Let's admit, the first Zeno Clash was fairly bonkers—but, by the looks of things, the sequel raises the bar on the insanity quite a bit. You get to suplex hairy dudes, punch bird people, and talk to some guy with a palette for a mouth. Just like in other first person beat-em-ups! But seriously, go watch the trailer, it's great.

Zeno Clash II is landing on the 360, the PS3, and the PC sometime in 2013.

My Apple iPad 2. Crisp display with a density of 132 ppi. Reacts to multi-touch gestures. Contains accelerometer, gyroscope. Reacts to involuntary shakes in hands. Enough battery life to last majority of a cross country flight. Reacts poorly to excessive, clammy sweating. Does not register uncontrolled clenching of fists/jaw. Eight-megapixel front-facing camera accurately captures wild desperation in eyes, ghostly pallor, but leaves out racing thoughts, mounting dread, cavalcade of head voices.

Plays games. Games help. Flying sucks. But it sucks more without approved electronic devices. 

I am definitely not alone in my fear of flying. This common fear affects up to one-third of Americans, and I think the fact that it's so widespread has led to a kind of dismissive attitude towards it. Either it's treated as a joke, or as something that only pills can fix. Practical ways of dealing with fear of flying get short shrift. In the scheme of things there are much worse problems, but that doesn't make it insignificant. Flying today is unavoidable, and can be a huge source of stress.

It's certainly not a panacea, but recently I've come to find that playing games on my iPad can alleviate my fear of flying more than watching movies, certainly more than reading a book, and somehow even more than my beloved comic books. I know that trying to be prescriptive about phobias is difficult, and what's often most helpful for me is just hearing about someone else's experience. So in that spirit, I'd like to talk about how games help.

Why I'm Afraid

Several years ago on a flight from Idaho into California the plane I was on encountered an unexpected coastal storm. We were preparing to land, and at relatively low altitude. In the small plane the turbulence was very violent. Passengers were pretty distressed, myself included, and only more so when alarms started sounding from the cockpit, including a pleasant female robo-voice repeating "wind shear, wind shear."

Wind shear, I later learned, is abrupt and dramatic shift in wind speed and direction. Imagine a strong wind blowing at your face only to suddenly be pushing you forward. Weirdly enough, it's not good for flying. I totally lost my cool and started furtively texting friends and family that I loved them—yes, my phone was on. Thankfully, after bouncing around and then plummeting towards the ground for a little while, the plane was able to recover enough to divert to another airport. Believe it or not, we encountered the same problem at the second landing site which led to another round of panicked out-loud cabin prayers and a final diversion to LAX.

And that's it. No injuries, no in-cabin fire or water landing. Millions of people have gone through the same thing, but for some reason I couldn't shrug it off. Hell, when we were finally landing at LAX I could see at least a dozen planes flying parallel to us, refugees from other airstrips. We landed, the pilot was kind enough to announce that he had been flying since Vietnam and it was the worst landing he'd ever done, and we got off the plane. I had to fly back across the country four days later. It wasn't easy anymore.

You don't want to see me when I fly. Shaking, sweating, crying: it's not pretty. The fear is slowly improving, but I still get intense anxiety while flying, and up to a week or more before and afterwards. I dream about it. Frequently. When I see planes flying above me, I get scared. Even watching people fly in movies or TV puts me on edge.

This is all, of course, before I get on the plane. Once there not only do I scare myself—half to death, my heart tells me—but also the poor people who have to sit beside me. I've tried a lot of things to help it, chemicals included. But it's that precious, wonderful time when you're sealed for hours in a tube miles above ground/ocean/comfort that help is desperately needed and surprisingly spare. 

Games Put You In Control

I had tried playing my 3DS while flying in the past, but it didn't work for several reasons. 3D was totally out of the question, and concentrating on the small screen made me prohibitively self-conscious about what I was doing. But mostly it was the DS's heavy reliance on stylus: one errant altitude drop and I'd end up stress-jabbing that bad boy right into my thigh. I don't own a Vita so I'll reserve judgement there. It wasn't until I inherited a friend's old iPad that I found a way to game in midair.

The first therapeutic experience I had with a game while flying was Capcom's Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I turned to the game on a cross-country jaunt instead of A) watching Ted, B) dragging my fingernails across my pant legs repeatedly, C) hyperventilating in the bathroom, or D) chugging tiny bottles of hooch.

In Ghost Trick you control Sissel, a mysterious man with wonderful hair, who's recently been relieved of his life and is trying to solve his own murder using things called "Ghost Tricks." Sissel's spirit can go back in time and possess objects, manipulating them to change his future. Playing, I felt the surety of my own demise slide a little further away. "What are these beautiful magicks?!" I thought to myself. 

In a game good for flying, death is reversible, avoidable, and altogether Not That Bad. Of course, most games feature a "back from the dead" mechanic, but it helps if your character doesn't just reappear a lá Mario. After all, who's that new Mario? Is he the same? Did he retain the sentience of the previous one? If Mario was on a plane and it crashed, would he just pop out of a warp pipe back at the departure gate? Existentially, it's a nightmare. Ghost Trick, on the other hand, has death and life a mere button click away, your character's consciousness sliding seamlessly between the two. Even better, the world of the dead is packed with colorful characters like a talking lamp and a cuddly dog named Missile who—hey we're already past Des Moines? All right!

Best of all, playing it allowed me to feel like I was in charge. A major contributor to my fear of flying is feeling that I have no control, especially concerning death. Not that I have it otherwise, but no one said this was rational. After an hour of Ghost Trick, every time the plane made a noise and sent me into a frenzy, I would imagine how, like Sissel, I could "trick" my way over to the offending part and repair it in a jiffy. This fantasy was made all the easier because over the past two years I've taken an unhealthy amount of time familiarizing myself with aircraft construction, aerodynamics, and the most frequent contributors to... incidents. So I knew (or at least could fudge) exactly what bolt, flap, or gauge needed tricking. Ridiculous, yes, but an amount of levity that can be hard to come by in time of panic. Speaking of levity...

Games Make The Afterlife Seem Fun

Replace your flying fears with fashion in Square Enix's The World Ends With You! The JRPG was originally released in 2008 on the DS, but I prefer the newer touch version. The touch version's deep-but-swift combat is just hard enough to be distracting, but intuitive and malleable enough to not be frustrating. As in Ghost Trick, the protagonist Neku is trapped in an afterlife. This one is a funky high-fashion Shibuya. He's participating in the "Reaper's Game," a sort of seven-day alternate reality game, to win his life back.

On a flight I noticed not only did it have the aforementioned agency angle, but it also made my initial fear look like a dynamic world of fun and friends. The world of the game is so cool that one of the main characters even volunteers himself for it. I am not religious, at all. I do not believe in an afterlife. But I don't dismiss the adage that everyone finds god in a foxhole. Any lie, any fantasy you can sell to yourself is a boon.

So for the duration of a flight, my harried brain had no trouble adopting the belief that engine failure would leave me somewhere exciting (as a diehard LOST fan, I've indulged similar fantasies in the past). Fully functional, tres exciting, and full of Important Lessons, the afterlife of TWEWY is the place to be. It's chock full of secret ramens, haute couture, math puns (so many math puns...), and crazy as hell music. Music so crazy and incessant you might just get hypnotized. Distracted, even.

Games Engage Multiple Senses

One thing about fear is you have to pay attention to it. Rarely is it a feeling simmering in the background, instead preferring to vice grip your brain. Trains of thought are quickly interrupted by the base, brute, repetitive "you are not safe. You will not leave this plane. You will perish in this outfit. No one here knows who you are. Why in the world did you board this thing. You poor, dead idiot." Rolls off the tongue.

Playing games on my iPad, especially with the headphones turned up, works to pry a few of those five fingers from around my grey matter, sense by sense. The best example I can think of here is Osmos, the powerfully soothing PC game which made its way onto touch platforms some years ago. In Osmos, you control a sphere through tranquil environments, consuming smaller spheres and dodging currents, obstacles, and more. It's like a bare bones Katamari on ludes. I appreciated Osmos before, but I never really loved it until I played it whilst flying.

The almost synesthetic mix of sound, visuals, and touch was able to elbow out some of my fear for sheer lack of real estate. Cloud front: I didn't see you. Whistling noise: I didn't hear you. Turbulence: what turbulence? It was a proactive approach, attacking the problem on multiple fronts. Quite literally, I couldn't yank out my own hair if I was too busy beautifully absorbing smaller motes and drifting away to flowing ambient music. Osmos: you won't have a heart attack!

Games Make You Feel Competent

An aspect of my fear of flying that I never would have predicted is the embarrassment involved. When I'm flying alone, I often spend several hours before a flight walking around the airport, dragging my bag behind me because I'm too nervous to sit. True or not, I think by the end some of the restaurant hosts begin to recognize me. Onboard is no better. When I look around the plane, everyone looks so placid that quite frankly I feel like a loser. All I have to do is sit down: how can I be so bad at it? All of these games and more can hand you back some of your dignity through small victories. The fear doesn't totally neuter you, you can still put up a high score damnit!

A little digital pat on the back can be just the thing when the girl next to you is whispering to her boyfriend in the aisle seat that you're acting weird. When that guy might be judging your jelly legs as you walk down the aisle. When your seat mate is aggravated at you for taking up the window space because staring straight through it helps just that much. I don't mean to be strange or annoying. Regaining my self-esteem makes me feel less small, and more in charge of my own emotions. You get to win. It feels nice.

Just Avoid The Frustrating Ones

You'll notice I've left out mobile gaming's bread and butter, bite sized puzzlers. I've played as much Where's My Water? as the next guy who plays a lot of Where's My Water? (and may own a Swampy plush hey who said that). At home or on the subway, I'll gladly spend a long time trying to direct that stream of water into a subterranean crocodile's bathtub, collecting all the rubber ducks along the way. But when that "fasten seatbelt" sign flashes on, the victory of 3 stars seems mighty pyrrhic.

What at sea level would be frustration expands at high altitude into self-loathing and acknowledgement of the pointlessness of the earth. Because of course that bird would stop rolling one pixel away from the final pig. What else would happen? Now let's look out the window until a pitot tube malfunctions and inexorably alters the aircraft's angle of attack, leading to aerodynamic stall. Zero stars. Best to stick to story-driven games, or at least a puzzler that puts tranquility above difficulty. Otherwise you just might end up freaking out. Even more.

I don't want to be afraid on planes, and I certainly don't like it. But I also can't pretend it's something that's just going to go away on its own. I spent enough time doing that. Discovering a way to at least partially fight a phobia can feel like a light at the end of the tunnel, however dim.

You take millions of footsteps in video games and the sound accompanying those movements is probably something that becomes white noise after a while. There's a good chance that won't happen in The Witness, though.

In a post on The Witness blog, creator Jonathan Blow reveals the kind of small detail that shows an intense focus on creating a sense of place:

Q: How many footstep sound effects are in The Witness?

A: 1,119 so far. They sound really good! We will probably be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the game with the most footstep sounds…

Blow elaborates on just how that specific number comes about in the comments:

We have different sounds for left and right foot, always. For any given material there are 5-6 variations for each foot, to avoid mechanical-sounding repeats; let's just say 5 is average.

So for walking on one material, you have 10 footstep sounds minimum. Thus 1119 sound effects would be about 112 materials to walk on.

But actually, it's fewer materials than that, and more footsteps. We have reverb footsteps for specific locations, where we blend reverb in and out, or crossfade between two reverbs, depending on where you are in a room or hallway. We also have "texture footsteps" that are meant to be layered onto a base sound… so if you are walking on grass, but a little bit of dirt is poking through the grass, the game will play the grass footstep, but with a little bit of dirt texture overlayed on top of it. (The loudness of the dirt texture sound will be scaled by how much dirt is poking through the grass).

The reason behind all this is: The Witness is a game about you wandering through a deserted island. You are the only active character in the game, so the sound of your own motion is hugely important for establishing setting and mood.

The guys at Wabi Sabi sound are doing all this work. It is coming out very well!

When will you get to hear the other shoe drop in The Witness? Not for a while, as Blow says that there's much more work to be done. As for the Guinness Book of World Records, there have been far more dubious achievements between those covers.

Two of the most talented and fiercely independent video game creators I've ever met are joining us today, right below these words I'm writing, to answer your best questions.

We've got Jonathan Blow, the man who brought us Braid and is leading development on the lovely island-exploration puzzle game The Witness. And we've got Chris Hecker, no longer working for The Man, and now toiling on the ever-fascinating, spy-vs.-sniper multiplayer game Spy Party.

That's right. Two game creators here for you to interview...for the price of one.

From 2-3pm ET, Hecker and Blow will answer your questions, live, in the comments section below.

This is our first interview using this new format, so a few pointers: 1) All readers can submit questions by typing them below. 2) Our interviewees will answer the best questions live; refresh the little circle-arrow to see the latests. 3) By default, you'll see all the answered questions, but you can toggle and look at every question that's been asked, if you want to avoid duplicating anything.

Ready? Ask away! Interview ended. Wow, that almost went too well! Thank you to Chris and Jonathan for doing this and to all of you for asking great questions. We actually got more questions and answers than we anticipated, so they're rolling right off the page! You can see most of the answered questions below, but if you want to see every single one of them, you will have to click on Show All Questions.We'll have ironed in the future so you can see every answer in one nice long scroll. If you liked this, then I have some good news: we're going to be doing more of these.

(Thanks to Jonathan and Chris for participating. Learn more about their games at the official sites for The Witness and Spy Party.)

The game is good. Really good, really fun. But my favorite thing about it, hands down, is Kyle Gabler's flabbergasting soundtrack. It combines the superheroic, soaring choral melodies of Tim Burton with all kinds of various ethnic and cinematic influences to create a musical pastiche that is at once epic, driving, hilarious and surprisingly emotional.

What possessed Gabler and 2D Boy to imbue their silly puzzle game with such a grand soundtrack? We may never know. We can just be glad they did. Best of all, you can download the entire thing for free at Gabler's website.

He talks about the process he used to make the soundtrack:

The majority of the instruments you'll hear are computer instruments, with a few live performances on top to add a bit of warmth. For the older music, I used one of those Sound Blaster cards that let you load samples into memory. More recently, I've been using the freeware sfz soundfont sampler. I have an m-audio keystation 49e midi keyboard for picking out melodies. Influences include Danny Elfman, Vangelis, Bernard Herrmann, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone, and all the big movie guys. I grew up listening to them, and they remain a big influence in everything I write.

Man, anyone who cites Danny Elfman, Vangelis and Ennio Morricone as influences is cool in my book.

Here are some of my favorite tracks from the World of Goo Soundtrack. Though they're all favorites, really.

"World of Goo Theme"

Beetlejuice meets, well, Beetlejuice—you can just picture the gears spinning, the goo flying, the oddly cheery, sinister world welcoming you.

"Brave Adventures"

This track reminds me of nothing so much as the noble "Agent Cruller's theme" from Psychonauts. Epic in its own way, but I love this kind of stuff. Another one with a killer modulation.

"Tumbler"

Man, this is an easy favorite. Spinning, cycling, growing, changing, tumbling.

"Jelly"

This is like, some extreme superhero music, straight to the epic build at the end.

"My Virtual World of Goo Corporation"

This one deserves a spot just for variety—suddenly, out of nowhere, we've got a chippy freakout. Perfect.

"Best of Times"

Such drama! Such emotion! Again, I remind you: This is a game about goofy little balls of goop.

"Red Carpet Extend-O-Matic"

I mean, what is this even? Part club-jam, part aria, part I-don't-even-know-what. I would dance my ass off if this played the next time I was out dancing. (What? I totally go dancing sometimes.)

There are a bunch more, and they're all good. And as a reminder, you can download the whole soundtrack for free at Gabler's website.

Today, Super Meat Boy, Braid and Lone Survivor were added to the fifth installment of the Humble Indie Bundle. Just when you think things couldn't get more awesome. [HumbleBundle.com]

Puzzling platformer Trine 2 is bringing its trio of heroes to Wii U with a Director's Cut of the game.

Indie title Trine 2, like its predecessor Trine was well-received when it debuted on Xbox Live, PSN, and PC. The game has the player switch on the fly among three characters—a knight, a thief, and a mage—each with their own particular set of skills. All three must work together, through the player's hot-swapping, to traverse each level.

The Wii U-exclusive Director's Cut will be worked over to take advantage of the GamePad controller.

Like Zeno Clash? With Zeno Clash II, the first-person melee brawler is getting a sequel that promises a bigger world, populated with crazier enemies and more punches.

The open world game features a new "lock-on" function during fights as well as role-playing elements to gain more strength or defense. Zeno Clash II will also feature drop-in/drop-out online cooperative multiplayer.

Zeno Clash II is headed to Xbox Live Arcade, the PSN, and PSN in early 2013. Read Kotaku's review of the first Zeno Clash.

A few weeks ago, the Atlantic magazine published a profile I wrote of the developer Jonathan Blow, a man known in gaming circles as much for his criticism of the mainstream game industry's intellectual shortcomings as he is for Braid, the outstanding game he created.

To put it mildly, this article pissed a lot of gamers off; in fact, given the tenor of the comments by gaming enthusiasts on Twitter and on fine websites like this one, it seems that many people believe my talents might lie less with game criticism and more with, say, janitorial technology.

Though some commentators took umbrage with what they perceived as Blow's pretentiousness (and you'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you he's actually a great guy), the substantial majority bristled at one particular argument I made about games. "There's no nice way to say this," I wrote, "but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb."

It's safe to say that we needn't seek out the services of America's top psychologists to figure out why this idea chapped a few hides. To use the words of Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott-who has even launched a "Smart Game Catalog" to prove my claim wrong, what I wrote was "a sharp slap in the face" to those who don't see games as juvenile toys. This isn't entirely true (I did allow for exceptions, after all), but I take his point. While I never intended to be disdainful or dismissive toward gamers (of whom I am one, but more about that in a moment), I'd also be lying if I said I didn't want to splash some cold water in the face of any intelligent gaming fan who contentedly pays to be treated like a dimwitted child. So, while I firmly believe everything I wrote about mainstream gaming's smartness drought, I also think the point I was striving to make deserves a bit of clarification.

First, because I wrote this piece for a general, non-gaming audience (upon whom any discussion of the artfulness of Bulletstorm's energy leash decapitations, for example, would have been lost), many gamers got the impression that I spoke from ignorance—that I was another Roger Ebert badmouthing games in a national forum without knowing the first thing about them. The truth, however, is that my opinion comes from playing too many games. I hesitate even to place a ballpark figure on how many games I've played in recent years, for fear of how it might strike my wife or future editors if they read this; let's just say I've done a very thorough survey of the field and have the Achievements and Trophies (O, the Trophies!) to prove it. What I wrote, then, came not from ignorance or contempt, but from frustration with the state of big-budget gaming. I've cared deeply about games for a very long time now, and thus it bothers me (and Blow as well, I should note) that they've failed to evolve much intellectually.

Which brings us to another point: as a chronic gamer, I'm well aware that Jon Blow is not the only human being ever to have produced a smart, artistically interesting game for a large audience. I've gone on record as saying that Portal is a work of unblemished brilliance, for instance (though I did not write the accompanying headline proclaiming Portal 2 "The Best Videogame Ever"), and there are many others that I consider terrifically smart. To name just a few recent examples: Bioshock, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Red Dead Redemption, Fez, Uncharted 2 (the apex of games as Hollywood movies), Limbo, Dark Souls (for sheer visionary weirdness), Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and so on. I don't know that I'd ever grab one of the nation's premier art critics, fire up the Chaos Witch Quelaag boss fight in Dark Souls, and then argue that it represents a masterful achievement on par with the portraiture of Gustav Klimt—but still, there's some fascinating stuff going on there.

The problem, though, is that smart games like these are vanishingly rare, particularly among mainstream developers. This is what I meant when I wrote that "games, with very few exceptions, are dumb." Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of console and PC games that emerge from the dark and mysterious caves of development studios each year, only a handful are what a reasonable observer might call smart or artistic—a disturbingly low batting average by any metric. The rest are...well, as I said, they're typically pretty dumb.

So let's have a word about what I mean when I use this admittedly rather unkind little term. ("Dumb," I realize, is a loaded word that many gamers would have preferred to see replaced with something less caustic- like "unfulfilling" or "emotionally unsophisticated"-but while this is a fair point, the d-word is what we have to work with.) I don't mean that literally everything about them lacks intelligence. It should go without saying that there are countless smart things going on in even the most outwardly silly games, or else they'd have no reason to succeed. To me, the gameplay of the cartoonish gorefest known as Gears of War 3 is as tightly calibrated as a Maserati's suspension system (I've written as much, as well), and only a fool could fail to see the beauty of Flower or the devious brilliance of a "social gaming" cash vortex like Farmville.

My issue, then, is with what we might call the intellectual maturity level of mainstream games. It's not the design mechanics under the hood that I find almost excruciatingly sophomoric at this point; it's the elements of these games that bear on human emotion and intellectual sophistication, from narrative and dialogue right on down to their core thematic concepts.

Take the 2010 shooter Vanquish, for example. Viewed through the context of pure game design, Vanquish is an absolute triumph; it's a joy to play, it looks fantastic, and it provides a nicely paced, challenging gaming experience. Yet when we evaluate it on the intellectual maturity scale, the game is an atrocity. Between its senseless plot, silly premise, cornball paint-by-numbers characters, and preposterous dialogue (a combination Japanese game creators seem to have perfected), the game is so toxic to the player's intelligence that one can almost feel the brain cells dying with each pointless cutscene and agonizing spoken exchange.

Everything other than Vanquish's core gameplay feels as though it was dashed together in an afternoon by a seventh-grade anime fan. In his excellent book Extra Lives (which anyone who cares about games should read immediately), my friend Tom Bissell notes that great art is "comprehensively intelligent," meaning that it's intelligent in every way available to it. A game like Vanquish, on the other hand, shows a fragmentary, schizophrenic intelligence; its gameplay is brilliant, while the rest of it is what Chris Hecker, in my piece, calls "adolescent nonsense."

Of course, this issue might not bother you. You might point out that one shouldn't really expect much brainpower from a bullet hell shooter in which one rocket-slides around battlefields aiming glowing energy balls at flying men in super-suits, which is an argument that would hold more water if the same problem didn't afflict virtually every mainstream game. It doesn't even strike me as controversial to point out that there is way, way, way too much of this thematic juvenility in games. Vanquish, like so many others, is a product that makes us say, "It's incredibly silly, but hey—it's fun."

Yet for gamers to just sweep that important first part under the rug over and over again in favor of brainless, high-octane enjoyment feels like a crime against the medium they love. To accept childish dreck without protest-or worse, to defend the dreck's obvious dreckiness just because the other parts of a game are cool-is to allow the form to languish forever.

Now, I'm not saying that intelligent people should never play intellectually unsophisticated games, or that games aiming at overall smartness can't involve a bit of ridiculousness. For one thing, "silly" games are frequently quite imaginative and rewarding to play, from the whimsical creativity of LittleBigPlanet to the deranged WTF-ness of something like Shadows of the Damned. For another, we have to make allowances for the fact that virtually any fictional work we experience requires some suspension of disbelief. Even great literature often asks us to swallow our objections about plausibility and logic; I just finished reading a much-lauded novel in which the narrator has incredible telepathic powers that derive from his blocked sinuses, for god's sake.

Almost all mainstream games that involve narrative or human emotion or conceptual thought, however, require something more like suspension of brainpower. Again and again, studios churn out the same story of saving the world, the same inhuman flat-as-a-pancake characters, the same lack of moral nuance, the same horrifically violent foundations (who actually enjoys the murder-porn segments of military shooters in which you rack up fifty kills per minute from an invulnerable gunship?), the same insipid dialogue, the same absence of intellectual maturity, the same disregard for the real existential dilemmas human beings face. The end result of this, for anyone who both plays games regularly and actually cares about such things, is that you feel—despite the surface-level fun—like you're wasting hours of your life that you will never get back on mindless adolescent escapism.

This has been my experience, at least. Too often, I play a game that I dearly want to—like Skyrim, say, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution—and end up feeling as though I've poured a colossal amount of time into what amounted, maturity-wise, to a particularly vulgar and bloody children's cartoon. Some gamers might say that I'm overreacting here, and that a game like Skyrim is in fact perfectly smart and grown-up. To which I would respond as follows: please look at the thing for a moment from an objective perspective.

As gamers, we get so used to the unique rhythms and conventions of game construction that we fail to realize how very silly they are until we're forced to step back and look dispassionately at what we're playing. With apologies to female gamers, I think of this as the "girlfriend effect": that moment when, as you're thoughtlessly playing Gears of War, your significant other walks into the room, sees what's on the TV, and says something like "You're really playing a game where you can rip off someone's arm and beat him to death with it?" Suddenly, you see with perfect clarity just how preposterous this seems to any other intelligent adult—the endless gore, the ultraviolence, the dumb catchphrases, the brainlessly simple good-versus-evil setup, the context-inappropriate cleavage, the huge muscles and huger guns, and on and on. What do you say then? That it's not juvenile? You can't, because it is; anyone can see it.

And often, this is every bit as true of more "serious" games as it is of deliberately over-the-top ones like Gears. To take Skyrim as an example once again, some gamers might absorb that game's grandiose aesthetics and epic sweep, and then come away thinking they're dealing with a deeply mature creative work. This would be a mistake.

We're talking about a game, after all, in which bandits essentially armed with sticks rush your level-500 character pledging to destroy you, in which you fight talking dragons for poorly-explained reasons, in which you must negotiate the most ruthlessly-boring and achingly-unrealistic peace treaty in history, and in which the random strangers you pass call out comments like "Being a fletcher is hard work, but when you craft the perfect arrow, it strikes forth like the fist of God." The game may have its merits, but let's not pretend this kind of thing is mature. My impression is that when gamers call something like Skyrim "smart," they don't mean it's objectively smart, as in filled with interesting characters and thought-provoking ideas; they mean it's smart for a game, as in not completely insulting to your intelligence at every moment you're playing it. But as Blow once told me, something is either smart or it's not; the "for a game" part is meaningless.

Am I being too harsh? Am I asking too much? Should I just set down the controller and spend my time sipping port while reading 19^th century French poetry if I'm so intellectually-frustrated with games? Perhaps, but I don't think so. Because what I'm looking for is actually very simple: not to feel like nearly every game treats me like a delinquent teenager with ADHD. I know that there are many out there who believe games are just supposed to be fun, so let's not get pretentious about the whole equation. If that's how you feel, go with god, my friend; I'm not out to spoil your party, and the market is already serving you very well.

But I prefer to believe that as an entire generation of lifelong gamers grows from twitchy adolescents into mature, thoughtful adults, it's reasonable to want games to grow up, too. Whatever you might think of Jon Blow, his work does show us that truly, comprehensively smart games are within our creative reach—games that make us think, treat us like grown-ups, and explore the whole range of real human experience. The only things holding developers back from making more of them are a lack of ambition and a tendency for gamers to accept juvenility as long as it comes wrapped in fun.

This situation frustrates me (and Blow, and I'm sure quite a few of you as well), because it's clear that games are capable of so much more than they're doing now. The video game, as a creative medium, has the potential to provide us with experiences every bit as rich and meaningful as those we've gotten from books, visual art, and film; for all we know, it could even surpass them. At the moment, though, the vast, overwhelming, crushing majority of that potential is being wasted on frivolous digital toys. These toys may be fun to play with, and we might have an especially warm place in our hearts for them, but that does not change the fact that they, by and large, are emotionally and intellectually unfulfilling-which is precisely what I meant by the word "dumb." Saying this doesn't give me pleasure, since I wish it weren't the case, but I still believe it's true.

So game developers of the world, please—please!—prove me wrong, but don't do it with words. Prove me wrong by making smarter games. I'll be waiting, controller stashed safely nearby, sipping my port like a jackass.

A few weeks back, The Atlantic ran a profile on Braid creator Jonathan Blow. It was a great read, and I enjoyed the insight into the developer, but at the same time, he came across to many as a bit of a pretentious asshole. If you're of that same opinion, you'll dig this "missing copy".

A Tumblr account has posted a (not real) section of cut content from the piece, and even as someone who admires Blow's work, it's funny reading, poking as much fun at the man as it does the style of The Atlantic.

Blow rouses from sleep preternaturally alert. "I rarely sleep more than four minutes a day," he declares as he pulls over a lurid Ed Hardy shirt, stray sequins fluttering off in apparent defiance of Blow's ordered universe. "When I worked on Braid I hired a Sherpa to strike me if my eyes were closed for longer than sixty seconds."

Reaching for a can of non-hydroflurocarbon deodorant, Blow sprays a perfunctory jolt under each armpit while clothed. When queried why, Blow barks a harsh laugh, as if disappointed at the writer's obtuseness. "I've got more shirts than armpits," he notes "it saves time this way. Besides – don't you people ever get tired of doing things the same way – as if you're just rote little worker bees?"

Read the rest below.

The Atlantic on Blow - the missing copy [Opinions Expressed]