The game can adequately be described as Total Recall meets Grand Theft Auto meets Rampage. You drive around an alien sandbox picking up missions as you see fit, doing your best to help the struggling miners of Mars out from under the oppressive thumb of the Generic Military-Industrial Corporation. Fortunately, it turns out that all of the means by which you remove a hostile military group from your planet involve the wanton destruction of damn near every building in sight, and that is a service that I completely willing to provide. For the good of the people, mind you.

Many of the structures in the game are marked red on your map indicating that they are owned by the GMIC, and which you may destroy any time it suits you. Roadside billboards? That’s enemy propaganda, and it’s got to go. Windmills or storage crates? Providing fuel and supplies to the enemy! Then there’s a nearly limitless number of nondescript, unmarked buildings… just assume they’re barracks, or something. You get the idea. The game does discourage you from killing any colonists, but the penalty is incredibly slight. I’m very busy making a Free Mars omelet, and a couple of innocent eggs are going to get broken along the way. Everyone seems to understand.

The strange juxtaposition of my crazed orgies of destruction compared to the enthusiastic support I get from even passers by does make me sometimes wonder what sort of role I’d actually be filling in a world with more realistic, nuanced social structure. What sort of figure do I represent to the common man trying to make a decent living in this place? The character as I play him is tirelessly canvassing the land without pattern, driving cars through buildings, detonating fuel tanks and murdering soldiers by the dozen. There is sometimes friendly fire incidents, but I do not demonstrate remorse. I return to base only long enough to lose anyone following me, to resupply my weapons, and to grab a new vehicle that I will surely destroy. I level apartment buildings with a comically powerful hammer. If the Joker happened to bemiraculously helping people during his crime sprees, this is probably what it would look like.

Ultimately I am provided with the simple, aggressive pleasure you probably experienced as a child crashing your Tonka truck into a Lego house over and over but without the tedium of rebuilding that house at the end. A level designer somewhere giveth, and my job is only to taketh away. I can do no wrong and I am relieved to not be unduly burdened by these troublesome moral quandaries.

The idea of MMOGs as drugs is a common joke: Surely you’ve heard names bandied about like “Evercrack” or “World of Warcrack,” etc. You see, the idea is that these games are addictive… LIKE CRACK! Get it? (I suppose it also helps that these names roll off the tongue a bit easier than “World of Warmethamphetamine,” but I digress.) The mental image these terms are meant to invoke is one of the lonely nerd huddled over their computer like a burnt heroin spoon. They are playing these games twelve hours a day, unable to peel themselves away. Their addiction is having a negative impact on their ability to hold a job or maintain relationships. They are junkies.

I think that the joke is about the time suck and the compulsion aspects, generally speaking. I don’t have any desire to comment on the validity of this comparison, since I believe reasonable people can deduce the truth for themselves and unreasonable people are idiots I’m uninterested in hearing from. However, I think there’s another, possibly more overlooked aspect to the drug analogy that concerns me more as a gamer.

I’m not addicted to WoW. I am an infrequent user, as evidenced by the fact that I have one character who is only level 75. I have never been on a raid with more than 10 people. I don’t know what the good armor sets are, or how to get them, and I don’t think I’ve even spent all my talent points. I am really only marginally invested in this game. That said, when I use it, I use it like a drug.

WoW does not stimulate me in the way that most other games and even some television does. I find grinding my way through Azeroth to be a sort of repetetive, thoughtless, almost Zen-like exercise. I go there to make thoughts die, my brain activity only dimly flickering like a flashlight right before the batteries go out. When I eventually awake from this induced stupor I find that I am in the future(!), and I have successfully arrived survived the passage of time with only the slightest feeling that something intangible has been lost.

It’s a comparatively better choice than downing a fifth of whiskey, smoking a joint, injecting mescalin directly into my forebrain or whatever it is the kids do these days. However, it still raises the question of why I’d engage in this activity over one that I might actually enjoy. I’m not talking about something so radical as going outside, talking to other humans, or even — God forbid — exercising. I can’t figure out why I would ever choose to do this over another video game I actually enjoy. I don’t know, but I suspect the answer reveals something dark and sad about me.

My name is Safety Monkey, and I’ve been free and clear for two days.

As far as cinematics that reveal no trace of actual gameplay go, it’s not bad. Heck, it may even turn out to be a fun game. But make no mistake: taking Dante Alighieri’s poem about sin and penitence and turning it into what appears to be a testosterone-thick slasher romp is an act of unbelievable vulgarity. Whose idea was this, and how do they plan to follow it up? Mona Lisa: Death Smile?

Anyway, first up on the docket has been the new Prince of Persia. The game is undoubtedly beautiful, as anyone who has merely glimpsed one of the trailers can tell you, and there’s little use in belaboring the point. It has fantastic artistic appeal, period. What’s more interesting is the game’s mechanism for death, which is to say that there isn’t one at all.

No, really. You can’t die. Any mistake that would otherwise be fatal (in PoP this basically means falling off a ledge) is met with a brief cinematic where your princess companion reaches down to grab your hand and magically whisks you back to the last solid ground you were standing on. If you get beaten down in a fight, you are saved and the enemy regains some life. The argument floating around the Intertubes is that this is bad, because the lack of any death penalty makes the game too easy.

I suppose it begs the question what the real, ludological function of death or failure is in a game. It’s all to easy for me to imagine the other end of the spectrum, wherein you have no recourse for failing a series of tricky jumping sequences other than to start over again from infrequently spaced save points or — even worse — running out of lives and having to start the game over again. Remember Battletoads? I never made it past the third level, and every three attempts or so I’d have to restart the entire damned game. I don’t think that’s a better model.

Without spiraling into a lengthy (and probably mostly inaccurate) dissertation on my take on game theory, I think that in most cases player death is intended to offer some penalty to the player for failing to meet the minimum skill bar, and conversely to increase the internal reward felt when successfully meeting or exceeding that same bar. If you want to look at it that way, then the penalty does indeed exist but it’s just very small. You don’t have to restart the whole level, just the last sequences of jumps you were doing. I think this was done intentionally, as it keeps the action flowing and the focus on the story and on navigating through the really skillfully constructed worlds. I also think it’s for the best: the game’s best moments are when you’re cruising rapidly through an area and it evokes that old sense of exhilaration that Sonic the Hedgehog games used to gave back when they were still any good.

At any rate I like the game, except for the way it encourages me to volunteer to listen to lots and lots of dialog on the off chance that I might get an achievement for listening to all of it. It makes me feel like they’re exploiting my being an achievement whore, casually tossing the gamerpoints on the floor and telling me to clean myself up before sauntering out of the room with a self-satisfied grin.

I should have Prince wrapped up tonight, and I have been hounded on all (or at least many) sides to give Call of Duty: World at War a shot next. Much like CoD4 this title appears to be showing a resurgence in popularity several months in release, and I’ve been warned that it may fully consume all of my free time. Gee, thanks for looking out for me, guys.

I had put it on my Christmas wish list almost as a goof. I’d figured my family was likely to steer towards something that looked less violent and un-Christian, possibly something involving kittens or Care Bears. But they got it for me alright and — amusingly — went on to give my cousin Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, possibly as a pointed jab to remind me that I will never be able to figure them out. Message received, guys.

Anyway, I was determined to love this game. For the six months or so I’ve owned a PS3 I’ve been treating it like a roommate after a fight, skulking around and avoiding the living room. Previous so-called system blockbusters failed to grip me in any meaningful way, much to my personal shame. Resistance, however, pulled down a 87 on Metacritic, something I used to take as a positive omen. Now I have come to question my faith in this system, shaking me to my very core.

As an avid Halo 3 fan, I’ve got no beef with console shooters. I won’t even penalize a game like that for its ridiculous lack of any coherent storyline. I do, however, require the sensation that skill has taken some precedence over trial, error, and dumb luck. Since your alien opponents are all apparently master sharpshooters at any distance, you are repeatedly encouraged to find cover. Not by any technique so fancy and newfangled as you might find in Gears of War or Ghost Recon, but by simply ducking down. The problem with this is that the basic grunt enemies are a biathlete breed, capable of sprinting up behind you and killing you in a single blow while you stare dumbly at the wall in front of you. Among the frequently repeated experiences of my life, this one ranks pretty low.

It gets better, of course. In many areas of the game there are enemies who not only wield the Finger of Instant Death, but they are invisible and will appear out of nowhere five yards away from you, charging like a bull at red cloth. This means that the trick to beating these fuckers is frequently simply to be killed by them, and then memorize where they’re at for your next pass through. Do you remember the movie Groundhog’s Day, where Bill Murray was trapped repeating the same day over and over again until he became a good enough person that he was finally let free? It’s like that, except instead of a cute movie premise it’s actually an aggravating, shitty game mechanic.

At this point, I’m simply holding out hope for Killzone 2. Three games into the platform and I’m already like a battered spouse. I pray that one of you has the common decency to stage an intervention.

Also: Oh, hi. Welcome back. Bear with me as I try to remember how to do this.