PixelVixen707

Will Wright has long held the crown as the leading maker of “God games” - games that give the player near omnipotent powers over some world, to shape the very earth and winds and treat the people as nothing more than a statistic. The long-awaited Spore may have knocked the crown off, as players found its lightweight God-dom less than irresistable. Or maybe we’ve just moved on: maybe the idea of playing God and manipulating a whole world seems a little cold. If I can flick a cow-creature across the ocean with my fingernail, how much could he really have meant to me?

This past month, a different type of game prevailed. Fable II, Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 - “the F game trio,” as Michael Abbott just tweeted - each gave us open worlds and bustling populations. As players, we stood above the plebes - and yet, we were still of the people, and the choices we faced at the end of each game felt intimately important. In fact, the stories ended with sacrifice, and even martyrdom.

Forget about playing God: the market now belongs to the Jesus game.

For once this post won’t contain spoilers, aside from the general themes I listed above. There’s no need to rehash exactly what made each of these games dramatic. But each of them shared a strategy:

- Create a world where the player can roam freely and dangerously.

- As the player grows up, he or she grows invested in this imaginary world - in its people, its problems, its struggles and its hopes.

- Near the end, drop a major decision right in the player’s lap. It should be wrapped in a neat multiple-choice problem, preferably with a savepoint in front of it (damn you, Molyenux). But there should be no easy victory: doing right should cost something, ideally, an atonement or sacrifice that saves the rest of the world.

- Player makes a choice. Drama ensues. Game ends - and ideally, haunts you for days.

Many games turn you into a hero and ask you to save the world. But they don’t expect anything in return: if you’re brawny enough to defeat the bad guy, you’ve done your job. Some games also paint the hero as a dark and tortured soul, but again, without a choice, anti-heroism is not compelling. I vaguely remember the star of Dark Sector being a rough character with a tough past, but that premise didn’t get past the cut-scenes. It was nothing like, say, Far Cry 2, where the player character’s evil is woven into all of his actions.

Jesus games are heavy. They’re also very angsty. Now, as an atheist, I mainly know the New Testament from watching Jesus Christ Superstar on TV. But think back to Christ’s big number, “Gethsemane,” where he calls out his Dad for getting him in this mess - and then faces up to what he’s gotta do. If he didn’t love these people, if he didn’t fear this choice, you wouldn’t hear that anguish, that agony, that gutteral rock star wailing.

The Jesus game makes deft use of both ludology and narratology: it delivers a dramatic storyline and compelling plot points, but only through the game-like elements of a branching narrative and a wide-open world can the story come to life. Like Jesus, you come to the world with certain powers and the possibility of aloofness - but the world is interactive, and it keeps you grounded and makes you suffer. The classic question goes: can a game make you cry? These games may - or maybe you’ll laugh, or get angry, or frustrated. It doesn’t matter, so long as you feel something.

The three F’s aren’t the first to pull this off - RPGs, lately Mass Effect, excel at it. But I had quite a month having my judgment tested and my moral compass spun by such big-name big-budget titles, in such rapid succession. And it makes me dread next week’s election. I’ve worried about enough worlds - I don’t have the strength left to sweat over the real one.