not sure why - this is my third try to post this at LBJ: Okay smartypants... maybe that's not a bad example... or at least maybe in the games that influenced some of those mechanics and dynamics there might be found some interesting examples. One problem is that the notion of 'buddy' is not very strong. Nor the notions of 'kill' or 'abandon'. It's really not that different from saying 'your barrel smashing hammer power-up will inevitably fade' in Donkey Kong. The other problem is that it doesn't spoil anything for me to know that (unless I read heavily into your word 'eventually', and assume you are referring to the events of the end-game... but then the forced reversals there are in the story (and poorly delivered)... though maybe the 'giving a shit' about the buddies in the first place can only come from the mechanics. Maybe there's something there. Matthew's response about Braid is intersting in that it perhaps points to the differences I see between 'game' and 'puzzle'... clearly giving someone a solution to a puzzle spoils the fun... but puzzle soltuions tends to be fized, where as games tend to have mutliple, borad, overlapping, fuzzy solution spaces that are not as rigorously defined or definable. Maybe they thus cannot be spoiled in the same way as Rich suggests. I think Justin nails it pretty well... the graphed soltuion space of Bioshock is not puzzle like - it is a map of all possible bioshock experiences. Potentially, if I am able to translate that graph into something I can *feel* as opposed to something I can understand, then - yeah - we're in mechanical spolier territory I think. Unfortunately - in the specific case of Bioshock, I feel (as is well known) that the more powerful and moving elements of the story overwhelm (and contradict) any meaning that might be experienced in the game. What if that relationship was inverted? What if the core of bioshock lay in those mechanics... would the revelation of the plotted graph and discussion of it's meaning (outside the domain of the story) ruin the game? It might. In that case, should we dodge it, spolier tag it, or ignore it and just give it away?

I don't really feel the 'review-vs-criticism' angle is relevant, and I strongly agree with the original post. To write anything at all meaningful about something, I think you need to be able to write about it freely. You need to be able to describe it, and describe your subjective perspective of it. If you can't do that because you are worried about revealing something to the audience, I think you might as well not bother. Here's a more pertinent question though - why are we even really concerned with giving away details of the PLOT in a video game. Elika doesn't die in PoP. There is no Elika, there is no Death of Elika, because there is no choice, there is no GAME there. The villain in CoD4 doesn't get his arm sniped off by a BAD SHOT, he gets his arm sniped off by an imposed narrative. The weakness of Passage is that the death of the wife is purely narrative, and the moving elements of the experience of Passage are the narrative ones. Telling the player these 'plot secrets' does nothing at all to impact the experience of the GAME in my opinion (you may still find these things moving, but they are not games, they are stories). I propose that we put this 'spoiler challenge' to the test - I'd like to see someone write a spoiler that was about a MECHANIC or a DYNAMIC of a game - something that is part of PLAY not part of the STORY, that *actually spoils the game* for me. Go ahead, try it. Find a game, explain the ways in which the mechanics and dynamics moved you, and write it up so that it ruins my own subjective experience of the game. I would propose that until we are able to achieve this, games are missing something. I hope someone succeeds at this, becuase I would happily sacrifice my own enjoyment of one game just to know that this is even possible... I'm not sure it is yet.