So on Friday, we published a feature article about the recent rash of studio closures coming during a period of booming US retail gaming sales. I was largely grateful for and impressed by the discussion that ensued in the comments section. To be honest, I expected a 3,000+ word industry feature not directly related to the hot game of the moment to be received with a lot more "TL;DR."

That said, there were a couple comments that stood out for me and I think warrant singling out. First, the following comment was posted by stanrule1:

I was recently laid off from Perpetual Entertainment and hit the job market. It was really frustrating every day for months hearing about how well the video game industry is doing, how we're recession proof, etc. But still unable to find a job, things were looking bad. I had to sell some things, move apartments, bum money from relatives, anything and I was out of work for six months. There's a happy ending to the story though, about two weeks ago I was picked up by a small start up and now am happily employed with a great company making fun casual games.

And then I received the following private message from another developer:

Along with over half of the [deleted] team I was laid-off from [deleted] a little over a week ago. [deleted] green-lit our new IP but cut the force in half anyway.

Obviously few if any of your readers have first hand experience of studio and corporate level politics or the rampant mismanagement that pervades so much of the Game Industry. If they did maybe they wouldn't make asinine blanket statements like [deleted], who suggested that teams sucked the financial blood from studios by staying on the payroll too long. And I'd like to ask [deleted] how he suggests we "shop our skills around before the project ends" when we are in crunch mode - working twelve or more hours a day, sometimes six or seven days a week for weeks on end? Or is he also blissfully unaware of or just callously disinterested in the industry's standard crunch time?

While I was impressed with the depth of the article written, Mr. Sinclair, I wonder at the cool and often outright unsympathetic judgements being made here so easily in the comments following the article. As if this were just another game critique instead of the sudden loss of livelihood for [deleted] people…

In this time of financial downtrend, with the market now flooded with my friends and colleagues all looking for work, we who have built worlds for your enjoyment would have valued your support and understanding.

I know the Internet is a big wide world of anonymity and the various usernames and companies we read about often don't actually seem like real people, so it's easy to throw snarky insults around or dismiss developers (or game journalists) as talentless hacks. And to tell you the truth, some of them (and some of us) are.

So it's ok to think that. And it's even ok to say it when the situation calls for it. But given the borderless quality of the Internet, just keep in mind that you're talking about real people, and those people might very well be reading what you have to say. So when you type up a comment about a game or a studio, take a second to stop and think. Think about what it might be like for them to have been canned because their game didn't sell, because it wasn't fun, because they weren't given enough time to polish it, because a handful of reviewers "didn't get it," because there was no marketing budget, because the movie it was based on sucked…

Now think about what it must be like for someone in that position--already at their wits' end from having fought to make something great and failing due to circumstances beyond their control--think about how they must feel to have some anonymous username gloating about their misfortune and rubbing salt in the wound. Think if you'd say this to the faces of the people who worked their hardest on that game or made up the lifeblood of the studio.

Some games just suck, and it's absolutely fair to say so. But take a moment's pause before you start tossing off personal attacks you don't really mean. You never know when the targets of your remarks are reading.

I wanted to slip this into the story about Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but I just didn't see a good place for it.

The last DC fighting game (to my memory at least) was Justice League Task Force on the Super Nintendo and Genesis. It was excrement. It was also developed by Blizzard Entertainment, something they will admit to if you ask directly, but they don't exactly go shouting it from the mountaintops.

The last time I played that train wreck of a game, I was Superman (frozen in time during the ill-advised long-haired period of the character when he looked like a member of Ratt, Mr. Big, or perhaps Slaughter), and I lost to Green Arrow. Apparently his boxing glove arrow was too much for my Kryptonian strength amplified by the Earth's yellow sun. Granted, Midway's cooked up some terrible excuse for Supes to lose too, but the game surrounding it might be fun.

Anyway, good luck to Ed Boon and Midway; I hope you knock it out of the park so you can always hold it over Blizzard and taunt them about Justice League Task Force when you run into them at industry events.

I just have to give a quick shout out to Wedbush Morgan Securities senior analyst Michael Pachter. You may know him from his somewhat controversial suggestions that Take-Two could sell the limited edition of Grand Theft Auto a week earlier than the regular edition to juice more money from people, or that EA could buy Take-Two now and delay the game six months to release it during the busier holiday window.

He moderated a panel discussion at the MI6 marketing in games conference this week, and cracked a mom joke at the expense of EA Casual president Kathy Vrabeck. Having all the restraint and intellectual maturity of a third grader, I of course recounted that joke in my write-up of the panel.

I've worked at GameSpot since 2005. In that time I've been responsible for crude and unnecessary puns in headlines, opting for braindead gags over informative text, and borderline libel. But this is the first time I've had the opportunity to put a mom joke in a news story. So thank you, Michael Pachter. You've made my life a happier, more fulfilled place.

So it's been a busy week, highlighted I suppose by April Fools Day. Looking over the reactions to GameSpot's gags and other sites' pranks this year, I was struck by a few things. First of all, my sense of humor doesn't fall in line with the general gaming community all that often. I thought our stuff was a mixed bag this year, but some of the headlines and jokes I thought would be huge hits fell flat, and people really got a kick out of some of the gags that just made me shrug (or actually gag). It was much the same for the jokes of other sites.

Pulling back a bit further than whether or not any one joke was funny, I noticed a stark difference in what people expect from their April Fools pranks. Some people want to be fooled. They want their gaming news sources to actively try and deceive them, to paint lies as fact. I suppose they enjoy the ever-so-brief process of being made to believe something briefly, only to realize that someone's just skillfully yanking their chains.

I don't so much like that approach. I was happy GameSpot went with the Onion-style satirical headlines approach. I don't mind having a little fun with the news, and there's about 364 days a year when I would love to just openly mock things for my own amusement. But I didn't want people to seriously think our fake headlines were real, even for a second. I don't ever want to use the trust readers place in this site, the news team, and me personally, as an aid to help me better lie to them. For the most part, I don't see the fun or the entertainment in a lie. It doesn't take too much creativity or insight to come up with a believable but fake news story.

On the other hand, I saw plenty of feedback from people who were disappointed that GameSpot's April Fools was intended to entertain more than to deceive or panic people. That really surprised me (though it was by no means my only miscalculation when it came to readers' April Fools Day reactions). I always found that such stories (like the original EGM Sheng Long joke) had a really malicious, cruel element to them because they were never really designed to simply fool people; they instead inconvenienced them, or played on sometimes deeply held hopes only to stage a crushing letdown.

I also wanted to touch upon another story this week, the bit about gaming addicts sharing personality traits with people who have Asperger's syndrome. Just judging from the people I've known, anyone who is so whole-heartedly into their hobby as a hardcore gamer probably isn't "normal." I'm not saying that's necessarily bad, I'm just saying the obsessive nature of slavish devotion to anything, especially a hobby, doesn't seem to strike well-adjusted people. Whether those of us who are a bit askew in the head are naturally driven to find a comfort area and plumb its depths or the act of really getting into a solitary hobby actually decays social skills and the like naturally, the two things seem to go hand in hand. I suspect if the researchers were to survey anybody who claimed to be a true devotee of any particular hobby, they would find many of the same recurring personality traits.

Over the weekend, I read a fantastic blog post from a friend of mine working on the development side of things. He was talking about the frequently stated developer goal of creating a game that will make people cry, as if that were an end unto itself. But he pointed out that getting an audience to cry, getting them to drop their guard--their reservations, the cynicism that is as much a part of the gaming culture as a save-game function--is ultimately inconsequential unless you have something beautiful and meaningful to give them back in return for that trust.

It got me thinking about media like books, movies, and music, things that we already know can tug on our heartstrings. I assume most of us have a shortlist of works in each of these media that can basically make us cry on cue, and everyone fundamentally understands the power they have to do that. Whether these things resonate with what we're going through in our own lives, or simply make us imagine ourselves in unfamiliar but all-too-real situations, we grasp their emotional power on a very basic level.

But games are different. The audience has control (or should have control, if we're actually going to use this medium to its fullest), and the creators of the entertainment must adapt to that when looking for emotional responses. It's not enough to cut up the various levels of a game with mini-movie cutscenes fleshing out two-dimensional characters in an exactingly rendered 3D world. That counts as storytelling in games the same way cramming the text of Moby Dick in between pages of Spider-Man proves that comics can be high literature.

As I see it, the challenge for developers then is to give players an understanding of their characters they play deep enough that they can become a proxy for the protagonist, a replacement for a scripted role. That suggests putting players in their characters' shoes in much more involved ways.

I know I just wrote about it last time, but Dead Rising is a good example of this. Frank West is a selfish, opportunistic, career-driven, glory-mongering sociopath, and everything the player does in the game, from documenting the unending miseries of the mall's survivors with his camera to casually slaughtering dozens of disturbed-but-uninfected humans, plays into that. But Frank West is still a fairly simple guy, as much caricature as character.

Books, music, and movies--at least the ones that make us cry--have more relatable characters, with a more complex concoction of elements that make them who they are, than games have. Consider your favorite literary or cinematic staple and imagine how a game could give players a deeper understanding of such a character.

Take a typical Breakfast Club-style social outcast story to start with. Create a social networking game based around the cutthroat world of high school, and challenge players to play the role of a nerd, jock, preppie, burnout, weirdo, or new kid as closely as possible. Ask them to step into the shoes of a painfully shy teenager that is at once insecure in his own skin but strong enough to retain his own personality in the face of constant peer pressure to conform. Get them to empathize by making socially appropriate actions in any situation difficult to discern thanks to mercurial standards, classmates' negative predispositions, and the ever-swirling miasma of adolescent drama. Discourage interactions with the opposite sex by making the risks associated with them far outweigh seemingly meager rewards.

In short, make players get their character on a deeper level than they get the Master Chief. Slant the playing field in such a way that the character's decisions--wise or not--are at least fundamentally understood by the player, even if they don't agree with them. And make players have enough compassion and affection for the character that they're willing to suspend their own good sense and go along with a little role-playing for the sake of an ultimately edifying, enlightening experience.

Games have the potential to make audiences empathize with their characters like never before. At the same time, that potential is going criminally untapped. The industry is instead swamped with offerings as emotionally stunted as the worst gamer stereotypes, and gamers all too often balk at the idea of a game that tries to offer something on top of--or perhaps even instead of--a good time.

So I hurt myself playing hockey last weekend. I was skating up the ice when I felt my knee pop, and I couldn't bend my leg without it popping each time. I went to the doctor who promptly referred me to an orthopedic specialist, who told me I probably tore my ACL and need surgery to repair the problem. But he won't know for sure until I have an MRI, and I can't even schedule the MRI until it's been approved by my health insurance, and that could take up to five business days. Then it's another appointment with the ortho doc to confirm his diagnosis, then it's time to schedule the surgery. Thank goodness we don't have socialized health care like other countries; I hear you actually have to wait for treatment in those hellish places.

Frustrated sarcasm aside, this is giving me a chance to sit in front of the TV playing games and not feel quite so bad about it. But instead of cutting into the stack of games I haven't touched yet (Williams Pinball Hall of Fame, Uncharted, Geometry Wars Galaxies, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, in that order), I find myself drawn more to games I left behind a while ago, like Dead Rising or the original Geometry Wars. Dead Rising is just phenomenal, easily my pick for 2006 game of the year. It embodies all the fun and satire of George Romero's classic zombie flicks, but it's just so much more biting, for lack of a pun-free alternative.

The most ghoulish characters in the game are all human, starting with photojournalist Frank, who snaps a picture of a woman being devoured by the undead and analytically sizes it up with a point total before assessing it as "great." Of course, Frank's not the only monster in the game. There's the psychotic clown who has clearly conflated violence with humor as he laughs his life away after falling on his own chainsaw blades, the insane grocer who values his job and his goods more than his fellow man, the tubby survivor who would rather embark on a suicide mission than miss a meal, and the list goes on.

Aside: I knew a guy who was a photojournalist around Oklahoma City when the Murrah building bombing happened. He rushed to the scene and took some amazing pics of the aftermath, but he later told me it was the reason he quit his career as a photographer. He just felt like scum snapping pics of people with head wounds in need of medical treatment instead of actually helping them. And Dead Rising captured that feeling for me all the way around.

In Dead Rising, Frank's motivation is for a Pulitzer, the whole fame and fortune bit. And that's not just useless backstory; the game plays right into that, from the opening helicopter ride where players can do nothing but snap pics of carnage throughout the city to the first bit of proper gameplay where you're left scrambling to save your hide while the deaths of a dozen innocent people with first and last names are prominently announced. As another aside, I always wanted Grand Theft Auto 3 crime sprees to end with a virtual list of the obits in the paper the next day, with full names and randomly generated backstories for each and every life you snuffed out. Granted, that's pretty dark, but I think it would be interesting to see developers humanize their game's fodder like that. I actually have an unused copy of Trapt for the PlayStation 2, partly because I liked the Deception series that spawned it, and partly because the game gives players a full bio for every foolish hero who steps into their haunted castles. Gotta love the personal touch.

Ok, back on topic now. Even more so than BioShock, I think Dead Rising pushed the practice of storytelling in games forward. BioShock had a great story, but it was a skilled adaptation of existing narrative techniques more so than a work that really took advantage of what games can do. It also had a plot that cleverly explained away many of the "game"-y elements, like why the main character essentially has his hand held through the entire adventure, with someone always there to explain the next objective. It worked in BioShock, but that plot device only really works the one time.

On the other hand, in Dead Rising, the story is tied down right to the moment-to-moment gameplay, like the way the game subtly conditions players to take a picture of survivors first, and save them second. It's a selfishly driven action entirely in keeping with the character of Frank, but it's also one that's entirely optional for players. Dead Rising seems to trust the player to interact with the story in a much more significant way than BioShock. For instance, in Capcom's game you can follow the main narrative or discard it entirely to wander around the mall until the zombie apocalypse. You can pick and choose which enemies to take out, which people to save (and which to take out before they become just another zombie). In BioShock, you choose which combination of weapons to kill enemies with, and whether or not to defer your Adam accumulation to a later date for a greater reward (because that's all the difference the harvesting of Little Sisters really makes in the end). It's like a 401k for psychic powers.

I've got more praise to heap upon Dead Rising, but for the moment, I need to pop some ibuprofen and get another ice pack for the knee. Anyone else want to sing its wonders in the comments?