I don't think its unavoidable but I do think its a hard problem to solve. Still I can think of a few games that did a very good job. I haven't played these sor

I don't think its unavoidable but I do think its a hard problem to solve. Still I can think of a few games that did a very good job. I haven't played these sorts of games in the past few years so most of these won't be modern, but off the top of my head I think Deus Ex 1 and Human Revolution (the new one), System Shock 2, Thief 1+2, BioShock all did well at making me forget that I was playing essentially an on-rails shooter. Gameplay can be linear and that's fine. Novels are linear and they surprise us all of the time. When gameplay is linear you can still feel like what's being done to you isn't, and that's important and I think HL2 just plain skipped it. All the game above are more or less linear, but they feel very different in terms of intrigue, character development, consistent pacing, and expressive emotions. Also, in every one of these examples who your character was mattered a good deal to the game. Instead of hand-held waypoints, all of them offered an interesting world and we knew that we knew little about it, but we could feel that it was so damn large and scary. The Thief universe for example was just plain incredible. Medieval setting with a small dash of newfangled machinery and magic, but unlike space robots or typical games with mages, both were powerful forces that are not well understood. You don't get to play badass wizard. You can't control these forces. But they're there, lumbering and wheezing. There appear to be gods, but they are not all-powerful and somewhat stay out of the way of humans. For all we know there were once hundreds of gods, and they have been beaten into submission by mankind and no longer show their faces. You get the feeling you're not let in on everything. Moral ambiguity abounds. You creep around looking for entrances, secrets and information. Most of the story development is gotten by way of eavesdropping. Nothing is just plopped in front of you like I felt for the entirety of Half-life 2. There's so much intrigue, and at times you really feel like you're in on something, part of this crazy, wide world filled with wonders and horrors. You get to fear it, but at least you have your shadows, so it still gets to fear you. Half Life 2 was a joke in comparison. You're treated like a kid. You walk into a shitty house and some clown colonel (Odessa Cubbage) hands you an RPG, and lo' a gunship, go nuts kid, there's infinite ammo in the box over there. I'll wait out back. Can you imagine storyboarding that? I hope to god it was more interesting than "well we got the car plot device out of the way. What's the next thing the player needs to check off?" But the end result wasn't. (all this criticizing leaves a dirty taste in my mouth. I promise to only be positive on HN for the next month.)