PAX East obliterated Jared Sorensen’s voice but he still had an event left to run. Players were counting on him. The convention schedule had the game session locked in. Sorensen, his voice already spent on conversations and events in the noisy convention venues, seemed fucked. But Jared Sorensen didn’t quit.

Sorensen was on the hook to run one of his new Parsely games on Sunday afternoon. Parsely games, if you don’t know, evoke classic text adventures through live, face-to-face play. One or more players (sometimes many more than one) issue commands to a person who parses (get it?) the players’ instructions in the fashion of an old text adventure, thereby navigating intriguing, frightening, exciting adventure environments like in days of yore. The players take on the role of explorers and collectors and the parser takes on the role of computer emulator, taking in the player inputs and doling out brief descriptions of the environment and the action.

“You’re in a dank cellar. The water here is ankle-deep. You smell gasoline,” the parser might say, then: “Exits are North, East, West.”

“Go East,” says a player on her turn.

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Wil Wheaton! TableTop!

Writer, actor, geek, gamer, and producer Wil Wheaton has a shiny new web series coming to the shiny new YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry. The show’s called TableTop and its something like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner For Five except instead of dinner or poker there are fun and funny people playing fun and funny tabletop games. The first episode debuts on Friday, April 2nd, on the aforementioned Geek and Sundy YouTube channel.

Word from the WonderCon panel at which the network was announced by executive producer and prolific writer/actress, Felicia Day, is that the show will feature a variety of board games, plus RPGs like Dragon Age and Fiasco. Check out the show trailer and the channel’s sizzle reel for a glimpse at some of the guests coming to the show, too. I am maximum eager to see this show light up my computer monitor and, one hopes, to give eventual DVDs as gifts to would-be players seeking primers on a variety of fun tabletop games.

Check out the TableTop debut trailer and subscribe to the YouTube channel to let them know you’ll be watching.

This isn’t about the unfair treatment of professionals who dare to voice unconventional ideas. We won’t discuss here the specifics of ugly incidents making the rounds online lately. Comments that stray into that turf will be deleted. This post is about what it’s about: considering a compelling and somewhat riling idea. If, by considering it this way, I seem to be endorsing this notion, then good. I am.

The Mass Effect 3 demo convinced me to preorder the game. It was largely the multiplayer component that convinced me not to wait a month or two to buy the thing, when I’d have time to play the thing in a dedicated sprint. The multiplayer demo is a lot of fun with three or four cohorts facing down Cerberus thugs together on alien worlds. The equipment packs, delivering randomized bonuses won with in-game loot, represent a terrific little device, combining the joy of random treasure tables with the alluring mystery and surprise of trading-card booster packs. I like it more than I expected to and don’t want two months to be leveling up my Infiltrators, Soldiers, and Engineers with my friends. Good job, demo.

Meanwhile, the single-player demo did one thing well above all—one thing in particular that convinced me this was the Mass Effect campaign I’ve been looking forward to most of all: it let me diminish the role of the intricate combat dynamics in favor of the unfolding story. With one little menu choice at the beginning of the game, ME3 gave me the option to choose which single-player experience I wanted, selecting between Action, Role-Play, and Story. I chose Story. When the finished game comes to my home, I’ll choose Story again.

It’s not that I don’t like ME3′s shooter action—I’m really excited about the story-light multiplayer element—it’s that I don’t want my ability to take in the tale of this climactic installment to depend on how good my shooter skills are from day to day. Sometimes I play games to study them, sometimes to overcome them, sometimes just to browse them. I’m a game tourist, as we say, in a lot of ways.

If I could skip combat encounters in some games, I would. I’d skip the jet-skis-and-explosive-barrels section of the first Uncharted every time. I’d skip over certain boss battles in various games, just to see what else the developer has in store in the game’s level design. I’ve been slow to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I dread the boss battles I’ve heard about and fret that I’ll get hung up on a spec-testing shooter puzzle when what I really want to do is see how my other decisions play out over the course of the game.

So, when it comes to the idea of video games with skippable combat scenes, I am in favor of the option. Not every game should implement that option and I have a pretty broad definition of “skippable,” personally, but I think it’s fine for games to have this tool in their kit. I’d finish a lot more games if I could accept a measure of defeat and progress rather than quietly, hopefully shelving games and then never getting around to finishing them.

In this post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun—“Escape! Escape! Embracing Skippable Combat”—John Walker makes his case for optional combat in video games.

Here’s mine.

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I’ve wanted to do this but never have. Have you done it?

The idea is simple, the execution complex. For each major chapter in your RPG campaign, you use a different game to resolve the action. You hack and modify the games you want to use like crazy, some more than others. What starts as an investigation lead by various governments in a weary, war-torn metropolis leads to the highest tier of society (Cold City). There, in glorious and lavish penthouse ballrooms untouched by the war below, the glitterati dance and drink and dare each other  (via The Dance and the Dawn) to determine who gets whom. That leads to a Fiasco involving miserable spouses, true love, stolen diamonds, and broken hearts that return us to the lowest levels of the city.

Or what about a military campaign that plays out over a century, beginning with complex machinations and paranoia (via Burning Empires) before progressing to the madness of an all-consuming galaxy-wide war (via 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars) and finally culminating in the least likely soldiers fighting in the bombed-out remains of the last human city (via Grey Ranks).

A great many of these games don’t let many characters out intact, so the traditional notion of following a core cast of PCs on a long literal or figurative journey might not work out. Rather, it might be necessary to tie individual games together with a few standout characters—who are playable only in certain chapters, maybe—or narrative connective tissue like monologues, flashbacks, or just a recurring theme or motif that brings together what would otherwise be a loose anthology.

My gut says this idea would require a lot of cooperation, maybe to the point of demanding certain metagaming choices be made during play, but I think the unique satisfaction from pulling it off would be worth it for the group that finds this compelling. Remember, the game that covers the next chapter wouldn’t have to be preordained. It might be that whoever gets the happiest result of the Fiasco story gets to decide what the next chapter is about, for example, so this wouldn’t have to be a strictly planned experience.

What games might you connect into a campaign if you could?

Chris Hardwick, he who founded The Nerdist empire (or, if not empire, then duchy) and hosts the likes of the Nerdist podcast and The Talking Dead, has a book coming out called, fittingly, The Nerdist Way. Hardwick’s also an occasional contributor to Wired (a magazine I like very much) and this month that magazine sports an excerpt from Hardwick’s book. Right now, right here, this website features an excerpt of that excerpt:

Videogames make you feel like you’re actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your brain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you’re actually accomplishing stuff. But unless you get paid to play videogames, you’re kind of not accomplishing stuff.

I sometimes do get paid to play video games, when I need to learn them to write about them (if they exist in a playable state when I’m brought on the project), and I agree with Hardwick here. Sort of. A little.

The thing is, what are “real-life achievements” exactly? Is it a real-life achievement when you earn your friend some bauble or doodad in a Facebook game that makes them happy? Is it a real-life achievement when your tournament win is grounds for a celebratory fling?

Whenever I think about the boundary on the idea of “real-life achievements” now, I think of that exchange from the Pirate Bay trial:

“When did you meet [fellow defendant Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?” asked the Prosecutor.
“We do not use the expression IRL,” said Peter, “we use AFK.”
“IRL?” questioned the judge.
“In Real Life,” the Prosecutor explained to the judge.
“We do not use that expression,” Peter noted. “Everything is in real life. We use AFK—Away From Keyboard.”
“Well,” said Roswall. “It seems I am a little bit out of date.”

Everything is in real life.

So, what’s the boundary on the notion of “get paid?” Does it have to lead to money? Things that are worth money that you get for free, that’s payment, right? Can I continue this line of questioning without using the word gamification? (Shit.)

Now I’m thinking about Jane McGonigal, of course, who argues that doses of gameplay are good. Games build confidence, alertness, awareness, and more, right? They can empower. They can hone. They can do good.

Of course, Hardwick’s writing not about a bit of healthy game-playing, he’s warning against obsessive tendencies that lead us nerds to overindulge, to submerge, to become devoted to things without leveraging them for enhancing our whole lives instead of our fleeting feelings.

And even that obsession can be turned to good, Hardwick writes:

If you’ve been obsessed with a game, you have already proven to yourself that you have the ability to focus. You know how lion cubs play around and it’s all cute ‘n’ stuff? They’re not playing for the fuck of it. They’re training to eviscerate things professionally later in life. If you’re a gamer, this is what you have been doing.

What real-life achievements have you earned thanks to games?