That, I think, is both why I and other nerds enjoy games, where the rules are clearly documented, and especially computer games, where the rules are infallible (computers are notoriously stingy rulekeepers, as any programmer will tell you). Because in life, the rules dissolve into countless variants and shades of gray. Relationships are one Rubik’s Cube that I personally haven’t been able to crack. At least in a real Rubik’s Cube, when you turn the cube a certain way, the colors will always react the same. But in a real-life relationship, one word, one look, even one touch can mean many different things. There is no “exactly right” way to woo someone, because the rules are impossible to define and rarely enforced anyway. If there was an actual strategy to a successful relationship — if game theory really applied to human interaction — nerds would be the biggest “players” around.

That makes me sound like I’m a sociopath, and that I’d much rather deal with virtual worlds and characters than the real world and real people (which, to a certain extent, may be true, but I’m social enough, I get out out of the house when I can). But it is interesting to me that many of the things I appreciate about a good game are intrinsically different to what I encounter in the real world situations that I have trouble dealing with. Games create the structure of interactions with their rules and regulations, and without those rules in place, it’s hard for us nerdy folks to figure out what the “right” move actually is.

P.S. After I wrote this, I went to read the comments on that post, and the point was made that “Games have explicit rules and no real stakes. The ‘real’ social world has no rules and high stakes.” That’s an important point, and I humbly admit that it pretty much undoes my point above. For all of their rules and consequences, games have zero to no real world effect, and of course the real social world can make or break your relationships, your job, and your life. So if you get a choice of playing an inconsequential game that lets you experiment all you want, or a one-time-only practically random game that will affect your life forever, which would you choose to do? That kind of paints me as a coward, drawing away from the real world because I’m afraid of losing the more important social game, but so be it. It’s true.

I’m serious — don’t think the movie is all hype and read this anyway. It really is that good, go see it.

Done? Okay. Here’s the real deal about Inception — I originally came up with this idea right after seeing the movie, but I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else yet, so I’m going to share it with you now.

Cobb’s “totem” isn’t the top. The top is his wife’s totem. Yes, he may have learned what the totem felt like somehow, and yes, he may have used it to incept his wife and make her believe that the world wasn’t real (and maybe it wasn’t — more on that in a second). But I don’t think he can just take her totem — because the totem is supposed to be something that only the dreamer can know about, it automatically wouldn’t work for him. She’d know just as much about it as he would.

I saw something online today that his wedding ring was his totem, and maybe that’s true — I haven’t done all of the research yet, but I don’t think it is his actual totem, just because that seems like Nolan would be hiding it a little too subtly. No, I think Nolan hid Cobb’s totem in plain sight.

So here’s my thought: Cobb’s totem … is his kids.

That’s why we don’t see their faces the whole time (because we can’t know what they look like), and that’s why they keep appearing in weird places, and that’s why he doesn’t want to look at them in the dream — if he looks at them and they’re not the same as his memory, that will tell him that he’s not where he belongs. And it’s why, at the end of the movie, he finally sees their faces, and recognizes them as his memories, and all is finally, finally right with the world.

Although I agree that it may not be — maybe, just as he stole his wife’s totem, she stole his. Either she realized that they were his totem, or just knew their children well enough to reproduce them. Either way, just because I do think the kids are his totem doesn’t mean I know for sure whether he’s dreaming at the end or not.

In fact, I’d probably argue that not even Nolan really “knows” if Cobb’s dreaming at the end or not according to the top. The whole time the movie was playing, I was worried that it would be all for nothing. The cliche twist ending of a movie about a dream within a dream within a dream is that even in the “real world,” they’re still dreaming. I could have told you that cliche even before the movie started. So the whole time they were running around the hotel and shooting people in the snow and running through the city, I kept thinking, “If this all turns out to be his dream, I’m going to be pissed. If Nolan does all of this, and it’s all just for a dream, what’s the point.”

And then, I got to the end, and the top spun around, and it shuttered and kept spinning, and ——

The screen went black, and with the rest of the theater, I gasped out loud. This cliche ending that I was suspecting the whole time had actually been turned on its head. The answer I thought I’d known all along had actually been taken away from me, and I imagined Nolan somewhere laughing manaically. “Oh, did you want to know the ending, Schramm? I thought it was all a cliche. I thought you didn’t care!”

So he got me with that one. But I think the ending is purposely ambivalent — the top does stutter at the end, so it’s possible that it will stop, and which means Cobb’s world is real, and he’ll live happily ever after, probably dreaming up wild cityscapes with Juno. But if the top doesn’t stop (and honestly, how would Nolan show that it doesn’t stop? If he wanted to show to the audience very clearly that the top keeps spinning, what would he do — have it sitting there for an hour before the screen went black?), then of course Cobb is still dreaming, and I’ve seen all kinds of weird theories about why that might be. Maybe he’s being incepted by someone else (which would explain why he’s spills his guts to Juno so easily, even when he can’t share his secrets with Joseph Gordon Levitt), maybe it’s a revenge thing by his wife, maybe he’s still in Limbo, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, none of that really matters — the point of the movie is that it works, completely, whether or not that top level world is real. It works according to its own internal, weird logic (that the subconscious attacks the intruder, that a kick will wake you up but not being thrown around in a car, that you can share minds with some kind of drug and unexplained machine, and so on). As complicated and as labyrinthine as it gets — get it, mazes? — it all works.

Plus, that hotel fight scene was really awesome. And that Juno is really cute.

• I got to interview Warren Spector, gaming developer legend behind Deus Ex and Thief, about his new game Epic Mickey. What a smart guy, and what a dream job he’s landed working on this game.
• I got to meet up with the folks from Riot Games again — they’re quickly moving up the list of my favorite game developers, and I’m really enjoying jumping into some League of Legends matches lately.
• I played Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood again a few times, and still enjoy it a lot.
• I got to play the great Scott Pilgrim game, which is my second-most anticipated downloadable title this year, the first being Puzzle Quest 2.
• And I got to play Rock Band 3. In fact, let the story be told: I was in the second band in the world outside of Harmonix to play the game. I wanted to be in the first band in the world, and so after the presentation to the E3 judges a couple of weeks back, I unashamedly ran up to the stage and grabbed the lead guitar and lead vocals. We were just about to choose a song, making me the first lead guitar player in the world outside of Harmonix to play the game, when I heard a song start from the second demo setup in the back of the room. So I missed it by just a few seconds. But oh well — the game is brilliant, and I expect to play it even more than I’ve played Rock Band 2, which is a whole heck of a lot.

So that’s E3. Actually, a lot more stuff happened (I took some of the Joystiq staff out to an amazing curry place near my house in LA, and took the two guys from Massively.com out to Pink’s Hot Dogs, the legendary hot dog stand out here. I didn’t get in on any In n Out runs, but I can do that anytime myself these days, so it’s not so big a deal), but there’s so much I don’t have time to share it with you now. I’ll probably portion out all of the stories in the future. There was a particularly good story (Burrito of Fate-level, I might say) told by Joystiq’s own Justin McElroy that you should look forward to.

WWDC was in San Fran the week before, and not only did I have the best Chinese food I’ve ever had in my life (at a restaurant called Fang) and another Beard Papa creme puff, but I also wrote about:

This very fun game called Chopper 2.
• This cool game company called Imangi, a husband and wife team of developers, and their latest title.
• Square, a company that’s made a credit card reader for the iPhone. These guys are going to be billionaires, and they’re doing it by being legitimately good, or at least as good as you can get in the credit business. They’ve had some technical issues, but I believe they’ll work them out.
• An app by Kyle Kinkade called Bartleby’s Book of Buttons. The app immediately reminded me of the book from The Diamond Age, and I told Kinkade so, but he’d never actually read it. I told him to buy it in iBooks immediately and read it on the plane home, and unless he’s been lying to me, he’s really enjoyed it.

And a bunch of other things that you can find in the usual places. What fun, eh? It’s been interesting to say the least — met tons of people, heard tons of stories, and done a lot of what I think is hopefully insightful interviewing and writing. This week, I’m back home for a while, and I’m looking forward to things being calmer, but it won’t be long, I’m sure, before I’m itching for the road again. I really love covering stuff like this, and after all of the back and forth about moving to LA and taking on a whole new environment, things seem to really be paying off so far.

Oh, and while most of my E3 writing has already appeared on Joystiq (so go there if you want to know what I thought of what I played), here’s the top five games I played at E3:

Game of the Show is Enslaved. Great game — feels great, looks great, very well written, and even though I’ve only played it for a few minutes, I’m already in love with the characters and their relationship. I’ll admit, last year I was big on Brutal Legend, and that game disappointed to a certain extent. But I was also big on Batman: Arkham Asylum, and that game turned out to be great. I think Enslaved will be one of the best original titles of the year.

Rock Band 3, of course.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light — there were quite a few great co-op experiences in the show (Portal 2, was great, I hear), but this one was my favorite of the one I played. Lots of puzzles, not so hard that they’re unsolvable, but just hard and “teasy” enough that they get inside your head and you want to experiment with them and figure out a solution.

Puzzle Quest 2. They had to drag me away from that one. I thought it was coming out tomorrow on XBLA, but apparently I have to wait another week.

Scott Pilgrim. It just brims with retro goodness — I couldn’t stop smiling while I played it, and I had to really pay attention to try and keep up with all of the little references to both the comic book and just great old NES games. I’m a little disappointed there’s no online co-op (there is supposedly four-player offline, and online seems like a must), but otherwise the game is just amazing. Will probably be a day one PS3 purchase.

I’ve been busy doing lots and lots of hands-on and interview work for Joystiq lately — E3 is in a few weeks, and so last week, the very talented and impressive Chris Grant (my boss, basically) came out to Los Angeles as a Game Critics’ Association judge to preview all of the big games, and he kindly let me tag along with him. As a result, I’ve gotten to play most of the big titles of the coming year, only I can’t really tell you about them until around June 15th, when the show actually starts. But I can tell you that they were mostly awesome. Especially this one I saw — oh man, if I hadn’t signed a little piece of paper making me promise not to tell you about it until they let me, you’d think it was awesome.

The embargo for a few has already come up, and here, in fact, they are:

• Before the E3 Judges week, I visited Activision’s HQ in Santa Monica (just minutes from my apartment!) to play Blur, and I liked it. It’s coming out this week, but as I said on Twitter, I’m not quite sure if I want to give Activision sixty dollars. If I could give the money straight to Bizarre Creations, I’d do it, but Activision has made some choices lately that I’m not all that into supporting. But the game’s good!
• I went to a Skate 3 event at beautiful Venice Beach and interviewed the game’s developer.
• I talked to the Audio Director on the upcoming Crackdown 2. We bonded over my Audio Production major in college.
• And thus began the pre-E3 events. First, I saw a presentation by the Art Director on Deus Ex 3. Game looks great, and man they thought a lot about how it should look.
• I interviewed Patrick Curry from Wideload Games, who I actually knew from Chicago (since their studios were one floor up from the PR agency I used to work at). Guilty Party was actually a lot of fun — if I regularly had people over to play video games, it would be a good time for sure.
• I didn’t write these, but I am mentioned in the hands-on of the Lara Croft downloadable game, and I asked a few of the questions in the interview. One of my favorite games of the show so far, providing some amazing co-op gameplay. The fact that it’s a downloadable title is just icing on the cake.
• I played Toy Story 3: The Video Game, and while it wasn’t something I’d buy, I’m sure there are plenty of people who were interested in knowing how it was.
• I got to see Enslaved for the first time, and it was awesome. This one should be big — the story and the characters really stand out already, and if it’s done correctly, I could definitely see it being a contender for game of the year.
• And I played Puzzle Quest 2, and had a long and really enjoyable conversation about game design with the game’s creator. Maybe it’s just me being egotistical, but I think we both really enjoyed the chat — he’s a really smart guy, and I’m a big fan of his game, so I think he was really excited to get and digest some direct feedback from someone who’s poured hours into his game. And I was excited to pick his brain a little bit, and find out some of the reasons behind the rules in the game I’ve played with for so long. If you liked Puzzle Quest, you will love PQ2, and if you didn’t play Puzzle Quest, seriously, go do it.

That’s it for now, but there will be lots more in the next few weeks. As for posting here, I will do it when I can — I meant to write up a big thing about the finale of Lost, but everyone is talking about it now, so that’s kind of passe. I’m also meant to be putting some time in on an actual book, seeing as I set a personal goal to start working on it during May. But I just haven’t had any extra time to write lately, much less put something original up over here. If I get the chance to do so, I will.

• This is an amazing post — all 52 bosses in Wrath, rated from easiest to hardest. Very nice (and thorough!) overview of the whole expansion from a raiding perspective.
• Here’s Saate’s latest Word Jumble, and he gave me a shout out for my shout out. Which means this post is a shout out for a shouted out shout out, I guess. Just go do the jumble, it’s fun, and I guess the answer is about me. And you can win a Spectral Tiger for commenting on that post, so do go over and do it.
• There are rumblings that BRK is headed back to World of Warcraft, and/or that he’s already playing in the F&F Alpha of Cataclysm. Far be it from me to speculation on what BRK is up to. It would be nice to have him around the game again, although given the reasons why he stepped away, I’m sure it’s not a decision made lightly. But if he is planning on writing about WoW again, more power to him. I haven’t emailed him yet, but of course he’s welcome to come on Tipoaa with us any time.
• Advanced classes looks brilliant — great way to provide some variety without having to build out a whole full-fledged class. Oh wait, that’s not WoW. Never mind.
• Blizzard asked Boubouille to take the Cataclysm stuff down, and he did. Man, I could tell you stories — but I can’t. Suffice it to say that it’s almost always better, especially with stuff obtained like that, to just go ahead and take it down. As I said the other week, we’ll see it all eventually anyway, and there’s nothing you can do with information like that. Sure, you can drool over it, and pretend it’s important, but we should have learned by now that the graphics and stats don’t make the game, the actual gameplay does. As Bou says, it’s stupid to make a stand. Picking your battles is smart, especially when you’re covering a company like Blizzard, and that’s not the right battle to pick.
• There was some new profession information released this week (See? This is exactly the kind of information that was leaking out anyway, only it wasn’t official — Blizzard has definitely learned some lessons for this expansion release, I can tell), and most of it is pretty boring. I assume professions will be the same as in the past, which means that you’ll have to level them all the way up to make anything actually useful, thereby making a bunch of non-useful items on the way. I like the little stats that add to your real character power, but of course they can’t make those too powerful. Oh well. I don’t think crafting can be improved too much further in World of Warcraft — some other MMO (or even just a game — MW2 actually has a “crafting” system in the form of weapon mods and the “Bling” perk) will have to try and do it better.
• Scott’s book is on its way to me — I can’t wait to see it. Scott was the most regular and dedicated columnist that ever worked with me at WoW.com (they were all good, but Scott stood out, as did many other folks in other ways), and he is a very smart and very clear writer. I’ve never lead a guild (and I don’t plan to), but I’m so glad he was able to work out that book deal. And I’m told my name is in it — it’s actually extremely selfish of me to be excited about that, but I am anyway. Congrats Scott! Everybody go buy his book.
• Finally, did I link to this last week? I can’t remember. Even if I did, go look at it if you didn’t — interesting survey results. I’m not sure how applicable they are to the game as a whole, but the summary is at least some interesting reading about the sample size.

And that’s it. Thanks for reading! Let me know if you did read it — if people care, maybe I’ll keep it up. Heck maybe I’ll even post it on Wednesday! Go figure!

EA’s case for this sounds somewhat legit: online costs have gone up, they’re doing things like constant team updates and regular online events in addition to regular online multiplayer, and they need some way to keep that going. Additionally, given that these sports games are released yearly, there’s a huge amount of back catalog used sales that they’re not making any money on, and charging for this pass is designed to let them do that. Plus, let’s be honest, they need the money. EA isn’t the company it once was, and games are more expensive than ever.

So why is this a bad idea?

It hurts used game buyers. Bare minimum, there’s a $10 fee that anyone who buys a used game has to play if they want in on the multiplayer, a feature that they used to get for free. And it’s not just Gamestop — if I trade games with my friends or pick them up on Craigslist, I have to pay that fee as well. I follow games, so I already know this fee is coming, but imagine the customers who have no idea about this change, pick up Tiger Woods from their friends for the $30 they have to spend on a game that month, and come home only to find that they can’t play a tournament online because they have to pay another ten bucks. That’s a bad customer experience, and especially if EA is talking about standard online features that most games these days come with, it’s a ripoff.

It hurts new game buyers. Obviously used owners are the ones targeted by this fee, but if I buy a game new, it hurts me, too. The second I use the code I get with my new game, it’s worth at least $10 less than what it would have been. And if I happen to have two consoles in the house (maybe one for me and one for the girlfriend or my son), we have to pay an extra fee to go online with the same game. I was planning on buying Tiger Woods 2011 this year, to play it with my friend online. And now, I won’t: buying an EA game that requires this pass will cost me money later, and could cause headaches right now. What if my code doesn’t work? What if their servers go down? What am I getting for my money?

It’s desperate. EA needs to raise money? Fine, raise it on features that are new, not features that we’ve had for years. Come up with something worth charging for — Mass Effect 2 already did this (and it’s actually kept me from buying that game so far), and instead of marking it as a must-pay fee, they’ve turned it into a way to release new free content. Almost all of the DLC items so far have come out for free, making that $10 that I would pay with a used game actually worth something. But just charging $10 to play online, something that we’ve already had for years, is dumb.

And if EA needs to charge for money for the same thing because they’re not making enough on their yearly sports rehashes, maybe they should invest their money more wisely.

Does any of my complaining matter? Probably not — people who buy Madden new will still buy it new, and they’ll never see the $10 charge (they’ll just put in their pass and go). Sports is a weird genre in video games, too — for all I know, most of the people who buy used EA games never bother to play them online anyway, so maybe they won’t even bother paying the $10 fee even if they’re asked to. I’m sure there are guys who buy last year’s Madden who don’t ever bother to play it online, just want it for a few football parties with their friends at home.

In other words, this will probably work (and like Mass Effect 2, we’ll see it implemented on more EA titles, and even other companies’ games in the future). But as always, I’ll vote with my wallet — if you don’t think EA should pull stuff like this, you need to make the choice not to buy their games and not to give them money. Companies keep doing what sells, so if you’re angry about a decision made by a game company, you need to look at your library first and see how much of your money they’ve made. I’m not organizing a boycott or anything — you do what you want to do, and if this type of thing flies (ie, people pay the fees), it’ll keep showing up. But I pay money for games and deals I think are worth it, and this isn’t one of those.

1. The Shins
2. The Hush Sound
3. The National
4. Imogen Heap
5. The Mountain Goats
6. Vampire Weekend
7. Fountains of Wayne
8. Arcade Fire
9. Okkervil River
10. Rilo Kiley

Which is pretty darn trendy, if you ask me. It’s interesting, because when people ask me what my favorite music is, I usually tell them The Police, Cake, and Bad Religion — those are definitely the bands whose entire catalogs I enjoy and (at least I thought) that I most listen to. But this list is way different. In fact, while I do see three Cake songs in my top 200, I don’t see any Police or Bad Religion.

Timeframe is another factor — I wore out my old Bad Religion tapes, and I own Cake and The Police’s whole catalogs on CD, so this list is definitely an iTunes product. The earliest song I entered into my library on iTunes is back in September of ‘05, and I probably did do most of my listening of those other bands before then. Strangely, the latest song entered into my top 200 is Metric’s Gimme Sympathy, which I put in my library in April of 2009. And before that, I have to jump all the way back to December 2008 (when I put the Son Lux album in).

Of course, songs have to be in my library a while before I listen to them enough to make this top 200 list (in fact, I wonder what a top 500 list would look like … ). But it’s interesting to me that the actual stats about my listening are so different from what I expected them to be.

• Have I linked you to my interview on Rawrcast yet? We talk about WoW quite a bit on that one.
• Blizzard made the news today (Joystiq’s post is still upcoming) by talking about their RealID system and how it works with Facebook. This all seems like old news to me — I’ve seen this stuff in action in the StarCraft 2 beta, and it’s not that big a deal. It’s basically a Blizzard login that tracks what you’re doing in Blizzard’s games. EA’s done the same thing for years, and Steam has done it even before that, but of course this one will work across the realms of Warcraft, so that’s the biggest draw for people. I share concerns that a few others have voiced — obviously I won’t want everyone I know to know where I am all the time. But I trust, from my experience with StarCraft 2, that I’ll be able to turn it off whenever I want — if I don’t want to be disturbed for any reason, I don’t think I will.
• The Friends and Family alpha is officially underway, and even with the leaks (Deathwing’s model got leaked, and surprise, it looks exactly like what we saw in the trailer), I’m still not seeing anything super intriguing there. Blizzard is doing a little better job keeping things under wraps, so good for them, and they’re also sharing a little bit more with their Screenshots of the Day from Cataclysm, but none of that stuff really entrances me either. It looks like more WoW, which isn’t a bad thing — never a bad thing — but I’m far more excited about other titles this year than I am about Cataclysm so far. They’ve got plenty of time to build up the hype, and hopefully I will see something that really intrigues me, but so far, it looks like the same old game in a few new places.
• It’s probably no surprise, then, too, that I haven’t been playing much lately. But that’s not really because I’m disliking the game, it’s more of a factor of time. I still plan to slave away at Loremaster, and hopefully even get it on my Paladin before the expansion. We’ll see. I’m hoping to take some of the day off for my birthday tomorrow, and while my focus has been on FFXIII lately, WoW may get some playtime.
• Spinks has a good post about damage meters. I’ve never really been against damage meters — they do make things more fun as a DPS player, and even when I don’t top them (which is often), it’s helpful to see who is and look at their gear and rotations. But I guess they’re troublesome enough, with the bragging and comparing, that Blizzard doesn’t want to officially bring them into the game.
• Another Word Jumble. I think these things are great.
• Here’s something interesting: No more 10/25 man raid differences, basically. Raiding 25 will still give you more loot, but not any better, and no difference in respective difficulty. That is interesting, though I wonder why they’re even bothering with 25-man raids anyway — why not just go 10 normal or 10 heroic? Honestly, I don’t think this will change how the game is played much — people who have the 25-man groups will still raid 25-man, and they’ll just get the best items they can get. But I almost think this is Blizzard cutting back content — it takes a long time to design different items and different abilities and different difficulties. And if people aren’t using them (and you can get more money by selling virtual items, ahem), then why put the time in? I don’t see this change as driven by customers at all — rather, I think Blizzard is deciding to cut costs where they can, not because they’re losing money, but because they want to focus on other functions of the game.

Thanks for reading!

Update: And the floodgates, they open wide.

• A few weeks ago, I went to a conference called 360iDev in San Jose. It was an iPhone developers’ conference, and among other things, I saw one of Apple’s engineers speak. I spent a lot of time there writing about that and the rest of the conference for TUAW.
• Last week, I went to a 3D Gaming Summit here in Los Angeles for Joystiq, and I even got to moderate a panel. Fun times.
• Last weekend, I flew out to Seattle, and visited the Voices that Matter iPhone deveopers’ conference for TUAW. Here’s a quick panel writeup that I did, and here’s a great story about a really smart kid who’s making amazing software.
• Earlier this week, I went to a game preview for Joystiq … that I can’t actually tell you about yet. I got to play an unreleased game, but the news is still under embargo, so we haven’t posted about it quite yet. But it was fun, and I got to take a quick trip down the coast here in California.
• And on Thursday, I visited the LA Games Summit at Hollywood’s beautiful Roosevelt Hotel (I’m told one of the rooms we were in was where the very first Academy Awards were held). I wrote about both Vivendi considering digital distribution for WoW (something I’ve thought about for a while), and a quick interview with Playdom’s CEO, along with a few other short tidbits from the industry summit.

So I’m glad to say that my plan, conceived all of those years ago, to come out to Los Angeles and hit the events scene is paying off big time. I’ve done a ton of event coverage already this year, and it’s only May. And it helps a lot that I really enjoy going out to events and doing interviews and meeting people — it’s a lot of work, but it’s also a very concentrated writing experience, and I love doing that.

I will definitely write here when I can, and when I’ve got something to say. But that’s why things have slowed down here again: just because, as is usually the case, I’m busy elsewhere.