One of the very first things I learned in my Creative Writing 101 class in college was a very simple rule of writing: Show, don’t tell. As a storyteller, the responsibility is on you to draw in the audience and paint a picture for them – let them understand what is going on through their own observations rather than simply explaining things to them. Showing a character’s irrational lashing out at someone is far more engrossing than simply saying “Dave was angry.”

The designers of Metroid: Other M must have missed this class, because they sure love to tell us pretty much everything.

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There was a day, long ago, when gender in video games was an unknown topic.  This was not because no one wanted to to talk about it – it was simply because no one ever thought to talk about it.  Early games were essentially gender-neutral; players, for the most part, were not playing people, but were instead playing things.

Pong, Space Invaders, Asteroids: in all these cases, the player’s link with the gameworld is a series of tiny blocks arranged in different shapes, sometimes a spaceship, sometimes a triangle, sometimes a rectangle.  Neutral things any player could connect with.  Things were this way mostly as a limit of technology; creating more detail was not yet an option.  As such, the idea of the avatar, of the player’s representation in-game, was a simple one, and discussions about player identity were a long ways off.

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