So Blizzard's gone and admitted that they've been working on Diablo III for a long time now, and all the world's gone mad with elation. When I saw Saturday's headlines, I was surprised and delighted too, at least at first.

The twenty-minute demonstration that Blizzard showed off was impressive in that it proved that Diablo isn't groping into the 21st century myopically. It's adopted all the sweet and sassy lighting and physics effects that we've come to take for granted over the past eight years. You can bring cracked stone walls cascading down upon your enemies, you can conjure up piles of hungry dead to devour your enemies, and you can use enhanced skills to spin, cut, and chop your way through your enemies. Yeah, there's a whole lot of enemy-killin' in this game, and I guess that's good, but something feels weak about it this time around.

A few weeks ago, I started a character in Diablo II just for the hell of it. I enjoyed myself for a little while, slashing and stabbing and poking at monsters, finishing quests and filling in the minimap. By the second act, however, my eyes started to lose focus. I had to blink to maintain my concentration. None of my reflexes were on alert. I felt lazy and dazed, like I was preparing for a nap on the couch, my hands absently patting a friendly pet who'd walked by to check on me. I wasn't accomplishing anything or meeting any challenges, I was just occupying myself.

Now, I don't think the age of Diablo II has anything to do with this attitude. It's not like dungeon-crawling and monster-bashing have gone out of style. I think it's just because the game isn't designed to stimulate. It's designed to comfort, like a bag of tortilla chips that you grab when you're more bored than hungry. I wasn't playing D2 because it was fun.
I was playing it because I'm a gamer, and that's what gamers do. Everyone agrees that D2 is great, so why not?

There's this site called Action Button, designed by Tim Rogers, where you'll find nothing but diary-like reviews of games. If you've read any of the reviews at Insert Credit, you'll know what to expect at AB: technical, emotional, name-dropping, occasionally pretentious ramblings that use adjectives like "crunchy" and "stop-starty" to describe minute-to-minute play experiences. Games are dissected qualitatively, and measured by the way they make players feel. The highest rated games are the ones that make players care for their characters in a dramatic way. The writers of these articles are quick to point out that cutscenes are often the poorest tools for accomplishing this. The point of the site is not to build hype, or to provide up-to-the-minute details (many of the reviews on the site are for games on dead systems). It's to provoke discussion about games and their creative elements, and to get a little closer to answering the question of why we keep gaming even though we don't really get anything out of it.

The perspective may be precious, but I find that it makes for compelling reading. Be assured that the opinions presented aren't oddball for its own sake: Call of Duty 4, Portal, and Grand Theft Auto IV have all received the highest acclaim from Action Button, so you can't honestly say it's a den of iconoclasts. Where they differ from the IGN/Youtube throng is in the reasoning. I recommend that you open your mind a bit and read some of these reviews to see what I mean.

My disillusionment about Diablo III stems from the issues that Action Button's articles often touch on. The situation is this: game-makers make games, and game-players play those games. Why? Ideally, because those games are entertaining. But games are often less than ideal, and half the time they leave us empty. I know I don't feel as proud of my Gamerscore as Microsoft would like me to. Lately I feel like I'm just collecting widgets and slaying whatchamacallits because that's all that game players have come to expect.

This past year brought us some earth-shaking games. I don't think anyone can deny that Portal toyed with at least a few preconceptions. Now Diablo III is announced, and we're all supposed to leap up and cheer. Isn't it time we started demanding more than the gaming equivalent of Starbucks?

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