This weeks’ Escapist is full of interesting content. The theme is “guilty pleasures” – gaming while drunk, whoring it up in MUDs, Superman 64.

I’m quoted in Andrew Webster’s article about gaming novels, so read it if only to see me pretend to be an expert. Webster spends a lot of time with author Drew Karpyshyn, the author of a lot of Star Wars Expanded Universe novels and the Mass Effect books, which Karpyshyn seems to think are good.

“The reason the Mass Effect novels worked so well was the depth of the universe we created for the games,” he says. “At BioWare, we spent a full year developing the Mass Effect galaxy before we even began work on the story of the game. By laying the groundwork for such a rich, widespread setting, we opened up the possibility to tell all sorts of stories beyond the plot of the game.”

I haven’t read the second ME novel yet, so maybe, now that the groundwork has been laid, Karpyshyn has things under control. The first one was an expository nightmare, explaining why the world ended up the way it did.

Attentive readers will notice that I haven’t spent much of my Print Screen time on game novels. When I started the column, I thought I would do more of them, but there is so little interesting material to work from there. Why would I read a Warcraft or Halo novel when there are so many game themed books out there trying to do more than piggyback on a particular title’s success?

That said, I will probably read the entire Halo series over the holidays so I can write about how it works as a setting.