As someone who just recently stopped using a nearly fifteen year old student ID to get discount movie prices: good job Hanna. Adulthood = Paying The Sticker Price, Darnit.

I feel bad that I've sidestepped your entire argument about the effect of aesthetics on player motivation to focus on storytelling. Sorry for jumping on the tracks right as this train is leaving the station, shouting "NO LETS TALK ABOUT *MY* HANGUPS!"

The God I was raised with was nebulous and self-defined. My parents, probably out of capitulation to my grandmother, took us to a Unitarian Church for a year or two where my only real recollection was a Sunday school workshop where I was somehow alone in arguing for the innate goodness of humans. So my personal view of a god, if I had to pin one down, would be a severely disinterested one. One whose benevolent act was our creation itself. Which also informs how I play games: buy purchasing them (on sale) and then rarely playing them.

I do like your idea of a person's spiritual beliefs influencing their hardcore gaming attitude (or 'tude), but the endless repetition in search of a better, more enlightened play-through sounds more Buddhist than Christian? Maybe? I don't know anything about religion.

I would totally play a game where a karmically bad playthrough led to a New Game+ as an insect.

You bring a up a good point re: perspective of player to character having an effect on how the player relates to the narrative. I definitely care more about Solid Snake's twisting tale than I do about Jim Raynor's antics. (Full disclosure: I've never bothered beating Starcraft single player and I think I rationalize the multi-player narratively as an intergalactic sport.) But isn't part of the reason a game like Metal Gear or Final Fantasy can get away with Serious World-Saving Stories (albeit with increasingly diminishing returns) is because of their lack of intentional replayability? How can Diablo justify multiple playthroughs within the story? (I mean, it could, I guess, but I love time-travel so let's not get into that.) Narratively, Mario's really only had to save the Princess maybe a half-dozen times, but she probably was abducted about 40 times a day in my childhood. (The culprit is, in fact, still at large.) The more times I have to do fantastic things the less it means to me and the only way around that I can think of is to have me repeatedly do in the game what I repeatedly do anyways. Which, I suppose, makes The Sims the most honest game of all.