In response to the "Why Hate the Everyman" feature over here:
Is game protagonists being super-powered anything new at all? Games are all about challenge and overcoming it, and the natural progression of that has been to amp up the challenge and amp up the powers given to the player to surmount the challenge. That leads eventually to turning the players into super-beings or just totally unrealistic crazy bad-ass dudes. How is that not perfectly obvious?
Isn't that the same in movies? Movies rely on conflict and the only way to resolve a conflict to a happy ending is by making the heroes more and more powerful. Conflict is most easily depicted through violence so naturally we've moved from cowboy westerns to IronMan.
What about stories? I can go on and on.
Where movies and literature differ from games, and the ones that shine as the brightest beacons of the respective art forms are those that shine a spotlight on harsh realities and focus on failure. Failure of the human spirit and of our value system. Requiem of a Dream is an obvious, if cliched example (cliched in the sense of how many people use it as an example) of man's failures making for moving, gut-wrenching cinema.
The other category of movies are those that take people to extreme sadness and agony, and make us watch them emerge from those tragedies as heroes. This is but an emotional translation of the "conflict" concept, but it still results in having to give the protagonist extraordinary emotional strength to get through the conflict. Movies achieve empathy even for characters who are stronger - sometimes - than any real person could be, by either showing us more of what's unbelievably great about them (Life is Beautiful) or by showing us their flaws (no good examples right now).
We're starting to see people talk about the second variety of conflict being introduced to games in the form of emotional conflict and character progression through story rather than points menus. Heavy Rain is but one example of this. And that's great/fine.
However, we're quite far from doing the first variety of games that focus on failure. Games do not gel well with failure at all and it'll be a while before we see such games come to life, or before someone even understands how that would work. But it's when a successful game can be made about failure, that we could possibly see TRUE everyman characters (not ones with superhuman emotional strength) walk their way through games.