There’s a pervading school of thought in gaming that says good combat is an anathema to good horror. In other words, having a character that’s capable with a weapon automatically makes a game less scary. After all, horror is about being vulnerable, and we can’t feel vulnerable if we can slice our enemies into pieces. But I think games often mistake vulnerability for weakness, that a character must be physically weak for us to feel in danger. Weakness does result in vulnerability, but feeling vulnerable doesn’t have to stem from physical weakness. There’s a way to make combat fun while still making it tense and terrifying. Silent Hill: Downpour finds a solution that seems so obvious in retrospect I’m shocked no one has done it before: breakable weapons.

The ethical and moral decisions in the Mass Effect series fundamentally shape the play experience—from beginning to end. Will sparing a race of sentient androids sow distrust among their creators? Will releasing the last member of a potentially hostile species create tomorrow’s ongoing war? Is there justice in destroying information gained by torturing innocents? Answering such questions is seldom made easy. In fact, many of the series’s moral conundrums reflect some of the difficult decisions that we, as a species, confront in our own family circles and on the political stage. There are rarely easy answers and Mass Effect‘s depiction of repercussions create a unique and compelling example of moral systems done right. In many ways, playing Mass Effect is a powerful learning experience.

Even so, the series does not deviate far from the traditional binary decision-making paradigm. However, one recent educational game seeks to experiment more directly with the question of moral and ethical decision making in games and in real life. Quandary, by the Learning Games Network, is a piece of interactive fiction of sorts that targets eight- to fourteen-year-old children, encouraging them to play alone, with family, or in a school environment. Instructors are encouraged to let kids play the game’s scenarios and work through the decision making process as a team. Of course, abstracting any complex issue is no easy task, so naturally the game’s choices lead to several interesting arguments regarding decision making. Quandary also offers some potentially useful strategies for traditional game designers seeking to model decision making in games.

I wandered into Dereth at some point in the late 1990s via a beta test of the massively multiplayer online role playing game, Asheron’s Call.  I don’t think that I knew what an MMORPG was at the time, nor had I heard the term “persistent world” to that point, a fair enough description of Asheron’s Call‘s Dereth, the aforementioned official title of that game’s world.

Indeed, I didn’t know anything about the game at all.  I knew that I liked Diablo and that this game was maybe sort of like that one.  Clearly, one spent time gaining levels, gathering loot, and whatnot.  To what end?  To develop a character, to explore a world, to help shape a world, perhaps.

Monaco is a multiplayer stealth action game oozing with retro style with a touch of neon noir flair.

This week Nick Dinicola and I discuss both the single player and multiplayer experience of a game that features a nod to the meticulous planning of the heist and all the frenetic pleasure produced by getting the chance to play out that moment when all that planning goes terribly wrong. Ironically, it is this lat bit that makes the game great. Monaco reveals the pleasure of making mistakes.

Monaco is a great cooperative game and a great single-player game. That combination is sadly rare, but Monaco balances both playstyles with ease. It’s all thanks to the exceptional level design and how the game presents the player with obstacles.