We've all lost people we love. I'm not referring to the spectacular cataclysms of Hollywood fare, but to the more typical losses caused by errors of the heart—mistakes that we were too vain to foresee and too proud to atone. If you could revisit that moment of your past, try to win back that person's trust, would you go?

Videogames have come under heavy criticism in recent years for conventions they refuse to retire, conventions that, the argument goes, are rendered absurd by the graphical realism and sophisticated 3D environments that have become commonplace. The RPG genre in particular has been the target of much of this criticism, but the reason is fairly complicated.