You still have the basic experience of "Wait, I've thought of something that might work. I will try it. Yay!" (And this really does contrast with CRPGs and fighting games. Those *also* offer a creative player experience -- otherwise they'd be boring -- but the basic command set is generally laid out in its entirety. Your exploration is a matter of high-level strategy, not your immediate choices.) In response to Klosterman's complaint about how there aren't any Kaels or Bangs for videogames, I would say that you could just as well ask why there aren't any for television either. I honestly can't think of any well known tv critic off the top of my head, but there is certainly a lot of stuff on tv that deserves probing criticism of the type that Klosterman is talking about. In it, among other things, the author pointed out that since games are generally not ported forward and publishing discontinues fairly rapidly, there is no sense of continuity and development. Classics are not systematically learned from in order to develop new games. The literary analogy would be as if writers today were not routinely exposed to any books older than fifteen years, let alone, say, Shakespeare. I'm rather late to this, but I might as well toss in my own two pennies. "People usually don't dip into fifteen-year-old video games, and when they do, they find them clunky and primitive in a way that old movies (with great stories, acting, direction) aren't." I