I've complained about The Escapist before as being a pedantic, wandering, sometimes pretentious "new games journalism" magazine. But it turns out that, when they're not writing articles about narrativism versus simulationism designed to make you lapse into a coma, they can actually come up with valuable points.

The best article of the week, in my mind, is A Thousand Heroes With Just One Face, lamenting the lack of competent writing in video games. As gaming has always had that whole, y'know, game part to rely on to entertain the player, the question of whether or not the plot is understandable or the writing is believable or whether the whole thing isn't just a hackneyed mess has often been treated as kind of a side issue that really isn't worth the time to focus on.

If you don't think dialogue is important, consider Shenmue. Sega spent over $20 million recreating, in painstaking detail, the feel of Japanese back streets, right down to the vending machines.

Think about that. $20 million, and the only thing the majority of players took away was the most famous bad line in gaming: "Do you know where I can find some sailors?"

Expanding on this idea is Magic Words, using examples from the Thief and Splinter Cell series to show how writing and dialog, rather than expensive graphics or sound, can expand the game's universe in the player's mind. Proper writing can render a bunch of mindless NPCs into full-blooded characters that seem to exist in a continuous world that, in the reality of ones and zeroes, don't exist at all beyond exactly what the player sees in front of him.

Finally there's Gaming at the Margins, by Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, who expresses concern that gaming could stay at the margins of culture (like, say, comic books) instead of expanding into popular culture at the level that movies or television have. He says he may come off as alarmist and I'd say to an extent he's right, but even so he brings up important weaknesses in the industry as it stands, such as its continued lethargy in moving away from pandering solely to the male 16-24 demographic.

So get out there and read this week's Escapist, before the new issue rolls around and they're back to sipping lattes while wearing berets and discussing game theory in clipped, scholarly voices.