The thing I most loved about Oblivion was the same thing I then most loved about video games, which was the opportunity for unscripted player exploration. I had been trying to teach myself Italian with an Italian-language edition of Oblivion, and it was greatly amusing to my Italian friends that I knew the Italian words for shield, ax, inventory, pestle, arrow, and skeleton, but not meal, sidewalk, pigeon, girlfriend, and confused. Every Italian gamer I knew was on his second or third play through. The big game in Europe at the time was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Even though I was interested in all sorts of video games, it was pretty easy, while living in Europe, to regard something like Gears as too familiar, too American. I figured this had been borrowed from Resident Evil 4, which was - despite its ESL dialogue, unfathomable plot, Britney Spearsian sidekick, and Castilian midget villain - probably my favorite game experience of all time.
The one thing that sounded intriguing was its use of the over-the-shoulder third-person point of view. New mission: Charge over there and kill those guys. I had played Halo: Combat Evolved a few times and liked it well enough, and of course I had played GoldenEye 007 and Counterstrike and Medal of Honor and Battlefield 2, but a lot of shooters left me with a feeling of gameplay indigestion. In the days after November 7, whenever I logged on to Xbox LIVE, I noticed that a number of my friends were playing Gears of War, which I had written off as a shooter I doubted I would find terribly interesting. What I was doing was playing the same few games over and over again. While I had an Xbox 360 (unwisely) installed in my office, I was not playing all that many games. At the time, I was living in Rome, Italy, and researching a book about early Christianity. Novemcame and went without much notice from me.
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