This is not news, but there’s an incredible absence of emotional pitch in the video games I’ve played lately – specifically in Fallout 3 and Assassin’s Creed 2. In both games, some really incredible events transpire – parents are killed, betrayals are played out, heads are exploded – and it seems like the avatar is pretty unimpressed with the whole thing.

There’s some attempt to portray emotions in the avatar in Assassin’s Creed 2, but it’s really underwhelming. It’s not that the guy doesn’t have emotions, he just doesn’t have enough of them. At these major, dramatic moments, he sometimes manages to, I don’t know, raise his voice while speaking, say. He doesn’t cry, or gasp, or shriek, or collapse with sadness, or shudder, or do any of the other vast multitude of things that normal human beings do when they react to intense events.

The Fallout 3 avatar is, of course, worse. At best, he/she finds expression in dialogue – and not snappy dialogue. There’s no pretense of voice acting or acting of any kind. This is why you absolutely must play the game in first-person. Actually seeing your avatar stare blankly at his long lost father would be a real buzz killer.

But then, your father is a total buzz kill anyway. And that’s because the other characters in these games are no better. Well, they’re perhaps a teeny tiny bit better, but by and large they, too, seem emotionally disinterested in the world and the intrigues they create. People die without terribly much complaint, they love with dead eyes, and they plot in monotone.

The only reason I can think of for all of this is that perhaps the designers want to leave all the emoting to the player – thus, they wouldn’t want the avatar turning on the waterworks, because it’s up to the player to react emotionally to the situation. Maybe, but it hasn’t really worked for me. My avatar and I remain wooden-faced throughout. Where I experience swoops of emotion while watching even the lowliest reality television show, my lips barely twitch while I go through the heightened scenarios of video games. Ay me.

I finished Assassin’s Creed 2 yesterday, at long last. And I did so by playing a whole lot of it over the day, a whole lot. I entered into that kind of world of numbness in which playing a video game isn’t necessarily fun, but is more of a flat out necessity. Had to get it finished – as if it was slowly killing me.

Even reached that point of video game saturation at which, when out for a walk in the park later, I hallucinated icons and symbols from the game in the world around me. Particularly memorable was seeing the “alerted guard” symbol somewhere in the bushes and briefly thinking about how I should get out of sight. I always find those moments kind of hilarious. (Oddly, our bathroom sometimes seems to make one the ‘new message’ sound from iChat. Is it iHaunted?)

Anyway, playing that much game and feeling that dead reminded me of why I’m sometimes wary of games. They are pretty addictive at times, with their whole behavioural circus. The collecting, the narrative, the points, the achievements, the validation. One falls a little into believing these things are something more than virtual.

So, I’m glad to be free of Assassin’s Creed which, though a perfectly adequate game, didn’t really provide all that much food for thought, despite its highly post-modern ending (characters looking direct to camera, anyone?). That said, my eyes now stray toward Mass Effect, especially since I have no PS3 and won’t be playing Heavy Rain any time soon.

I’ve discussed it before (I’m Nothing Like The Woman In The Mirror), but Assassin’s Creed 2 is making me relive my nightmares about the potential for a hellish disjunction between avatar and player skill.

So, I’m meant to be an assassin in the game, obviously. And one with some pretty extreme skills in terms of running on rooftops, leaping across chasms, diving from towers, and so on. Not to mention the slashing of throats and stabbing of backs.

For the most part it works out really well. As I’ve said, the “free-run” controls are pretty great at making you feel like you can sprint across uneven terrain and jump between roofs and so on.

But this backfires on those (many) occasions when I just can’t pull something off. Specifically, when I do something stupid it looks even worse because the default control scheme makes most things look so cool, and because the narrative is one of general bad-assery.

Case in point: a recent assassination mission of mine. I climb a tower toward the guy I’m sent to kill. I mistime a leap and fall to my death. Restart. Climb the tower, kill a couple of guards, leap… fall! But no! I catch a ledge and survive! But no! I’m panicking and hit the “release ledge” button and… fall to my death. Later, after many falls to my death, I get to the guy I’m meant to assassinate, I kill him and then, in the ensuing fisticuffs with the guards, I fall to my death. The final run of the assassination? I get there pretty smoothly, kill the guy, and then stand around on the top of the very high tower wondering how to get down. I can’t see any way down. I gingerly hang from a ledge, figuring I’ll drop and catch a lower one, but instead, I fall… well, you know.

All these deadly pratfalls make me feel considerably less like an elite assassin, and make me dubious about those sequences when I am performing up to snuff. Rather than my game experience being an edited-together version of the smooth footage of successful sneaking up and slicing throats, I’m all too away of the imaginary “Special Features” menu and the infinitely many out-takes it contains.