I decided not to bring my GameBoy Advance with me on my vacation to Hawai'i. I would have enough to do, I thought. I should read books instead. I should be social. Sand and sea water would muck up the controls, scratch the display.

And besides, I am bringing Neverwinter Nights on my laptop.

The truth is, I'm not sure I can survive without video games. They're integral to my psychological well-being. When some people get home from a hard day at work, they flip open a beer and call a friend. Or pour themselves a whiskey and surf the internet. Or fix up an ice-cold lemonade and relax in front of the TV. We all have our rituals.

Video games are more than a ritual to me. I think about them all the time. I wonder about what makes a game good, I wonder about what they say about pop culture, I wonder about how to approach them theoretically, I wonder how on earth I'm going to get the mission completed under 3 minutes while the cops are chasing me. And I wonder about the future of games, gaming, and game development.

To my mind the biggest video game story of last year isn't Grand Theft Auto 3's impressively immersive gameworld; it's not even the Neverwinter Nights online collaborative module-building engine based on the Dungeons and Dragons role-playing gaming system. It's the fact that in the middle of a global recession the video game industry experienced a growth of 43% last year; that GTA3 sold over 3 million units; and that Dance Dance Revolution shows up in a Skechers commercial. The fiscal growth and accompanying cultural permeation of video games in the last few years are astonishing.

Video games are quickly spilling over into the mainstream in the U.S. Whereas in the recent past computer and video games had been the exclusive perview of geeks and nerds hunched over their snarky toys, today games like Britney's Dance Beat and NFL 2002 appeal to a wide gamut of video game consumers who might have hesitated, a few years ago, to call themselves "gamers". But the question is, how long can it last? Can the gaming industry continue the trend of broadening its market? And what does it mean for game culture that it has been opened to a greater number of participants?

This is the year that console gaming jumps online. This fall Xbox will introduce its Xbox Live package, which will allow gamers to connect over broadband with other players and stage massive shootouts with each other while talking smack into their headsets. Sony has launched an internet adapter for the Playstation2, and Nintendo has similar intentions for the GameCube. But although there has been a flood of press depicting online gaming as the hottest development in the market, industry insiders agree that the widespread success of online gaming is far from a done deal. One problem is that broadband penetration has not proceeded as quickly as predicted. Currently only about twelve percent of homes in the U.S. are wired for broadband. And will gamers want to pay a subscription fee for gaming in addition to their regular cable or DSL bill?

For the massively multiplayer online role-playing games like Everquest, time is also a factor. These games are notorious black holes. You can eat, sleep, live in the game - so it's no wonder you forget to do so in real life! When you're spending upwards of twenty hours a week completely immersed in one game - in which you have a network of friends, a list of quests, maybe even a job in the case of The Sims Online - you'd have to be a true game freak to add another similar online game to your roster. Honestly, one is enough. Maybe even one too many.

Still, the fact that online gaming is being pushed and invested in so heavily means that video game developers are making a decent amount of money. And as formerly start-up, fringe-culture companies become megalith corporations, signs of indie counter-currents emerge.

While a large audience for games is lured by the stunning graphics and "realism", many hardcore gamers lament the sacrifice of game design and gameplay for good looks. There is something of a disjunction between marketing, which wants to focus on gorgeous visuals to sell product, and game developers, who want to code structurally different games which encourage players to approach gameplay in innovative ways. A movement towards emergent gameplay is a trend seen in some development studios, like Ion Storm, whose latest offering Deus Ex 2 is touted as a mainstream game which attempts to have a highly interactive environment and nonlinear gameplay. The argument is that while the later iterations of the Final Fantasy series are cinematically arresting, actually playing the games does not give you a whole lot of choice about where to go and what to do. Similarily Shenmue was an amazingly detailed and beautifully realized environment that was nearly devoid of fun factor. By contrast, visionary Peter Molyneux's much-admired Black and White does not have an endless parade of mazes to level through or bosses to beat; in the game, the player is a god who can choose to be a merciful Creator or a vengeful Destroyer, and the entire continuum in between. There is no one way to win the game; each player adapts the parameters of the game to play the game he or she wants to play. Molyneux is an example of a big-name game developer who manages to work somewhat independently within the system; but not every designer has the clout to develop interesting side projects, as Will Wright was able to do with The Sims. And as studios become more beholden to their stockholders and to the public, creative control will become more and more dispersed.

Some of the frustration with modern game development is channeled into a DIY movement, one that parallels the indie movements in music and in film. The slightly more formal side is represented by the Indie Game Jam, which last March invited game developers to participate in a four-day creative game-building jam session. The developers who work on innovative games often do not care about polygons or bit mapping, but are instead trying to push the limits of game structure and concept. Some games created in this vein are, of course, more fun (therefore, more successful) than others; but the very existence of indie game development promises a similar injection of creativity in games that Sundance provided in film back when it was truly indie. More loosely this ethic is practiced by the hundreds of individuals who create patches and mods to pre-existing games, especially open source games like my beloved Neverwinter Nights. Of course, this is no different conceptually from the text-based MUDs (Multi User Dungeons or Domains) that people have been playing online for years - except that now there are tools and graphics. And more people involved than ever before.

But this is great for gamers, right? With both the mainstream big-budget games and the indie off-the-wall experiments, we have more choices than ever before. Finally, we can come out of the closet and find lots of fellow enthusiasts to log on with. But having our hobbies out in the open also means that they're subject to public scrutiny.

A couple months ago Nightline did a show on what is arguably the most violent video game on the market today, which is also (not coincidentally) the most popular. Grand Theft Auto 3 is often described in shorthand as the game in which you can pick up a prostitute, have sex with her, and then beat her up and get your money back. Although this may be the absolute nadir of the morality of the game, others also object to the cop-killing, the car-jacking, and the beating up of innocent pedestrians which are all integral parts of the game. This is a game that was banned in Australia. The Nightline segment addressed the issue of how games affect the kids who play them (if at all) and whether such games are harmful to society. The much-publicized tidbit that the perpetrators in the Columbine shooting spree loved the first person shooter Doom fired the public's imagination, creating the same sort of panic that in the previous decade swirled around the "satanic" lyrics of heavy metal. Still, the outcome of the Nightline segment was not to condemn GTA3 utterly; the final word was given to a well-spoken seventeen-year-old fan of the game, who essentially pointed out quite reasonably that he and his friends know the difference between fantasy and reality, and that the game is just a game.

Is a game just a game? Do video games hold no greater meaning? In May, Judge Stephen Limbaugh declared that in video games, "[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures." Whether you agree with this statement or not, it sets the stage for curtailing free speech in game format, and therefore for restricting the style and content of our games. Even heavy metal didn't have to prove that it was a form of expression.

These legal debates bring up a larger problem, which is, what do video games mean? It's only natural, perhaps, that academics have begun to turn to video games as fodder for research papers. A growing academic field takes on this question and other approaches to game theory. Computer science departments both in the U.S. and abroad are beginning to add game theory to their curricula, as well as the technical aspects of level design and programming. In the humanities, too, cultural theorists and pop anthropologists are beginning to write and think about video games as signifiers, and studying them in the contexts of post-colonialism, feminism, structuralism, film theory, literary criticism, and other ideological constructs dear to graduate students across the globe. Journals devoted to investigating games theoretically have been launched, and more will follow. For a young academically-minded video game enthusiast, this is the beginning of a golden age. While I believe that entertainment all too often gets ignored as a critical field of study, game theory as such is still underdeveloped and unable to cope with the wide genres of games. Film theory is often invoked, which is not entirely appropriate, and many papers are written in such a way that I begin to question how many games the writer has actually played. But I am glad that theoretical and political lenses are being turned to games, because I am fascinated with the place of play in culture.

Video games might occupy a unique space in culture because they bridge pure creative play, as seen in old school pen-and-paper games, and directed entertainment technology like television and film. A continuum of possibilities exists between the extremes of non-interactive visual absorption and completely free, self-directed gaming. I'm reminded of Calvin and Hobbes' "Calvinball" - "the only rule is that you can't play the same rule twice!" The rules are not as important, after all, as how we exploit, test, and innovate within the rules - that's what makes a game fun. A good example of this is the atrociously designed Summoner, an unimaginative swords-and-sorcery role-playing game. The combat system is frustratingly clumsy, and the world is laid out to force you to run through massive areas devoid of interactive elements to get to key locations. It's such a poorly wrought game that I am ashamed to say I've played it through to the end three times. The reason I found the game so absorbing is that the very limits of its design allowed for spectacular abuses of its parameters. The unbalanced character upgrade system, for example, can be exploited to pump all your extra points into the Backstab skill for your thief character. She will be able to sneak up on just about any humanoid enemy and kill it instantly with this skill, essentially negating the need for any of the other characters on several maps. I get such gleeful pleasure out of this tactic and similar dirty tricks that it's worth running through all the vast expanse of open unplayable space every time I need to get into the palace. Of course, when you play the game (which I can not recommend that you do), you might want to drop all your points into building a skull-smashing fighter and beat through your hordes of undead and evil mages without any finesse at all. It's up to you.

The next generation of emergent games will allow game players to shift their priorities, rethink their strategies, and evolve their approaches to play as they play in a collaborative online community. Observers outside the gaming community are taking note. Stephen Johnson's book Emergence, about the power of networks and distributed intelligence, looks not only at the hive mind of the ant colony, but also at game systems such as the one designed by Will Wright for the groundbreaking sleeper hit, The Sims. Howard Rheingold's upcoming book, Smart Mobs, about the social organizing power of mobile technology, mentions a game played on mobile phones by young people in Scandanavia, called Battlebots. Battlebots allows the players to configure individual virtual bots and store them on their phones. When opponents come in range, the bots fight. The best bot wins, and a message is sent to the combatants via their mobile phones.

Why are these writers paying attention to games? It's not just that the technologies for programming, building, rendering, and displaying games; it's that the technoculture around games has also shifted and expanded. Games, as people play them, can describe new models for aggregate human behaviors and patterns in individual actions that help us understand network theory, both from a social and technical perspective. In the Korean game Lineage, for example, nearly 4 million subscribers play this truly massive multiplayer game online by organizing themselves into "blood pledges" and go to war with each other in an extremely organized fashion. The communities that evolve in the game mirror, to some extent, the communities which exist outside the game world. The game tests the limits of organizational principles - because games like this function as both co-operation and competition at once, the game environment becomes a dense laboratory for pitting individual desires against collective good. Play becomes a social experiment.

So I do my part in expanding our knowledge of human behaviors and culture-making. I leave the sunny shores of Waikiki and walk into the dark, pestilence-infested city of Neverwinter. My avatar, Thorn, is a third level rogue, a second level ranger, and most recently, a first level sorcerer. She has a dagger +1 in one hand and a saber in the other. She's stolen an elven cloak which covers her light leather armor. With soft steps, avoiding the traps which are obvious to her trained thief's eye, she steals into Lord Nasher's mansion.

It's time to kill some baddies.

A large portion of this article originally appeared in Satellite Magazine. Thanks to Paul Daniell, my editor.