creatures and a treacherous vizier (As an aside, can I just point out that the vizier is
always treacherous? makes one wonder why they kept them around at all...seems like just asking for trouble...) and undo a terrible mistake you made at the beginning of the game. Straightforward enough.
But there are moments, typically while you’re hanging from a ledge or leaping across a chasm, when the Prince just starts talking to himself, mostly about the princess, and how she’s attractive, and maybe she likes him…and then he interrupts his “own” train of “thought” saying “stop TALKING to yourself!” It’s nice. The princess’s forte is squeezing through narrow openings to activate levers on the other side; at several points she says, with just the right note of boredom, “oh look, another crack.” The game knows it’s a game, and it reminds you it’s a game, but it also knows it’s a world in peril, and you can save it if you’re fast and clever and vicious enough.
Striking the right balance in any narrative form is hard. But it’s that balance that is the source of appeal to this thinking gamer.
On the other hand, if I were looking to highlight a trait aimed at the girly gamer, in, um, some people, I could point out that the buff, dark-haired, blue-eyed, trendily goateed young prince starts out fully clothed, but gratuitously loses his shirt during the course of the game.
[Our hero striking the right balance.]
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This caused a bunch of different simultaneous reactions, which fortunately cancelled one another out so that I did NOT spew noodles and broth all over the table. I had a small coughing fit though.
