Somewhat shamefully, when I first played Irrational Games' 1999 classic System Shock 2, I didn't complete it. That was common for me during that era--it was when I was starting to think critically about games, but before I had really gotten into them as a "primary" hobby, and I rarely dedicated enough time to absorb the full experience. (Coincidentally, Thief, which shares a number of developers with Shock 2, was one of the most important games in the development of my thinking about the medium, along with its contemporary Half-Life.)

A few weeks ago, as BioShock 2 approached, I decided to rectify this particular partially-incomplete part of my repertoire. Yesterday, after about 15 total hours of play, I finished System Shock 2. It took a bit of fiddling, but I was able to get it up and running on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. I eschewed mods for this playthrough; maybe I'll swap in altered textures and mechanics during a future excursion.

I'm sure just about anything I have to say about the game has already been said, it being a decade after its release, but it made enough of an impression on me that I'm going to say some things anyway. The first section is about design, and is spoiler-free, but if you haven't played through the game (and you should), don't read the latter parts, because they've got a lot of spoilers.

As Gamasutra's resident PC gaming nerd*, I was again tapped to provide our PC-specific Best of 2009 awards. Since I'm not sure if Idle Thumbs is going to bust out another GOTY.cx this year, I figured I'd let you guys know what I thought of this year's offerings by way of my Gamasutra rankings.

The more I reflected on the list, the more I remembered that although this fall has been fairly unremarkable for the PC -- lots of competent but expected multiplatform games, mainly -- the first half of the year was jam-packed with amazingly interesting and unique PC games, many of which were exclusive, with an impressive range of indie to high-budget experiences.

Along with the digital distribution price war really kicking into effect, it's been a fantastic year for the platform. My opinion that the PC is not the place for mainstream triple-A action game experience was solidified; people looking at the platform through that lens (which is understandable, as it's how the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are sold) are likely to come away feeling the PC is comparatively anemic, but those willing to broaden their horizons and examine a more diverse array of genres and scopes will better perceive the true strength of the format.

Here's a quick alphabetical list of all the games I highlighted:
AAaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity (Dejobaan Games)
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Rocksteady Studios)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward)
Dawn of Discovery/Anno 1404 (Blue Byte/Related Designs)
Dragon Age: Origins (BioWare)
Empire: Total War (The Creative Assembly) (Confidential to Nick: Ha ha.)
League of Legends (Riot Games)
Left 4 Dead 2 (Valve Software)
Plants vs. Zombies (PopCap Games)
Risen (Piranha Bytes)
The Sims 3 (Maxis)
Tales of Monkey Island (Telltale Games)
Torchlight (Runic Games)
Trine (Frozenbyte)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (Relic Entertainment)
Zeno Clash (Ace Team)

The full Gamasutra article has the Top 5 ranking as well as justifications for each choice. As with other blog posts, we still have no comments, so feel free to discuss in the forums.

*My colleague Kris Graft, who joined this year, has fortunately doubled our staff's PC gaming ranks.

You know what you must do.

(There are other great things on sale as well.)

(This began as a simple endcap on the MIGS roundup post, but the post quickly became too long and lopsided for that.)

While it's tough to ever assign a running theme to an entire conference, I did feel that there was a bit of an undercurrent running though a number of the Montreal International Game Summit talks I covered, about the need to expand the expressive or creative possibilities of the medium. I may be reading that into more talks simply because it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

If you're reading this, you probably love games. I certainly do, but I've been thinking about what makes games important to me, versus what makes books or music or film important to me. I think I might be most interested in the formal and design aspects of games more than those other things, partially because the way my career path has gone means I spend so much time thinking about that. It's also just exciting to be here to witness the evolution of a creative form so early in its existence. The theory and creative side of games is going through so much more creativity and discovery than the theory of those other forms, which are much better established and understood.

But there are still some parts of my life that games don't address that well. They do the "fun" thing well, and they give me a lot to think about, but they rarely speak to me the same way a wonderful novel, film, or album does. I don't as frequently feel that I've genuinely realized something about myself or my world in the same way I do when I read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, watch Mad Men, or listen to The Who's Quadrophenia.

That doesn't mean I don't get creatively excited when playing games. That happens all the time, and it's great. I love it. But, at least for me, that excitement is more often related to the exploration of game design and the video game medium than it is related to broader human revelation. It's obviously easy for me to say things like this; it doesn't take much to throw stones. And it is certainly true that (fairly randomly) chose examples of other works that were created much later in their forms' history than would even be possible with games now. (Although on a personal level, I think I could choose a number of films that are more historically equivalent in that respect.)

But the reason I bring this up is because I think games are certainly capable of more. I think games have the possibility of speaking to us as people, not just as gamers, in the same way a film by Scorsese or Bergman or Welles or Kurosawa or the Coen brothers can speak to us as people, not just as film buffs; in the same way The Beatles or Beethoven or Charles Mingus or the Flaming Lips or John Adams speak to us as people, not just as analysts of music theory; in the same way Vonnegut or Nabokov or Shakespeare or Orwell or Hammett speak to us as people, not just as appreciators of literary prowess.

Maybe some of you reading this would claim games are already there. I wouldn't actually disagree. For me, there have already been a few amazing games that speak to me beyond triggering my "fun" receptors or engaging my interest in design. And obviously there's no objective measure of this; I would never presume to decide which games have achieved this or haven't achieved it for anyone who isn't me.

As Hecker suggested, though, that crucial consideration of the "why" of game development -- along with related questions like "What are you trying to say to people?" or "What influenced this?" or "Are you trying to say anything at all?" -- seems to be less important in this medium than it is elsewhere. That's understandable, since "fun" can be pursued for its own benefit, and to great and impressive effect. Surely we've got that covered by this point, though, and there's bandwidth for more.

Smith's discussion of whether it would be possible to make a "not fun" game is also probably less important than the question of whether we can make games which don't explicitly put "fun" at the top of their list of paramount goals. (I imagine that, outside of the context of his directed thought-experiment, he would agree.) It seems as though, through iterative design and decades of progress, we have -- at least to a reasonable extent -- figured out how to iterate until we've found some fun.

I'm sure directors like Scorsese or writers like Vonnegut are plenty concerned that their works turn out "fun" (or whatever equivalent synonym you want to apply to their forms), but I suspect they have never focused so single-mindedly on that goal that they strip away any elements that aren't All Fun, All The Time. They have other goals they are trying to achieve with their work that serve some higher purpose, and their skill and experience as craftsmen allows them to keep "fun" (or whatever) as one consideration, rather than as the one consideration.

Particularly right now, as the industry becomes even more risk-averse than ever in a period of declining revenues, maybe this isn't on everyone's mind. But I think game developers who actively have something to say and want to express it through games don't necessarily need to engage in particularly risky or experimental design to work towards this goal. Intent seems like a great first step.

We still have no comment functionality on this blog, but feel free to head over to the forum and discuss this thing there if you like.

I spent most of last week in downtown Montreal covering the annual Montreal International Game Summit for Gamasutra. Since there isn't much other content going up on this website at the moment and since we didn't do a roundup on Gama, I figured I'd bust out a coverage roundup here on Idle Thumbs. Maybe you guys will find this stuff interesting:

- Asking 'Why' Will Keep Games Out Of The Ghetto, Says Hecker: Chris Hecker warns that, without proper attention from the game development community, games could end up in the same culturally irrelevant position long held by comic books. This isn't technically MIGS coverage. Chris did, however, deliver an essentially identical address during his MIGS keynote, so we can just act like it's MIGS coverage and everyone can be happy.

- Hecker: Indies Can't Do All The Heavy Creative Lifting: ...but Hecker did do a Q&A after the Montreal version of his talk, and in response to one question, he stressed that we can't just look to indie developers to address that issue. Mainstream game developers, with their wider reach and accessibility, must do their part as well.

- Randy Smith: Do Games Need To Be Fun?: "Games need to be fun" is one of the industry's most ubiquitous sentiments, across all disciplines and genres and audiences. It's become so prevalent that it is also becoming increasingly meaningless. Surely there are other valuable and valid goals besides "fun," and former Looking Glass and ION Storm Austin designer Randy Smith has some thoughts on the matter.

- Valve's Holtman: Digital Direct Gives Developers More Pricing Freedom: Just about every time someone from Valve gets up on a stage to talk about the studio's own design and sales strategies, they hammer home the importance of treating the online PC space in the experimental and fluid way the platform inherently allows. In this talk, Jason Holtman demonstrates how developers can completely abandon traditional retail beliefs about pricing.

- Valve: Devs Should Experiment With Post-Release Content Using Digital Distribution: ...and in this piece, Holtman takes the same attitude towards downloadable content (free or paid), which come in all shapes and sizes, from long-term expansion-level additions to quick, experimental bits of content -- even content that borders on jokes shared with the audience.

- Rolston: Physical And Virtual Artifacts Crucial To Narrative Designer's Job: Ken Rolston, now of Big Huge Games, has decades of RPG design experience spanning from early pen-and-paper titles to Bethesda's recent Morrowind and Oblivion. In a talk whose rapid-fire entertainment value I failed to adequately capture, he discusses how physical and virtual artifacts are crucial to designers of narrative-driven games, for the benefit of both the designer and the player.

- David Sirlin: Keep Interface Design Simple, Concise, Efficient: Considering games are inherently interactive, it's consistently surprising and frustrating to me that more attention isn't paid to making interface elements as streamlined and usable as possible. Sirlin offers some examples of games that do it thankfully right and instructively wrong.

- Assassin's Creed 2's Plourde On Why 'Fail Early, Fail Often' Is The Wrong Approach: To me, Patrick Plourde's talk about the document-driven design of Ubisoft Montreal games like the Assassin's Creed series may demonstrate both why the first Assassin's Creed had so many seemingly dead-end design decisions, and why its sequel (which I haven't yet played) apparently gets it so much more right.

- EA Montreal's Schneider: Who Do We Make Games For?: Reid Schneider, who heads up the ultra-macho Army of Two franchise at EA Montreal, discusses the reality of the industry having to increasingly address audiences that may not be as on board with traditional Gamey McGamer settings and themes.

- Wada: Too Much Diversification Will Confuse Game Consumers: Square Enix's CEO is understandably concerned that the seemingly neverending introduction of brand new meanings of "video game" will just confuse and scare away as many people as it attracts.

- Square Enix's Wada Talks Going Beyond Globalization: ...and he also noted that the term "global" may be tossed around too often, and that it's more important to aim for many different cultures than it is a monolithic global approach.

That's a lot of articles, I know. I did it all by myself!