I recently finished a fifty-five-hour playthrough of Grand Theft Auto V. It’s a ridiculously fun game. It’s also can be a very disappointing game.  Unlike Grand Theft Auto IV, Grand Theft Auto V is a flawed masterpiece worth playing, thinking, and talking about whose good will never erase its bad and whose bad doesn’t, for me, overwhelm its good—it just cheapens it.   About ten hours into my Grand Theft Auto V playthrough My wife said to me, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you giggle as much as since you started playing this game.” And she was right. So many of the things that Grand Theft Auto IV almost got right were beautifully executed in Grand Theft Auto V. Driving (and piloting) was fun in its own right, and the different handling based on vehicle and terrain kept it exciting and strategically interesting. The quantity and quality of random things...

I’m not the kind of player who longs for “the good old days” when games seemed to hate you and want you to die. My attempt to replay Paperboy and recapture the glory of my NES days was short-lived as I realized how needlessly, unrewarding cruel that game is—I just didn’t know any better as a kid.  But I’m also not the kind of player who wants games to be easy. My first walkthroughs are more often set to Hard than to Normal. My biggest disappointment about the death of my first PS3 Console was that I lost the save data for my finished Hard play through of The Last of Us and so wouldn’t be able to play Survivor mode next. The difference is in what makes the game difficult Difficulty, like everything else in a game, can be designed well or poorly. To see what good difficulty plays like,...