Welcome!

Welcome to Games Should Be Good, with Matt, Nick and Brent. This is a soapbox where we can rant about the things we love and hate in gaming.

We're big fans of all sorts of games, from videogames to table-top RPGs to board games to CCGs and miniatures, and we spend a lot of time discussing and thinking about games. We aren't the go-to blog for finding out crazy updates about the new graphics in Gears of War 3, we're more into carrying on the torch of BoingBoing's sadly short-lived Offworld.

We'll be offering reviews, guest-posts, interviews with developers, artists and players of all sorts of games, and hopefully we'll help you figure out what it is you like about gaming while we figure it out for ourselves.

I posted an old short essay I wrote about two years back on Mirror's Edge. It's not entirely the style and tone we're going for, as we'll be finding out our voice as we move forward, but it's definitely the kinds of ideas we'll be touching on. Enjoy!

Mirror's Edge

I'm running through an office building, frantically pounding up the staircase. I burst out of the fire exit only door, labeled to discourage its use, and as my eyes adjust to the overwhelming brightness that is the sky that high up, I see a man with a gun. He's already drawn it and it's pointed at me, and he's close enough he won't miss.

I can hear my heart beating in my ears, and I act out of instinct, pushing him backwards over the railing. We're at least 15 stories up.

This incident happens in the first third of Mirror's Edge, and is not a scripted event. Unable to control my panic, I send a man, likely one who has a family, and is working a low-wage security job to buy medicine for them as news reports on every screen trumpet the arrival of a new strain of bird flu to the city, to his death. From then on, I am haunted.

Mirror's Edge plays like a first-person shooter, but may be the first game in that genre (if it is even in that genre, as it plays more like a platformer wearing an FPS skin) that not only allows, but encourages you to be a pacifist. You don't start equipped with a gun. If you want one, you can get up close and personal with somebody aiming one at your face and take it from them. Naturally, this is dangerous, not to mention time-consuming, both liable to get you killed in a world that you need to keep moving through at breakneck speed. Even if you do take a weapon, pointing and firing costs precious seconds, and it's often best to just throw it away.

How many other games depend on you taking weapons away from people and then not using them? Aside from sports games, which are still all about domination, since when has a game not required murder? Since when has escape and freedom been such a crucial part of play?

I resolve at that moment not to kill anyone else for the rest of the game. It makes the game more difficult at times, easier at others, but it forces me to consider every action. In Call of Duty, I don't even track my ammo, spraying it at enemies without any consideration of what it's doing. Rainbow Six Vegas forces me to conserve my ammo, and stands apart from the crowd as less a war-game and more an accurate simulation of the horrors of being shot by small pieces of metal traveling at high velocities. Both of them still require murder. Even Mario demands I headstomp Goombas.

Non-puzzle games aside, what other games have you seen this trend in? Is the idea of domination so entrenched in the concept of play that this is almost a fluke? Does that explain the low-sales on one of the most innovative and challenging games of last year?