Greg Kasavin Executive Editor, PC Games	Recent Favorites: Wizardry 8, Dark Age of Camelot, Breath of Fire (GBA) Most Wanted: Warcraft III (beta) New Year's Beverage of Choice: Blue Margarita

Martian Dreams, Part 1 of 2

When you stop to think about it, games are really strange. Imagine if a Martian landed on this planet, greeted you, and asked you in perfect spoken English, "What exactly are these games you play, and why do you and other people bother to play them?" The Martian, while learning to speak English and all other languages fluently, had been observing us for a long time and noticed that some of us would sit motionless and expressionless in front of a screen (large or small) for hours on end, day after day. Despite this Martian's intellect and open-minded curiosity, it still simply couldn't comprehend what the appeal was and decided to investigate directly. So you're tasked with explaining to this Martian exactly what's so great about games, and the Martian is eager to listen to whatever you have to say.

Any Martian that lands in my backyard is going to end up like this one, mind you.

Maybe you're wondering what this Martian looks like. That's up to you--let's say it looks like whatever you think it should look like, or if you can't think of anything, then let's say it looks like a Sectoid from X-COM: UFO Defense. In my own case, it looks like my mother, my father, or my older brother--especially my older brother. Although all my relatives are each in turn a lot more belligerent than our patient Martian, what they share with the Martian is little understanding for what compels me to sit around and play games as much as I do.

I write a lot of reviews for GameSpot, all of which are designed ultimately to persuade the reader one way or another. I'm fully aware of the limitations of my abilities to do this because, despite having played games for almost my entire life, I've never managed to convince my family as to what's so great about them.

So if you follow my logic, the world is still predominantly filled with Martians like my family. Perhaps all of your close friends play games just like you do, but most of your other acquaintances--your relatives, your in-laws, your coworkers, your classmates, whoever--probably don't. They don't for good reason--like this Martian, they don't see what games have to offer. They only superficially can tell that games are expensive, time-consuming, and addictive--qualities that, let's face it, aren't really all that recommendable. Smoking cigarettes at least makes you look cool, right?

			Do you think it's easy to explain why you like games so much? Yes. No. I'm not sure.

Only a gamer knows what it feels like to be out of mana.

Until games are more superficially, outwardly appealing, they won't appeal to as many people as they could. Certain things that are inherent to games--the fact that they're played on screens, being able to use various kinds of controllers from keyboards to joysticks--are fundamentally alienating to people who aren't familiar with these things. I'm not asking for holographic games with neural interfaces--at least not yet. But I do think certain elements in games make them very obtuse and hard to get into. That is to say, most games are designed for people who have already played similar games before. This leaves curious but inexperienced individuals like our Martian friend confused and feeling left out.

Death comes swiftly but has little meaning in most games. Weird.

What a strange concept. Maybe there's no way to make a game fun without focusing it around a life-and-death conflict. There may be a few exceptions, but most games do contain characters that can live or die depending on how you play. Next week I'll come up with an answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this article, but not before we explore several other gaming conventions that exist only because they're traditional.