DLC MC: Woe! Red Rings of Death!

Lost without my 360, again.
11/6/2009 9:40 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

I am lost. My head hangs heavy. My heart is torn apart. I cannot sleep. But I dream about her, so far away, thousands of miles.

I go to Halloween parties, dressing as a tattoo-headed vampire, masking any semblance of my self. The Yankees win on television, a momentary diversion. I see the orange autumn sun stipple brilliant yellow leaves. But the leaves fall and I am sad -- over my Xbox 360.

For the fourth time, she died. As she died, she blinked again and again, blood red. The disease? Red Ring of Death.

I miss her body, sure, that charcoal tone which stood proudly in my living room. And I miss her brain, her hard drive. We like the same things, you see.

But I really miss what's inside. Not the big epic games. Finishing Batman: Arkham Asylum can wait. Borderlands' post-apocalyptic nightmare will be there later.

According to various developers I've interviewed recently, not that many people ever get around to finishing a top game. If 25 percent of gamers finish a longer game, that's considered by publishers to be a pretty huge success. I fall into that category, too, with a lot of games -- maybe more, since I have so many games to look at for an audience.

I mourn for the little things, the DLC. Without downloadable content, I am a gamer traversing the bleak wilderness.

For a while, I survived, if you can call it that, by living in the past. Wasn't it good to go all Super Metroid-retro with Shadow Complex? Wasn't it great to be locked down and in the zone and hit the top-10 leaderboards in Pinball FX?

But then, I began to live again. It's due to what Will Wright calls "generative" stories. At the Game Developers Conference, at a small San Francisco club in February of 2008, Wright explained that the best stories in our culture and our history -- including the tales in the best games -- lead us to re-imagine these tales into our own narratives.

I'm not the only one.

You've done it.

You, in your own mind, embellish what you've witnessed in games. It could be merely fantasizing about Chun Li or Lara Croft. It could be plotting your next move in Demon's Souls. If I do X, will I get past Y? And then what happens?

Weirdly, it's been DLC that has stayed with me and made me dream stories. DLC doesn't die when the hardware breaks. These gameplay experiences live even when I have no controller in my hands, even when I can't see them on my 50" TV.

See, the characters I end up thinking about offline are the characters whose story I can embrace like those in a fast-paced book, a 20-hour experience as opposed to a 100-hour experience. I wouldn't be ruminating on how Marcus Fenix got his scar. That's because in Gears, I'm more concerned about moving forward in the game, via the pop-and-stop cover system, than I am about story.

But with Shadow Complex, which is exploration-based, I can think about what I have discovered in its 20-hour experience more easily. In my head, I can expound upon what's given in the story and make my own. For instance, where would I fly if I had that jetpack here on the Lower East Side?