About a year and a half ago I helped bring four of the world’s top game developers -- Cliff Bleszinski, David Jaffe, Harvey Smith and Will Wright -- together for a roundtable discussion.
We aired it online and later on MTV2. Harvey joked to me in advance that the conversation would resemble the kind of "nerd chat" game developers have all the time. And, I suspect it did.
But it also got more serious than I expected it to, especially when Harvey talked about the meaning of death in video games. Spinning out of a talk about creative freedom, he said:
I would like to make a game that explores our relationship with death, culturally and intimately. I would like to make a game with one player character that is in different phases of his life. So in the early mission he’s the five year old boy who… finds his dog dead in the back yard. And he’s trying to understand what has happened. Later he’s the teenager who’s grandfather died. Later he’s the middle-aged man whose wife died. Eventually he’s the old doddering man whose son died. And all of these things are about the different ways in which we experience death
The average video game has a thousand deaths in them and yet none of them are deep or real or intimate at all. And death has influenced my life a great deal. My mom died when I as six. My dad killed himself. And so I’ve got all this death in my background that I’ve had to overcome. And that as an artist is the sort of thing I would like to work on and no one will pay for it.
That's the statement that I recall most often from the "nerd chat." It revealed how personal and how powerful games could be. It also suggested games’ limits. Watching the clip you'll see David Jaffe raise legitimate concerns about whether Harvey's idea could work as a game. I go back and forth on that.
The statement also struck me as an extraordinary indictment of games, a one-star review for a medium that has managed to convey little of the potency -- little of the emotional heft -- of one of the concepts it most commonly presents.
Video games, I believe Harvey was right to suggest, don’t convey the impact of death very well. I’ve come across few games that do. In fact, I've only come across one that makes gameplay-driven death hit hard. Of all things, it's a Nintendo strategy game series. It's "Fire Emblem."
So I was alarmed when I learned at the Nintendo media summit earlier this month that one small change being made to the American version of the next "Fire Emblem" might undermine the very thing I praise in this series.
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Nintendo spokesperson extraordinaire Perrin Kaplan can handle any questions I throw at her.
Fans of "Super Smash Brothers Brawl" for the Wii, I apologize now.
A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Nintendo's vice president of marketing in the U.S., Perrin Kaplan. I've talked to her quite a bit but have seldom formally interviewed her.
There are things people at Nintendo know that they don't want me to know.
Over at MTVNews.com I published 
Sure, you could read