I’ve said, quite a few times actually, that it’s not the characters themselves that make for compelling stories, but character relationships. This month’s Round Table asks you to explore a relationship within a game that you found compelling or memorable.

Characters. We love ‘em, or we hate ‘em. Final Fantasy 8 was forever ruined for me, thanks to Squall’s petty and pointless teenage bad mood. Some people feel the same about Cloud. Some people love Princess Peach, adore her in fact. Others despise her.

What defines a character is the way they relate to those around them. For me, a huge part of the attraction in playing through a game is to witness the redemption and change of a character. Heroes tend not to be redeemed. Even if they give up, become dispirited, we all know that they will return to save the day. But a character like Linebeck, he begins the game by taking people for what he can get. He finishes by taking up a sword and trying to face down Bellum. Okay, he fails to do much damage. But he tries.

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Is plot important to a video game? Tetris managed without it, Sim City is hardly the stuff of novels, and Sonic revolved around a blue hedgehog and an egg-man. Plot was often consigned to the manuals for earlier games, whilst fighting games, racing games and shooters needed only the thinnest of excuses to send you into the fray.

The first games that featured imaginative story were the text-based adventure games. The first adventure game I ever played was an Atari game called Lords of Time. Featuring excessive amounts of time travel and the collection of several ’symbolic items’, the puzzles were horrendously difficult, but the story implanted in me a love of puzzle games that has never faded - although the genre itself sadly did.
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Don’t you just love the cell phone in GTA IV? I’ve only played about an hour of the game, but I’m already in love with that feature. It is, of course, just one aspect of many. A small thing. But then it is the attention to detail, the sheer loving polish on a game, that elevates it above the crowd. You can find driving games, shooting games, and gangster games anywhere. You can’t find one with a cell phone that works as well as that though. I haven’t accessed the GTA IV internet yet, but I’ve heard it’s hot stuff - and another incredibly detailed piece of work.

When we think about the great games - the games that we replay long after the graphics are dated and the game play is old hat - it is usually some small thing that we remember. For example, take my favorite game of all time. Final Fantasy 7 had a lot to recommend it, but the thing that stood out to me was the fact that every character had an individual walk. Tifa had a bit of a mince, that belied her martial arts expertise, whilst Cid had a macho stride that made him look rather stupid when he ran. Vincent was acrobatic as hell, whilst Yuffie was a lanky teenager. The walk bled over into everything, their gestures when talking, their victory dance, and it even helped show Cloud’s change of character post-OMG-I’m-not-Zack.

For a sprite, that was some pretty incredible acting.
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Casual gamers. Doesn’t the phrase make shivers run down your spine? Industry experts everywhere are calling out this new audience, these so called casual gamers with their free time and bulging wallets.

Who are they, exactly? They are housewives, they are retired, they are kids playing Tetris on their cell phones. They are the people buying Wii fit and trying to train their brains. They are this huge user base that developers are desperate to attract and cough up cash.

Hardcore gamers don’t like it of course. When your Grandmother (she’s fine, by the way, it would take more than a pick-up truck to take down that grand old matron) is taking over your console it all feels a bit, well, quality family time. We’re not about that. We like to get competitive. We like to swear at the screen and toss the controller at the wall (well, I do).

It’s hard to put your finger on. Obviously its good that games are reaching a wider audience, and developers are making enough money to stay in business…. and yet. And yet.
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It’s true you know. Video Games will bring around the end of civilization as we know it. We’ll either be addicts, virtual-junkies, slavering over our screens and snarling at the rest of the human race - or we’ll be nicking cars and driving over random pedestrians.

Ever since Death Race came to the attention of the press, back in 1976, games have been blamed for everything - from theft to assault, from swearing to murder. Games have responded to criticism by becoming bloodier, more sexual, and allegedly racist, homophobic, and sexist. So here’s a top ten of the craziest, most controversial games in gaming history.

1. Death Race

The first video game to stir-up major protest. The object of the game was to run down ‘gremlins’, that resembled people. Sadly, the ‘gremlins’ looked like people, and the working title of the game had been Pedestrian. The media went into overdrive, discussing the psychological impact of games and eventually the game was banned - though not before protestors supposedly dragged the consoles out to burn in parking lots.

Later on, we got Carmaggedon (The Carpocalypse). Instead of gremlins, they were zombies. Times, they are (not) a-changin’.
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Lara Croft. Sephiroth. Link. Mario. Chun Li. Solid Snake. Sonic. Samus. Alucard.

Chances are, if you’re a gamer, you will know every name on that list, and be ready to shout out some more (how could I forget Dante? Kefka? Ryu Hayabusa?). Games are cool, and one of the reasons they are cool is that they let us step into some bad-ass shoes. We can leave behind the travails of spindly limbs and an inability to blow away hordes of zombies and enter the online world of someone who is, well, cool.

In literature, the famous characters are the flawed ones. The tragic hero, with his achilles heel - I’m sure you’ve read all about him. In creative writing courses we are repeatedly told that perfect characters do not appeal. We don’t like them. They make us feel bad about ourselves.

The video game is not quite literature. It sits uneasily beside it. Games plunder narrative conventions, ideas, philosophies from books, but they are not books. They are games. During the game, the central character is not just Lara Croft, she is also us. Link follows our movements, if we look away from the screen or drop the controller then he dies - and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, we die a little along with him.
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