Playing As You!

I have recently been playing Mass Effect 2, and after watching an episode of Extra Credits on the escapist I noticed something.

If I play the game answering questions not in the mechanical way that I usually do to get paragon or renegade points the game play changes significantly.

I.e. at one point I come up against a military leader and a renegade action lets me shoot and kill him before the fight starts wich allows for a much easier fight against his squad.

Instead of thinking and acting like the paragon I was I just shot and killed the guy. Mainly because I knew that it could get really hairy in fights.

This got me to thinking, what would happen if i tried to answer each question and complete every quest as me, will, the person who sits here writing this blog? I found out that it can actually make the storyline a lot more interesting.

a good example is were I have the option to toast something when drinking brandy with the ships doctor (btw I am attempting to keep this as spoiler free as possible) I can either toast the allience, technically the faction that has turned it's back on me, or I can toast my fallen comraides. Of course the Allience was set at the nuetral middle position and the fallen were set at the lower renegade option. I usually always pick nuetral or paragon, but this time I found myself toasting the dead. It just seemed right.

So this is an interesting questions that I put to you: When was the last time that you actually played as you in a video game?
It's games that challenge who we are as people that makes gaming as a media so interesting. People on the outside may see it is nothing but escapismn, but I think that if we truely want to show people that games can be something more, we need to stop buying games that are pure spectical like God of War III and start buying games that can help us realize our value as human beings.

Thanks For Reading

DFTBA