Is Bioware's Dragon Age the last of its kind? A solo-player game absent an integrated online component? Or is it actually the next step in what Spore designer Will Wright calls the "massively single player" experience?

Dragon Age (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows) heralds Bioware's return to fantasy role-playing, a "dark heroic fantasy" that lets you choose from six origin stories designed to change up your game in more than the usual cursory ways. It's out on November 17th.

In the final part of our interview with the game's lead designer Mike Laidlaw, we talk about the "death" of single-player gaming, a fantasy version of The Wire, the death of moustache-twirling villainy, social networking, and how to get noticed in a crowded room.

This is Part Three (Part One, Part Two)

Game On: A Theory of Fun author Raph Koster argued single-player gaming was doomed back in 2006. He went on to clarify that he meant games in which "only one person [is] making decisions." That pretty much describes games like Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and now Dragon Age coming out three years after his pronunciation. Your response?

Mike Laidlaw: I think the glory of stories--and I think this is something computers are only now starting to be able to participate in--is that stories are shared experiences. It's the shaman telling the tale of whatever around the campfire, the boy scouts with the flashlight under their faces. All these things are primal ways that we as a people communicate, share experiences, and quite often, share wisdom and growth. Before written communication, before the printing press, and before computers certainly. Lore and legends were often wrapped up as fables and parables, for the purposes of sharing experiences.

So to my mind, the most valid story is one that can be experienced but also shared, that can have moments that really resonate with you. And in an ideal world, we're looking at playing to the strengths of computer gaming, and making the game and story reactive, but also enabling people to share that story and say "Look, I did this, and then this, and then this," and feel like an experience happened to them that they want to relate to others. That is where gaming transcends where it's been in the past.

I don't think a single-player experience means you have to do it in isolation. I think that's where the fallacy lies, the sense that by firing up a single-player game you instantly shut down your messaging utility, destroy your Facebook account, and close your Twitter account. These things don't happen. People want to post about what's happening to them, and you're seeing games now that'll for instance allow you to post a Twitter update from inside the game.

We're actually developing something for Dragon Age called the Social Engine that allows you to share the experiences and growth of your characters. Even though it's a single-player game, you'll be able to hold it out for people to take a look and go "I can see what you're doing there, and how you're doing it." One of the big strengths of Dragon Age is that by the time you finish playing, we hope players don't feel like they experienced the story we wanted to tell them, but that they played through their story. We're using specific techniques to guide the experience, to make it so you're not lost and wandering completely disengaged, but within that there's substantial choice and variety. At the end I think it all comes together and you're like "This feels like something I did, and I want to tell people about it."

GO: What kinds of ethical level does the game operate at? Is it broad stroke "with us or against us," good versus evil, Clash of the Titans stuff? Or more like a mythic version of The Wire?

ML: The strength of shows like The Wire, which is fabulous by the way, is that the ethical dilemmas you face are ones that resonate with you. Because you can understand--and I think The Wire does this better than other attempts--that it's showing you people in relatable situations, and it shows you how they got there, and why they're still there. You can empathize and sympathize, even with the guys doing really bad things. You can empathize with the corrupt cops. You know you can really sink your teeth into it because you can see that deep down they're also people. You can understand how people could end up in these scenarios. It's easy to look down from your perch and go "Oh, that would never happen to me," but The Wire shows that in its particular reality, it's the only way to survive.

Where Dragon Age falls into that spectrum is…it's kind of halfway between the two, because The Wire, to use it as our touchstone example, deals very much with the kind of mundane, the smaller day-to-day stuff, whereas Clash of the Titans deals with issues that are so gigantic it's almost impossible for us to conceptualize without thinking metaphorically. You know, fighting Medusas and things that are completely off the hook. Somewhere between those two, I'd put Dragon Age, where the characters and interactions you have are ones that--especially if you go digging and read the lore and ask questions of the characters you meet--you can understand the motivations behind what seems to be apparent villainy, and you can rationalize how someone could end up there.

That's where I am very excited about our villains. Because they aren't just moustache-twirling "I'm here to destroy the world." They're people reacting to things that happened in their past, things that happened directly to them, and they're responding in the only way they feel is reasonable.

So for instance, and I think this is a major theme within the game, there is very clearly an evil on the horizon. There's a storm cloud a-brewin', and that is The Blight, the Darkspawn, and they're coming. But at the beginning of the game they're not fully formed, they're on the way, but you've got people questioning whether the stuff that's happening is really portentous. "It's been 400 years, is it really going to happen again?" That kind of…it's almost denial. Later you can see how characters reacted to the fact that they weren't sure, that they didn't know, how that indecision or perhaps ambition drove them to attempt something because "Oh look, everyone's distracted, I can get away with this right now," and so on and so forth. As a result you can get into a space where you can understand our villains and yet still have this big looming wall of evil heading your way, which I like, because it means there's something you can be opposed to even while feeling sympathetic for characters that have fallen into some sort of depravity.

GO: It's where Tolkien dropped the ball in the Lord of the Rings. Why did the orcs and trolls sign up? Why do they care? Why fight to pulverize the topography? There's no insight into that stuff, into these other presumably nuanced ethnicities, who are of course going out and dying in untold numbers for some faceless Big Bad's sociopathic desire to put a wrecking ball through the world. It's not that we have to be sympathetic with what they're doing, but at least tell us why they're doing it, and be honest about its complexities.

ML: Well in Dragon Age, we certainly have the Darkspawn and The Blight, which is that force of evil, though you get the sense that there's something behind even that as you're playing the game. The nice thing is that when you do have this opposing force, where it's kind of like "I see the arch-demon is rallying the Darkspawn behind him," but as you encounter people who've been touched by the corruption of the Darkspawn, you start to realize things about their motivations. It's like, these things are bestial and evil, but what's really going on here?

Then when you're dealing with the more visibly human forms of villainy, it's definitely not of the moustache-twirling variety. It's very much a comprehensible, almost sympathetic kind of evil.