Earlier today, we posted some excerpts from Round 1 of the second annual Slate Gaming Club, in which four writers discuss the year in videogames. The roster? New York Times op-ed page staff editor Chris Suellentrop, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, New York Times games reporter Seth Schiesel, and the staff of Level Up. In Round 1, the group was pretty polite, but there are definitely some pointed remarks and glowering stares in this, Round 2, of our email exchange. Some excerpts:

Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: [W]hat to think of Gears of War 2? The game is even more shamelessly derivative than the first one. I picked up allusions to, off the top of my head, Independence Day, Battlestar Galactica (the Ron Moore re-imagining), The Empire Strikes Back, and the speeder-bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi. Mitch Krpata of the Boston Phoenix pointed out on his Insult Swordfighting blog that one of the game's levels is a tribute to, or a rip-off of, the final level of Contra....

[Yet] I think Gears of War 2 was the most fun game I played all year, and the game that most achieved the goals it set for itself. If you want to see what an interactive Sylvester Stallone movie looks like, play Gears. It's everything a big summer blockbuster should be. But this is awards season, right?

Stephen Totilo, MTV News: Gamers abandon games--even games that they like--before finishing them. Gamers get angry at games--even games they like--for being repetitious or derivative or for falling short of being as good as it seems like they could be. That's what you get when you, the gamer, indulge in a creative form that was created to convey satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action for a quarter per minute. This is the creative form that has somehow evolved into a medium of 25-hour, $60 collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.

Seth Schiesel, New York Times: Over the course of this year, plowing through game after game, what surprised me most was simply how good most of them were. Though the crop of 2008 has demonstrated its talent in different ways, it seems clear that the overall level of production quality and creative talent is higher now in video games than it has ever been. This is the real golden age of gaming because only now is the audience large enough, variegated enough, and mature enough to support high levels of investment in such a broad portfolio of genres on such a wide range of devices and screens.

The major publishers have finally figured out that schlock is not a business strategy that can compete in the long term with producing a high-quality product. I have played through and reviewed most of the biggest games of the year, with a few formal reviews still to come, and the one word that keeps coming back to me is professionalism.

N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: Your point about professionalism also intrigues me. You're correct that, by and large, the level of craft in the video game industry continues to grow each year, and 2008 was no exception. I wonder if, however, by settling for the professionalism inherent in the acknowledgment that "we are those men, and we had fun with these games," we let games off too easily when they take the easy way out, interactively speaking....

Was Epic's handling of Maria's fate a failure of craft or art? I say it's worth thinking hard about, especially when writing for a mainstream audience like yours in the Times and mine at Newsweek. Because when we avoid such questions, we're gulling our readers into believing that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive--or that games are just like other media.

Feel free join in and take shots at us in the comments below, or just share your thoughts on the best and worst of 2008.

Last year, the Web magazine Slate (which, like NEWSWEEK, is owned by The Washington Post) convened its first ever Gaming Club to discuss the year in videogames. Participants included New York Times op-ed page staff editor Chris Suellentrop, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, New York Times games reporter Seth Schiesel, and the staff of Level Up. We debated and discussed such notable titles as BioShock, Halo 3, Desktop Tower Defense, Portal and more before drawing things to a gentlemanly close. Now don't go calling it a comeback, but we've returned for a second installment of what we all hope will be an annual affair. The epistolary exchange kicked off yesterday with three of the Four Musketeers contributing, while today's round will include the full quartet. Some excerpts:

Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: One thing I've been wondering: Is it a good sign or a bad sign for the medium that this year's crop of games has produced such a wide divergence of opinion? Michael "the Brainy Gamer" Abbott thinks Fable 2 is perhaps "the most seductive game world ever created." Chris Dahlen thinks Fallout 3 "balances—and sometimes betters—the approaches of other videogame masterpieces: the retro immersion of BioShock, the paranoia of Portal, the exploration of Oblivion and the seamless storytelling of Half-Life 2. The pseudonymous "Iroquois Pliskin" says GTA IV is "a classic, and stands head and shoulders above its previous iterations and nearly every other game released this year."

Those are three more of the smartest people writing about games. They each think their Game of the Year is a new addition to the canon. Maybe they're right. Or, more likely, this was a year of just-misses, which is why there's an absence of consensus.

Stephen Totilo, MTV News: Fable II as Game of the Year? Getting warmer. In the reverse order of what happens in GTA IV, this game begins with a poorly defined character in an uninteresting medieval European fantasy world but winds up with you controlling a man or woman who is literally the shape of the choices you've made in the game. All that celery he ate made my guy skinny; his ample scars came because he was a clumsy swordsman; his youthful visage remained, because I chose not to sacrifice his looks when given the alternate option to sacrifice a maiden to the gods instead. Ten years from now, the world will remember Nov. 4, 2008, as the day America elected its first black president. I'll also remember that day, I'm sure, as the day when I was first emotionally affected by a video game. Pausing my DVR just after California was called for Obama, I had to go back to Fable II to make the game's final moral decision, a triple-optioned Sophie's choice involving money, loved ones, and community that would affect characters I'd interacted with for weeks. I'm still haunted by the pick I made. Obama's victory speech later that night distracted me from the unease that my final actions had put in my heart, but as I went to bed, with cheers still echoing down the Brooklyn streets near my apartment, I was haunted by the wonderful emotional pain I finally felt from a video game.

Yeah, that's my frontrunner for Game of the Year.

N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: [Fallout 3 and Braid] aren't the only two games I'm considering for whatever top 10 list I assemble whenever I assemble it; others include Patapon, Grand Theft Auto IV, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, The Last Guy, PixelJunk Eden, Gears of War 2, LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, and Play Auditorium. But I'll end here by asking each of you to name and discuss the game you've had the hardest time expressing your opinion of. For me, it's Resistance 2, a staggering work of heartbreaking mediocrity from one of the industry's most accomplished studios. Staggering in its we-put-every-dollar-up-on-the-screen production values, in its scope, in its careful borrowing from all the right touchstones of the shooter genre. Heartbreaking in that its overblown scale may have helped do it in, in that it has created a fictional world that over two games has never truly connected with me, in enemy encounters that hit all the notes without ever quite playing the tune. It's not mediocre in the way that most games are mediocre. It's just off, and for the life of me I still can't figure out a succinct way to explain why.

Any games from 2008 make you feel that way?

Consider this an open thread for sharing your opinions on our discussion as well as your favorite games of 2008, and check back later for a post on Round 2.

1. EGO...trip: Shot fired at The Serious Games Journalist Network of Pretension
2. UGO...in "high-level talks" to buy 1UP, nix EGM? So sayeth the grapevine
3. THE...Colossus of London consumes MMO developer Cryptic Studios
4. HAX...x0rs are fooling around with Left 4 Dead 360. Is Valve reloading?
5. RND...Having saved Gotham City, Christian Bale to take on Skynet