If you didn't take the story in Gears of War very seriously, apparently it has nothing to do with the fact that its dialog was corny and the characters were little more than meathead stereotypes. No, it's your fault. You don't take game worlds seriously enough!

"One of the problems with videogamers is that they don’t take the videogame worlds very seriously," accused the Gears of War 2 creator. "It’s just like wink-wink, hey, it’s a videogame – whatever, right?"

Is it just me, or do 360-exclusive developers go on an insane rampage of stating wacky sh*t in the weeks before a game's release? Denis Dyack, Peter Molyneux and now Cliff Bleszinski have all done this, and I think this is certainly one of the silliest generalizations I've heard. The problem, I think, is not that gamers don't take virtual worlds seriously, it's that virtual worlds don't often give them much to be serious about. Try asking a Warcraft or BioShock fan how seriously they take their games.

Bleszinski also stated, rather challengingly, that if you don't care about the "emotionally engaging" plot of GoW2, you can just skip it: "If you really can’t deal with 30 seconds of dialog, if it’s really that agonizing for you, you can just hit the back button and Marcus will be like, ‘Enough!’ and you just keep going."

Now, I love me some Gears, and I really dug the story mode for the original game. I didn't take it seriously though, because I didn't think that was the point. It's a big, dumb action game with silly dialog and ridiculous rubber-faced monsters. That's not a slight, that's just what it is, and I like it. Don't expect me to write a fifteen-page thesis on Gears of War 2 when it releases tomorrow.