In October of last year, my wife and I purchased our first home. We got a good deal on a house in our ideal neighborhood. It was a short sale, so the process was a little more convoluted than we would have liked, but it all worked out in the end. The house is 100 years old, and came with all the charm and headaches associated with owning a centennial home.
I’m a web developer and technical writer by trade (you wouldn’t know it by looking at this terrible blog!), but …

The third part of Josh Forman’s 3 part series on gamasutra about storytelling techniques inspired this post, although it’s not required reading. Still, it might help to read his ideas about medium before reading this. Here’s a link.
Anyway, to point:
Games are built on abstractions, both from the design standpoint and the player standpoint. There’s no point in “real life” where pressing X makes a person perform a jump, or a kick, or whatever. It’s an abstraction. Game designers provide a world where players connect the relationship between pressing X and …

The Expendables has everything I could ever want—hilarious one-liners, over-the-top action scenes, complete disregard for human life, ignorance and simplification of exotic cultures, and unabashed, flaming homoeroticism.