Last year I ranked my games by how many hours I played each of them. It was sort of depressing and I don’t want to go through that again. Rather than making big lists, I’ll just cull out my gaming highlights for 2009:

• Thepure joy of playing Scribblenauts… for about an hour. This “create anything” DS puzzle/platformer was the truly rare game that elicited pure joy. Think of anything, write it and see it brought to life – amazing! After the novelty wears off, however, it becomes a pretty mediocre physics-based platformer and the moments where item behavior solves puzzles in serendipitous ways are few and far between. Still, I’ve seldom had as much fun with a game as those first moments.
• Being Batman! I watched every episode of Batman the Animated Series back in high school and college, so what a joy it was to hear Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as Joker in a new Batman game that didn’t suck. Arkham Asylum wasn’t the most groundbreaking game of the year, but I loved losing myself in that world.
• Getting to know the cast of Dragon Age. For the first 5 hours or so, the generic LOTR-derivative setting and music and stock fantasy scenarios weren’t selling me on Bioware’s latest, but once I started to assemble a small team of companions and took the time to listen to their stories and interactions, the game was a revelation. So many games in recent years allow players to make so-called “moral” choices that really only reward the player for being mustache-twirling evil or a goody-two-shoes nice. Dragon Age manages to avoid this trap by having moral choices have no bearing on the player character, but rather only affect how your companions perceive you. Eventually you learn which characters’ company you value (whether for personality, skills or looks), and you’ll be inclined to make choices based on pleasing them. At first I thought it was a little artificial, but the more I reflected on it, the more it became clear that that’s a pretty accurate reflection of life! When we’re getting to know people, we can either follow our convictions and see who’s left standing, or we can make compromises to get to know people whose convictions greatly differ from our own, and once those friendships are formed, we can navigate the occasional difference more easily. Dragon Age simulates friendship better than any game I’ve played before. Oh… and  you can have threesomes.
• A Crash Course in Facebook games. This year, I earned the majority of my income from working on Facebook games. I was the lead writer on Yakuza Lords, Champions Online (facebook version), and a forthcoming vampire game, and a contributing designer for Band of Heroes and Zynga’s Vampire Wars, Special Forces and Street Racing. As “research” I spent way too much time playing other games as I tried to familiarize myself with the space. I also spent a lot of time studying the metrics that drive the “success” of these games, at least as measured by DAU/MAU’s. I’m no longer working on those games, and I’ve since blocked all gaming apps on my account. For me, these games tap too strongly into addictive behavior patterns and don’t satisfy on any meaningful level. I don’t mean to dismiss this incredible new medium outright, but I found myself spending hours clicking buttons and leveling up and thinking about it when I was away but getting absolutely nothing out of it. There was nothing “social” about it as few of these games even have avenues for communication within the game (this is something that will change in the next year for sure). I’m still interested in working on casual/social games, but I think I need to approach that on my own terms or with likeminded creators.  We’ll see what 2010 holds.

Any gamers out there care to share their favorite gaming moment of the year?

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