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Defense is where I feel the most comfortable. My passing and shooting skills leave a lot to be desired, and I can feel this entire Florida crowd holding its breath whenever I go charging across the blue line. Even I get jittery when my lane gets shut down and I have to dump the puck to one of my teammates. It’s a 50 / 50 chance of a turnover.

It makes sense. Offensive controls in EA’s NHL 11 are much more nuanced. Defense is all about positional play and reading the offense. I don’t have to be a master with the controls to break up a play, because I’m already ahead of it.

So on defense, I’m the guy who comes slicing across the ice to intercept a shot on goal, then destroys the poor wing that is stupid enough to try and recover the puck. There’s a tooth-rattling crunch as he’s blasted into the boards, and the crowd goes berserk as the Panthers go hurtling toward the goal with 3 on 2 while the Flames try to figure out what the hell just happened.

I know that I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game. Career mode is neat because you basically role-play as an NHL player, starting with the end of your semi-pro career and then transitioning to the big time. You gain experience points based on your performance, and you use those experience points to upgrade your player. My guy is becoming a little more physical, and little tougher, and is working on his puck control. But while he can be upgraded, I can’t.

Which is why I’m not really ready for the other parts of this game. I have no idea how to play the other positions, so the championship mode is totally beyond my skill. Every time a new player gets the puck, you get control of that guy. I can play left wing, but I can’t flip between the wing, the center, to the other wing in the space of five seconds.

Nor am I ready to tackle the challenge of being a GM, and that brings up my major problem with the EA sports games. They provide almost no assistance to the learner, as nearly as I can tell. You’ve either been with these series since the PlayStation 2, or you’re going to spend a lot of time floundering. The interface is anything but intuitive, and there is an awful lot of presumed knowledge both when it comes to position play and team management.

Admittedly, I should know the sport better. Were I a devoted hockey fan, NHL 11 is probably more self-explanatory. But there are some things I understand perfectly well that the game gives me no real opportunities to practice. I understand what I want to do on offense, but I’m having trouble connecting the action of the right thumbstick on my controller to what my on-screen player is doing with his stick. I need a better explanation, but neither NHL 11′s thin tutorials nor its pamphlet-sized manual provide much insight.

That said, something like career mode goes a long way to making up for the weak tutorial tools. Because I’m being forced to integrate myself into an offense, I’m learning how to help construct a play. When my player runs out of energy and goes to the bench, I watch from the sidelines as the computer players run the game. I pay attention to the kind of plays where I’m weak. Between the coach’s feedback (“Watch the turnovers” is a popular admonition) and the commentary, I am getting up to speed and having a great time doing it.

And that’s the key to getting people into a game, I think. There has to be a hook, something that establishes the game’s appeal without requiring that you necessarily grasp everything that contributes to it. Career mode in NHL does exactly that, by tapping into the most basic fantasy of anyone who watches a good hockey game: playing at the highest level with an elite group of pros, breaking and making the big plays.

If you mosey over to GamePro.com, you will find that I recently wrote the first of a three-part series on Civilization V. GamePro has been evolving its approach to reviews and one of the areas it is innovating is in how it approaches open-ended games like MMO’s, sports sims, and now a grand strategy game like Civilization V.

Games like this are tough to review because it’s not a simple matter of completing a narrative or seeing how you feel about one or two new mechanics. These are experiences built to last over scores of hours, and much of their nuance only becomes apparent after you’ve spent a lot of time with them. So rather than simply have a reviewer go hog-wild on the game for a week or so, then pass a “final” verdict, Gamepro is having guys like me, who know these genres, play over a longer period of time.

My first piece consists mostly of first impressions. Over the next month, I’ll be playing more games, pushing it in new direction, and keeping an eye out for patches. Then I’ll write another piece that really digs into how Firaxis changed this game, and whether these changes add up to a successful strategy game. Sometime after that, I’ll have some valedictory thoughts on the game, and chisel my verdict into the granite of time.

Or at least, I’ll post them to the web.

Labor Day morning I saw a story making its way around Twitter that Brian R. Wood had been killed by a drugged and reckless driver. She was apparently high and driving a carload of similarly intoxicated friends around in her Blazer when she decided to take off her sweater, and asked her friend to hold the wheel. The friend sent the car into the oncoming lane and killed Brian, along with passengers in the back of the Blazer.

Brian’s pregnant wife, Erin, was in the car with him. A day later, it came out that Brian saw the collision was inevitable, and turned so that his Subaru Outback took the impact broadside rather than head-on. In other words, he put himself between that car and his nascent family. If his death was tragic, it was also rather heroic.

The death got a lot of attention in the gaming community because Brian had worked as a designer on the Company of Heroes series, probably one of the best and boldest RTS games released in the last decade, and was at the helm of the new Company of Heroes Online project. At 33, he had already done great work and was set to ascend to the top of his profession.

A day later, I found out that he was also a member of my fraternity, the Mu Chapter of Phi Kappa Tau at Lawrence University. He left a couple years before I started there. Lawerence is a small school and Mu Chapter is a pretty tight-knit group, with a long history of being a haven for some of the most intensely nerdy and talented young men at the school.

For all these reasons, I haven’t really been able to stop thinking about this tragedy. I didn’t know Brian, but he was a member of one of my extended families, and also a member of the community to which I belong. Doubly then, I feel he is one ours.

His friends and family started a fund to take care of his wife and their child. It would mean a great deal if you could donate. What happened should not have happened, and he died taking care of his family. If we can help, as brothers, schoolmates, colleagues, appreciative fans, or just people of compassion, then we should.

More details at the website for the Brian Wood Memorial Trust.