most games are still missing a very special something that traditional media have spent centuries or even millenia refining. Sitting in that hotel room in California, I realized what that is: emotional engagement. Two decades ago Electronic Arts, now the world’s biggest game publisher, unveiled the marketing slogan, “Can a computer game make you cry?” The answer: not yet.

That I thought this during the Mass Effect demo is not a knock on the game. Just the opposite. Mass Effect, which is forthcoming from Microsoft, seems to play a bit like an epic interactive movie where the player controls the combat, but, more important, helps direct the story. And the story, not the fighting, seems to be the heart of the game.

As in many games, the basic idea in Mass Effect is that you have to save the galaxy from an all-encompassing evil. Fair enough. But without giving away the plot, the depth comes from the fact that you may have to sacrifice friends and decide just what your values are and what the greater good really means.

In Santa Monica the game’s makers showed a scene involving those sorts of choices that literally shut up the whole room. When it was over, a half-dozen normally chatty game writers sat there for a few moments digesting what we had just seen.

It was powerful, but it was still no Mahler.

Much the same could be said of Fallout 3, another of my favorite games from E3. Like its esteemed predecessors, the third installment of the franchise is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where you, the player, decide how to carve out your place in a horrible new version of America. Put simply, you can be a good guy or a bad guy and there will be plenty of heart-rending, suffering people to either assist or exploit.

That is, of course, what makes games distinctive among media: within the confines of the system it is the user who decides what happens next, whether that means turning left or right in Pac-Man or deciding whether to blow up a town for pay or save it in Fallout 3.

But merely providing choice is not the same as generating a deep emotional response.

Yes, when my spaceship in Eve Online gets blown up, I am upset. Yes, when my guild in World of Warcraft beats the latest demon, I swell with pride. Yes, when I finally slay that mythical beast in God of War I feel both insightful and dexterous.

But in all of those situations, I as a player know that the outcome was largely my own doing. And so the emotional connection is more akin to a golfer who shanks a drive or hits a gorgeous approach shot; sure you get happy or sad, but ultimately you can’t be emotionally surprised because you did it to yourself.

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