Games tell stories best when they're elliptical and ambiguous and there's a sense of roaming and freedom.

We are no longer worried that children are missing school because of video games, though. We are worried that they are murdering their classmates because of video games.

Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate.

Only in about 2007 or so did it become clear to me that games could stand proudly beside other storytelling mediums, and that's when I became more, shall we say, evangelistic in my position. Prior to that, I don't know how enthusiastically I would have admitted that I game.

I'd been in Sacramento a day and already noticed the pervasiveness of its homeless problem. The city seemed like California without the masks or pretense: a place where dreams were occasionally made but mostly torn apart.

This does not make the authors of those narratives liars; it makes them servants of fallible human memory and perception.