I think I am actually Chaotic Good and weaker/less agile, but ...

I Am A: Neutral Good Half-Elf Rogue (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-10
Constitution-9
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-13
Charisma-17

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Half-Elves have the curiosity and ambition for their human parent and the refined senses and love of nature of their elven parent, although they are outsiders among both cultures. To humans, half-elves are paler, fairer and smoother-skinned than their human parents, but their actual skin tones and other details vary just as human features do. Half-elves tend to have green, elven eyes. They live to about 180.

Class:
Rogues have little in common with each other. While some - maybe even the majority - are stealthy thieves, many serve as scouts, spies, investigators, diplomats, and simple thugs. Rogues are versatile, adaptable, and skilled at getting what others don't want them to get. While not equal to a fighter in combat, a rogue knows how to hit where it hurts, and a sneak attack can dish out a lot of damage. Rogues also seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to avoiding danger. Experienced rogues develop nearly magical powers and skills as they master the arts of stealth, evasion, and sneak attacks. In addition, while not capable of casting spells on their own, a rogue can sometimes 'fake it' well enough to cast spells from scrolls, activate wands, and use just about any other magic item.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Oh, Amazon. You know me so well!

OMG I totally slept with Kaiden Alenko tonight but I closed my eyes and pretended it was Carth Onasi the whole time.

I'll be honest. I like stuff. I like material goods that are completely unnecessary in my life. A new obscenely large TV. Pairs of shoes I have worn only once (or in some cases not at all). A car I am contemplating spending $5K more on for the sport version. All completely unnecessary, and it's debatable whether or not they will truly impact my standard of living and my ability to be happy.

Sometimes I feel guilty about it. I think, but there are so many more worthy things to spend money on. For the price of that pair of shoes I have never worn, I could buy someone ten sandwiches. Ten nice sandwiches with pickles. I'm hoarding ten sandwiches in a box in my closet.

And then I wonder, what are my values? As in, what do I *value*? I say that I value humanity's progress in the world, peace and justice, food and an opportunity for everyone. But I don't spend my money on those things. If you look at where I spend my money, you would say that I value looking good, eating rich foods and drinking fine alcohols, diverting myself with electronic entertainment, and decorating my house.

Are these things I want to value?

I am not normally one to feel bad or guilty about things that I want; if I really think it's wrong to want something, then I will stop wanting it. So I don't think it is *wrong* to want a gorgeous new TV.

But I wonder what it says about my values.

Tomorrow I will be heading to a place where this is in my future:

Hooray! It will be a welcome change from the winds and rains that have lashed the San Francisco Bay Area for the last week.

Dear Harmonix,

Happy Christmas and how are you? I hope you are well. We are all enjoying Rock Band to excess. Thanks for releasing The Sounds as DLC! But as you can probably guess some of us female fans want more music featuring female vocals. Orange Crush seems like it should be easy but it's not, as it turns out!

So I was wondering if you could possibly release more girl-rocking songs as downloadable content in the future. That would make my year!

Here is my wishlist. Some of these would be perfect for a Goth Pack as well, which I hope you are also working on. And they have all been tested v. scientifically for singability in my shower. Thanks!!

Sincerely,

Jane

P.S. I LOVE YOU! XOXO and Happy New Year!

*******

Jane's Wishlist for Girl Rock:

Patti Smith - Because The Night
L7 - Pretend that We're Dead
Luscious Jackson - Naked Eye
Concrete Blonde - Joey (maybe too mellow? but so catchy!!)
Bikini Kill - Rebel Girl
Le Tigre - Deceptacon (ok this might be tough but it's SO GOOD!!!)
Lush - Ladykillers (I <3 Miki!!!!)
Elastica - Connection, Stutter
The Go Gos - We Got the Beat, Our Lips Are Sealed
Rilo Kiley - Portions for Foxes
Veruca Salt - Seether
The Breeders - Cannonball
Pat Benatar - Hit Me with Your Best Shot
No Doubt - Just a Girl
Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees - Hong Kong Garden, Kiss Them for Me
Sleater-Kinney - One More Hour (ok, no bass, but two guitars!!)
Heart - Barracuda
Liz Phair - Rock Me
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - Bad Reputation
The Cranberries - Dreams
PJ Harvey - A Perfect Day Elise

So I'm settling in on a Saturday night for adventure with my homies Liara and Kaiden (who, we all agree, isn't half the man that Carth Onasi was and the ONLY reason I'm even pursuing romance with him is that it's the same voice and, yeah, I want the achievement) when what should happen but a gruesome grinding noise emanates from my 360 drive. I leap up in alarm and immediately extract the disc, only to find a perfectly circular scratch that now decorates my copy of Mass Effect.

Who gets away with putting out hardware like this? Not to mention the fact that even without the grinding the thing is so fucking loud it gives me a slight headache every time I turn it on.

So now I'm out one copy of Mass Effect and possibly out one console, too...! I'm scared to put anything in it. Well, I may play some puzzle fighter or something... but man, what a bummer!

Just got Rock Band. Yay!

But I have a question for those folks who have been playing it longer. Are the instruments locked to each character? So in other words if I have been drumming as "Jane" do I really have to create a new character to sing or play guitar? I can't just switch instruments?

No love for multi-instrumentalists? :(

Okay, back to Rock Band practice. More later.

So, if you listened to 1UP Yours last week you know I bitched about what Activision/Neversoft did to the female characters of Guitar Hero, especially Judy Nails, whom a lot of people loved to play for her brash, tomboyish punk look. Look at them side by side now: Judy Nails 2, totally fierce! Judy Nails 3, totally trashy! Totally slutty! Totally gross!

Ugh. Anyways, I have to admit that while I love playing the Guitar Hero series, I have never really listened to heavy metal or classic rock, so none of those dudes were really my personal guitar heroes. Slash? Carlos fucking Santana? WTF? Who cares? When I was learning guitar back, oh, a decade or so ago, I was inspired by my own heroes - and heroines, because frankly, the whole Guitar Hero series is missing some serious diversity there. Most of the musicians I swooned over as role models are women. And some day when we can import our own music to play along to, these are the musicians whose tracks I will import and play my heart out for. Keep on rocking in the free world!

Well, this is neat. Thanks to collaboration with the game producer and Freezepop band member Kasson Crooker, my band Dealership has a demo track in Harmonix's new beat-matching game for iPod, Phase.

The song they used is the unreleased track Dots and Dashes, from our upcoming (I swear!) album, The Future is Far Away. Since the game is about following dots and dashes it seems kind of appropriate, no? Anyway the neat part of the game is that you can play along to any of your playlist - our song, along with some other indie bands' tracks, are in the demo portion. We'll be releasing just this track on iTunes soon, too.

Thanks, Kasson, and thanks, Alex!

I was invited to go to Reykjavik for the annual EVE-Online Fanfest. Okay, I'll admit right now that I am not an EVE-Online fan: I find it too cold in space. But the community really intrigues me, as does the company that creates the game, CCP. And how often do I get a chance to go to Iceland? Not often enough! MORE...

Wow - I'm really excited - while I'm in Iceland I get to go to the Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa! That sounds amazing. Check out the photos. Friend says it's pretty brutal, though - you have to walk across unsheltered cold cold cold before you hit the hot water. And given that it's in the low 30's in Rekjavik right now that is going to be a death march for my spoiled california skin.

Over IM with a friend we were talking about how much we love love love BioWare games - we both fell hard for KOTOR, for example. And she said, "If BioWare were a man.... I'd be so stalking him right now."

So true! I kind of do stalk BioWare - in the sense that I read every little article that comes out about the company. Lately lots of nice things about Mass Effect... and I admit I'm not sure it could supplant my devotion to KOTOR but I'm willing to let it sweep me off my feet....

(Thanks, Matt!)

It's hot here, and everyone says "unseasonably" but we all know that California gets summertime in October - right? But it is scary weather, because it's so hot and, after a long summer, so very dry - and then you have these vicious winds that rattle the dry grass and leaves and then you add to that crazy arsonists or random cigarettes and you have firestorms.

This time of year, I know I said I love it, but it's also a time that's fraught with lots of feelings for me. My mother died in August, my father in October, and my house also burned down in October. So I find myself getting very anxious and apprehensive, as if I'm waiting for the next disaster to sweep away what I knew of my life again...

In the meantime I take comfort in little things that reawaken my sense of wonder and joy.

A whie ago I clamed that kniting > WoW. But recently I discovered that's not the case. At this rate I'll have my new cashmere cowl AND hit level sixty in no time!

First, there's this, the Cavegirls Halo 3 Tournament to raise money for breast cancer research. All proceeds will be donated. It's only ten bucks to enter, and it's happening this Saturday, so get ready.

Then to celebrate the release of Beautiful Katamari there are these lovely Katamari rings. So cute!

And catching up on my blog reading, finally, I came across this amazing game design idea that came to Daniel in a dream. It just reminded me of how powerful dreaming can be, how liberating. I used to dream music - something my father once told me that he did, too - he dreamed entire symphonies that would melt away when he woke up. I used to keep notation paper by my bed so I could try to scribble down what I heard while sleeping. I should get a digital recorder instead, it's probably easier to hum than to remember how to write musical notation.

Last night I dreamt I was riding through Central Park on a horse. We took a break, I got off the horse, and he told me he was sleepy and needed to take a nap. I took off the saddle, he lay down, and we napped in the grass in Central Park. Not the most creatively inspiring dream I've ever had, but it helped me wake up pleasantly refreshed.

Even in the mild Bay Area, the air is getting crisper and the leaves are turning shades of gold and pale orange. We had some rain yesterday - okay, a mere drizzle, but it caught me unawares and unprepared and it covered my face and hair and my light cotton trench coat and it was marvelous, truly.

I love this season because I love fall clothes, for one thing. As much fun as summer is, there's something slightly, I don't know, slutty about it, which is all well and good, but the cooler weather signifies a return to classiness, to elegance, to tall leather boots and long wool-and-cashmere coats and scarves and pretty knee-length skirts.

I also still experience a Pavlovian back-to-school delight and excitement at the onset of cooler winds: the feeling that there's a fresh start possible, if only you will reach out to it.

The one down side is that it gets dark so early, and stays dark in the morning. But even that has a brighter spot - it's easier to justify staying home after work to play games and watch movies. So I don't really mind that, either.

Fall in California may not be as spectacular as it is in other climes, but it's still my favorite season.

So, I got an iPod a while ago, and I now have the ability to choose a soundtrack for various daily activities, thus making each errand exponentially more fun and making me feel as if I'm in some sort of romantic biopic about my own life.

Here are some picks I recommend:

Best music for walking down the street in high heels: Daft Punk, Daftendirekt. Guaranteed to make you feel like a total high heeled warrior badass. Also the pace is just right for clicking those Louboutins smartly down the pavement.

Best music for walking in the early morning: Sigur Ros's entire album Takk..., from beginning to end.

Best music for feeling gloriously sentimental when it's raining: Roy Orbison and KD Lang's duet version of Crying.

Best music for cleaning out and organizing your closet: I'm sorry, but ABBA's Gold. It makes me want to try on all my dresses to make sure they still fit. And perhaps I may also twirl around in them, so what? No one's watching.

Best music for getting pumped about cleaning your bathroom: Andrew WK; I Get Wet. Seriously. You will scrub that tub like you've never scrubbed before. And you will do it with a huge smile on your face.

Best music for reading a trashy novel while eating a delicious chocolate madeleine and drinking coffee: Yo Yo Ma's Bach Cello Suites. Makes even the trashiest novel seem like Edith Wharton wrote it. Okay, maybe that is a slight exagerration.

Best music for working out to: M.I.A.'s Arular. It just makes you feel like you want to get sexy. And do good at the same time.

Best music for falling asleep to: anything by Kimmie Rhodes. Her voice is magic.

I have a stack of games to play and an instance all lined up in WoW, ready to go. It's raining - perfect for gaming!

Jesus, but you can spend a lot of time on Facebook these days. It's the incredible exploding social network. On Facebook now I can attack friends with my zombie army or my pirate army or my hero, Penny Century; I can leave a scribble on a friend's Fun Wall. I can add to my list of books read, films watched, and cities visited around the world. I can join groups with fanciful names like "I judge you when you use poor grammar." I can poke and superpoke and pwn. I can send cocktails and gifts with secret messages. Dear lord! I'm embarrassed to say that I even *bought* a gift, for $1, to send someone. One REAL dollar, people! USD! Why did I do this?

Who says micro-transactions don't work?

In any case, the brilliance of Facebook is that unlike Friendster, Orkut (ugh, remember that one? Overrun by Brazilians?), Myspace, et al., it is both clean-designed and chock full of optional applications that add extreme stickiness to the application. There are games here, and not just the game of who has the most friends - it's, how can you upgrade your account and what novel ways can you find every day to interact with your friends?

Is there anything here that Xbox Live or Playstation Home can gracefully co-opt? Would they be well-served by doing so? Would increased social interaction enhance gaming experiences? I believe so.

The number one problem with online gaming is the LFG (Looking for Group) problem. It's not just a logistic problem - that is slowly starting to be solved, with ways to match people up by experience, for example; but for me the far more important problem is the Trust issue.

(Yes, I have trust issues, so what?)

My problem is this: I want to play a game to have fun; therefore I want to play with people who are fun, and whose notions of fun align with mine. What's not fun to me: sore losers, angry players, stupid players, homophobic, racist, or misogynistic players, players who overindulge in smacktalk of the bordering-on-cruel variety, players who have no sense of manners. This holds pretty much true for me across all multiplayer games, from chess to Halo to WoW to online Scrabble.

So what's the solution? Well, play only with people you actually know in RL - that's pretty much been my solution so far. But that can really decrease the available pool of players and add to the logistics problem, creating situations in WoW, for example, when we are waiting for a friend to log out and log in as his mage and come meet us at Scarlet Monastery all the way from Darnassus. Or something. And surely there are other players out there who are like me, or with whom I would have fun playing. So how do I find them using the criteria that are important *to me*?

Friends of friends is one interesting way to go, I think. So maybe your usual buddies aren't online, but what if you could take a look at their friends' lists and invite some of them? Even better, what if they had profiles online so that you could check out a little more detail and get a sense of what this person's play style was like? Beyond just the rough monikers "Family" "Recreation" and "Underground" that currently exist on Xbox Live. Furthermore, what if you could actively be working to create friends and strengthen bonds out of game, by using a web app like Facebook to continually re-inforce, through relatively simple and low-level interactions, social connections? You'd be building up a trust network, and increasing the amount of trust you have between yourselves. Also, if you are connected in that sort of network, you are less likely to want to break the bonds of it by acting like an utter ass. These effects would then enhance the play experience the next time you played with people in your network.

Hm. I need to think more about this. I'd welcome your thoughts, too.

I just can't get excited about Bioshock. Yes, I've seen the screenshots, I've talked to my friends who loooooove it, and they make compelling, smart arguments about it. Yes, I liked System Shock, of course. But after all it's still a game in which you run around and shoot stuff, whether the stuff happens to be zombies or aliens or Nazis or other baddies. And there may be great physics or whatever but you know, what good is excellent physics if it's only used to demonstrate how thoroughly you can destroy the environment?

I feel FPS fatigue.

Seriously. this game is so incredibly addictive, that even with all my game consoles at my disposal I am still playing a web-based casual game MORE than anything else.

Even WoW.

Help me.

No, really, help me, because I can't seem to crack level 42 or so. Everything's going great, all the creeps are dying, and then suddenly, BAM! three groups of creeps come at once and all my leveled up squirt towers and bash towers can't seem to stop them.

Knitting.

Hey, I was in the zone - you can't stop when you're in the zone!

Harry Potter, that is. I somehow found myself browsing for designer sunglasses as I am sometimes wont to do late at night while drunk and/or stoned (I didn't buy any, don't judge me) and my Amazon page displayed the following:

Eleven percent of people shopping for Christian Dior sunglasses bought the new Harry Potter book.

Astounding. That's where the clever Amazon preference system breaks down, a little - because obviously the book is nothing like the sunglasses; it just shows you how many fucking people are buying this book - so many that it's skewing results; and by skewing results, it pushes into a feedback loop (the more people buy it, the more it appears in "recommendations", and therefore the more people click on it and buy it, etc.) This is sort of the internet's anti-Long Tail effect - the hit-amplification effect.

Am I the only one left who doesn't own a copy of this blasted book? And will I accidentally one-click it and become one of the 11%?

I came across a design doc for a game, Tree Story, inspired by My Neighbor Totoro. That's one of my favorite films, and the idea behind this game is really quite charming!

I wish I could create graphics like that - it helps so much in creating design docs. Being able to visualize what the game will look like is an invaluable aid in "seeing" how the gameplay will work. Concepts that are clumsy to explain on paper - especially since we still lack a unified lexicon to describe gameplay elements! - are elegantly expressed in a sketch or drawing.

I've been knocking around a game design idea in my head, that I've been talking over with my friend Matt. I should break out my watercolors and get sketching!

Except, it was real, and it was caused by power fluctuations in San Francisco. The power in my office went out six or seven times. Fun! Gaming sites and high tech sites went down, too.

I should have worked from home today....

Coincidence? a quick Google search doesn't show a lot of results for "Tragedy is in the Details" outside of my story (and one story about bathrom remodeling - go figure) so I don't think it's a common phrase or anything.

Sure, it could be coincidence. or a mistake. But it feels a little like someone saw my story, took my headline, then linked directly to the NYTimes. That's just sloppy blogging etiquette.

Okay, I admit it's also bad blogging etiquette to complain about something so trivial as this when there are so many other bigger things to worry about - death at too young an age, for example. Forgive me, I am cranky today! Had lots of stressful dreams again last night.

It's not really that hard to look graceful, effortless, and beautiful in high heels. It just takes a little practice, and with practice comes confidence, and with confidence comes true beauty!

Here's a brief video that illustrates the worst offenses.

Yesterday evening Souris IMed me, "See you at the party!" What party? She meant the Harmonix party, happening tonight. Then it hit me - so many of my friends are at E3 and I'm, somehow, not!

And I feel both relief and also a nostalgia tinged with sadness. I think I had a little moment of mourning for an era that is over. Not just for me - E3 is different now. It frustrated and exhausted me when I went but I have to admit that somewhere in a corner of my fangirl heart I miss it....

From the BBC, more news stories about romance:

Chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting "buzz" than kissing, and doubled volunteers' heart rates.

Dr Lewis said: "There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz.

"A buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss."

I love chocolate and all, but really, those people clearly don't know how to kiss.

Well, they're here - both my Xbox 360 and my two Guitar Hero II for 360 controllers arrived today. Luckily the thoughtful sender of the latter included a snazzy gig bag for carrying both guitars in style. The 360 box, however, weighs about as much as a Mini Cooper. So, now I have to get them home somehow, and for some reason I thought wearing heels was a good idea today. Riding the train home will be interesting! I hope I can find a seat.

But at least I look really cute today. I should submit my photo to wardrobe_remix. With the gig bag strapped to my back.

I've been on Eastern Time lately - falling asleep by nine or ten, awake by 4:30 AM, long before the sun comes up in California. It's actually a refreshing change from staying up all night and then being late for work every morning because I could barely get up by eight.

So yesterday while I was browsing my internet at four in the morning, I finally bought the Xbox 360. What made me do it, finally, after all this time? Two things:

Sorry, World of Warcraft, I've got a new boyfriend and he's arriving in a white box today.

Yes! Final Fantasy Tactics ported to PSP!

Way better than FFT Advance. All those laws and crap. That game was a disappointment. I would still have preferred FFT on DS but hey, I'll take what I can get!

I'm not one of those girls who likes to use the word "slut" as an oddly affectionate term. Much as I love the site, the name of "Bookslut" always inspires just the slightest shiver of disapproval in me, but then, I suppose I am old-fashioned in some respects. Still, even the most matronly of observers would have to characterize my WoW behavior as a bit promiscuous.

I am in three guilds and am considering joining a fourth. Actually, I am past considering. I am at the stage where I beg the officer to let me in. Not that it will take much begging, I hope, as a lot of my friends are in the guild. Which is of course the main reason for my wanting to join.

Perhaps it's possible to have too many friends?

Of course I joined my first guild because I figured it was only fair to inflict my newbishness on the very folks who had convinced me to join up. Then one day I was messing about on an alt and remarked on how cute a guild name another player was sporting. He invited me to join immediately, and on a whim, I did. Then just a couple of nights ago I was on yet another alt romping in the lovely Blood Elf starting area when I fell into conversation with a girl who kindly kept me healed up as I stupidly blundered into Darkwraiths and we bonded over boys and cats. Then she invited me into her guild. We had bonded! What could I say?

Finally, last night I sat in on 1UP's podcast about World of Warcraft, Legendary Thread, in which they told me about their group guild. That's the one I am now wanting to join. Because to roam around Stranglethorn Vale with Skip and Karen and Luke and Jeff and Demian seems like online bliss!

I know I am crazy. I know this. Because I will have to start a new character on a new server and catch up to all of them. I'm aware of this - and that's why I started two last night. I couldn't decide between warrior and paladin. So they are both at level 7 now, sitting in Stormwind waiting for me to come play. Just as soon as I can.

ANY1 PLS GIVE ME ONE GOLD PLEASE!!!

The other day, someone in World of Warcraft was standing outside the bank in Darnassus spamming the general chat with this request. Predictably, he was met with derision. "Go farm it," and "Welcome to my ignore list" were popular, and natural, responses. When you're a newb, one gold seems like a lot, it's true; but as opposed to real life, it's much easier, and more predictably accomplished, to make money in the game. Simply find mobs, kill, loot, repeat.

Most people ignore spare changers in the game; but I can imagine someone flipping this guy a gold piece to shut him up. The logic behind spam is that it's so easy to do, even a .1% return rate is worth it. Is that worth all the other players who bumped your avatar to the ignore list, though?

I don't know if it's the brashness of youth or that there is a cultural shift, but I'm noticing behavior like this much more frequently, and not just in games. Someone emailed me recently with a "To Whom it May Concern" address, asking for sponsorship money in a gaming competition. I thought to myself, come on; in the real world, when you ask for sponsorship, you don't send blind emails - that's what Nigerian spammers do, and at least they do it poetically ("Dear beloved of God, I have heard of your worth..."). No, you do a little research. You find out the name of the person you're asking money of, at least. My name is all over this website - its not like I post here anonymously.

Well, at least the person asking me for money identified herself, and gave me some idea of what she was all about; because sometimes even that courtesy is not extended. On a mailing list I'm on, someone recently posted anonymously asking vaguely about being able to interview some members about their jobs in the game industry. No name, no self-intro, nothing. Just, "I'm coming into your community and asking you for things without giving anything in return because someone told me you were a great resource." And my paraphrasing is actually more elegant than the way the original writer phrased the request.

Predictably, there was no response for a while, and then someone teasingly pointed out that other members on the list may have been put off by the fact that the anonymous poster went by "Bugger" in the email address. The original poster then turned huffy and defensive, blaming the mailing list members for being judgemental.

There's another group I belong to, which is mainly made up of friends who are all generally polite to each other. However, once in a while a new person pops up and, apologizing for not providing a self-introduction, proceeds to ask for advice, help, contributions.

I can't stand this sort of behavior. It's rude. It's presumptuous. It says to the people who have spent time on the list, or in the group, I don't care enough about you to spend the time getting to know you or to let you get to know me; I need something from you, and I'll just ask for it. I don't respect the group that you have let me become a part of.

Okay, maybe I'm just cranky today. Things have been really busy around here and lots of people are asking me for lots of favors, and that is probably contributing to the tone of my post. But come on. Don't let your first post in the group simply be a request. Don't ask for help without first offering yours. And don't ask for a piece of gold unless you are a rogue that can open a Thorium lockbox. If you are, pst me! I've got some work for you.

Two weeks feels too short a time to spend in Paris, city of lights, especially duing winter when darkness falls so early and the lights start sparkling. It sometimes seemed we had just finished lunch and emerged sleepy and contented from the bistro, after two bottles of cheap and excellent wine and a hearty meal that ended with creamy cheese and strong coffee, and it was already nearly twilight. The light was pale and silvery, and just a few blocks away on the Champs Elysee we could see the graceful trees, stripped of leaves but adorned with white lights arranged in perfect spirals. I knew it was cliche but I couldn't help it - I was moved.

We were staying at the apartment of a friend of ours who was spending the holidays in San Francisco. His place was breathtakingly huge for Paris (or for San Francisco, for that matter.) Three bedrooms, a vast salon, an adorable kitched with bright blue tiles on the floor, and excellent heating. It was also situated in the posh 16th (ah, le seizième, said Jesse's mom with a grin when she heard) on the Avenue Kleber, next to the famous Hotel Raphael.

But I think my favorite feature of Parisian apartments is the proportion of the windows, tall, elegant, stately constructions that even the tiniest closet-sized box has.

Two weeks without touching, I swear to you, a single videogame. I couldn't even locate my DS Lite before my flight, so I didn't have my trusty Advance Wars or Fire Emblem to keep me company. And I didn't miss it at all.

Now of course I'm home and the DSL has mysteriously stopped working so I will need to bend my energies to fixing that if I'm to play any WoW this weekend.

Still, when the frigid air hits my cheek as I walk to work, I can't help thinking how much I miss Paris.

You know what you should do? You should integrate the Mii-making tool with Flickr and that odd little My Heritage app that makes everyone into a sexy star. (I got Ava Gardner.)

That would be awesome.

Thanks for everything!

Your Friend,

Jane

The other day I was jumping around in Ashenvale (my favorite thing about World of Warcraft - why run when you can jump? It's so much more fun) and I came across a pair of characters belonging to a guild called Altoholics Anonymous. I waved and jumped at them in glee, and I thought about joining the guild right then and there - because I'm totally an altoholic.

(The term Alt, in case you don't play MMOGs, refers to your alternate character, as opposed to the main character whom you have presumably brought up to level 60 and outfitted with all kids of elite special gear).

A couple of weeks ago as we were packing up for the day my colleagues asked me if I had big plans for the weekend. "Not much," I said. Then, I added quickly, "Just playing some Dungeons and Dragons."

That statement still elicits curious looks and a bit of laughter. It was even considered too nerdy for my friends at Ziff who get together to play nerd games (and that's what we called them, "nerd games." Board games like Puerto Rico and Shadows over Camelot, Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan.)

A shiny PS3 arrived in the office today, and I played a little Resistance: Fall of Man for a few minutes. I have to say I'm not terribly impressed. It doesn't look that "next-gen", it's got lame loading times (the true next-gen will come when we can destroy loading times once and for all - or at least, disguise them cleverly), and it feels very same-old, smae-old - it has the brownish, through-a-dirty-glass look of Call of Duty and plays like it, too. I wasn't really paying much attention to the exposition but even that is sloppily done - cut-scenes and voice-overs. Ho hum.

Am I just terribly, terribly jaded?

On IM yesterday with Eric: he asks if I'm going to play WoW later, I reply I'm not sure... "We're doing BWL" he mentions - Black Wing Lair, a notoriously difficult instance, and the one I watched last week whle the team wiped out again and again. I am obviously too lowly (level 10) to participate, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to, anyway. But I am curious about how it's going, I want to see how their new strategies are working out, especially now that I'm a member of the guild and feel personal attachment to the team.

I wish WoW had a spectator mode!

Saturday, I had a leisurely lunch with Eric, got to talking about things, including the only game that he plays seriously these days, World of Warcraft. Then suddenly, the afternoon sun was slanting down and Eric said, "I gotta get ready, I have a raid at 5 PM." "Can I watch?"

I'd been avoiding the game as if it were heroin because I knew, I knew what would happen if I let myself install and play. I knew that I didn't leave the house for a week during Dark Age of Camelot. I can't go back to that.

So, I watched Eric log in, meet up with teammates. They were doing a really tough raid that day, the same instance they hadn't been able to finish the week before. There were some new people, too, players who hadn't ever done the raid before, who needed to be walked through the details of the rather complicated strategy. There was tension. There was a lot of planning. Team leaders were in place, and positions assigned. No one was allowed to countermand orders in the instance. Once the battle began, it was over with everyone dead in about ten minutes.

"Hm," I said, and drew my chair up closer. Then it happened again, and again - the third time, the team lasted longer. They were learning from their mistakes, that was sure. It was incredibly compelling. After two hours I was desperately rooting for the team, watching all the life bars on screen ge chipped away little by little. "Come on, come on," I muttered to myself while Eric tried to outrun the dragon-things.

That night I installed my copy of the game and spent a few hours getting to level 8. I told Derek about it today and he said, "It seems like a random time to start." It does, and it is - but that's the way so many things happen to start, don't you think?

We used to play this game, my nerdy bookish friends and I, where we'd write a novel collectively, usually at a gathering that involved candles and wine and perhaps pot. Sometimes it was a story-telling format, all of us cross-legged facing the center of someone's parents' livingroom; sometimes it was in a faded notebook passed from hand to hand, paragraph by paragraph. Later, it mutated to the internet and lost that sense of gently getting drunk together off of ridiculous words.

Lately I'm staring to feel it again though, through the novelistic spam that arrives in my inbox. The short preview glimpse of the email often makes me want to read more. It tugs at my attention, distracts me from the business of the day, such as this one I got a few minutes ago: "Curse that Selmi, he has made mecatch cold! Now, with death,he would surmount them all.
He looked at his hands, his legs, and at oncefelt a thrill of horror."

It goes on:

Why, why had they been gathered up like thattogether?
Henceforward, he wasraised above everyone and everything.
Now Donna Caterina will die of a brokenheart. His hand strayed restlessly in his pocket.
And his fatherdied here, in my arms, at Milazzo.

In about an hour I will leave to head to the airport to catch a flight to Seattle, and thence to Bellevue, home of the Penny Arcade Expo. It will be an amazing time. I know this, because last year was amazing. I expect to be even more amazed this year.

No small feature: the weather in Seattle is forecasted to be 81, 82 degrees this weekend.

Ryan and I will be working on The 1UP Show from there.

Now, here's the news part: this will be my last 1UP Show. I'm leaving Ziff to work at CMP, as Conference Manager for the GDC.

I'll be reporting to Jamil Moledina, the Executive Director of the GDC; I'll be working on a new unannounced conference, as well as helping to program tracks and sessions for the GDC proper, in March, which will be in San Francisco again this year.

It's odd to think about leaving a place like Ziff because here, I get to be creative every day; I got to basically make up a position for myself and fit myself into it. I got to create a show that became a flagship product for the video wing of Ziff. I got to write emails to the team saying "I'm not coming into the office today because I'll be at home working on the new theme song." I got to work with talented and humane people who cared deeply about what they are doing. I learned a bunch of new skills and I met a bunch of new people.

Thank you, Ziff, and it goes without saying that I'll miss you terribly. You really did become like family to me. Never have I worked anywhere that felt like home; never have I had coworkers whom I've universally liked. We had a lot of laughs, surely, and concocted some tasty memories.

And now, I'm leaving to do the same thing - to conquer a new challenge, to meet more people, to do something I've never done before, to make a product I can be proud of.

Life never stops, so why should I?

Anyway, I'll write more later - from sunny Seattle!

I have a bad habit of making up fanciful passwords to various applications that require me to log in. Consequently, I've completely forgotten how to log in to my Movable Type account for umamitsunami.com. You may have noticed that I have not updated in a very long time. Part of that is ... that I've forgotten how to log in. An additional wrinkle is that I started the account before Movable Type unrolled their "recover your password" feature so I never set that up.

Any thoughts?

Today I spent two hours in a slightly stuffy conference room with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of some of my favorite games. I wasn't alone with him of course (zut alors) because he had his peeps and we had ours - everyone who's ever been to an industry event in San Francisco knows that Ziff rolls in a pack. So I was there along with the gang, talking about Lumines 2 and Every Extend Extra.

But we also talked about Miz's earlier games, Rez, Space Channel 5, even extending back to Sega Rally. At first glance, Sega Rally seems a departure for Miz - after all he's the guy who introduced gamers to Kandinsky and synesthesia. He's come a long way from racing games.

But I remember the first time I played Sega Rally - it was in Las Vegas, in, I believe, an arcade in the Luxor hotel. I saw this cabinet there - I'd never seen anything like it before - there were miniature cars. It was something like four dollars to ride, which at the time was a decent chunk of change. But I waited in line to ride it. When I got into the car and started up, the car jumped forward. Whoa. The speakers, surrounding me, blared not just music but sound effects so the engine rumbled below, tires squealed, and the navigator was perched right behind my shoulder saying in my ear, "Easy right. Easy right." It was a totally immersive experience. In fact, Miz was, even then, exploring the ideas that he'd go on to refine with Rez and Lumines.

Which goes to show that you can apply high-concept ideas about game development to even a fairly trite (at least to me) formula like racing games. Sega Rally really strove to take you out there in the field, just short of spattering you with mud.

I think that's pretty cool.

Seriously. I mean, I already get lost in a lot of FPS games. This game would make my head explode.

I was at my local game store on Sunday (the tabletop kind, not the electronic kind), walking off my World Cup woes (it's still too painful to talk about but oh Zizou why, why why?) when I came across World of Warcraft: The Board Game. I would have bought it except that it was almost ninety bucks. I'm intrigued, especially upon reading the official publisher's notes, explaining that it "is a team-based fantasy adventure. The Horde and the Alliance factions must compete to be the first to defeat the invincible Overlord...."

But hold on a minute, on the back it says it's for 2-6 players. How do you recreate World of Warcraft with two players? For that matter, how do you have competing teams with two players?

As I said, I'm intrigued. I have spent many happy hours on board games. Actually, I met Warren Spector over a board game, before I quite knew who he was, many years ago. But there's something odd about adapting a persistent-world MMOG to a board game that takes 4 to 6 hours and requires up to, but not more than, six players.

Board games ought to be solid enough to be good on their own, without the benefit of an electronic game tie-in. That is not to say that there are not natural correspondences between the two platforms, because some of the basic design principles are the same. Thus Risk works brilliantly as both a board game and an electronic game.

But some elements of board games are difficult, if not impossible, to recreate electronically. Diplomacy is an excellent game that, when I used to play it with a bunch of my Machiavellan friends, inspired hours of secret treaty-talk, backroom deals, slips of paper exchanged, and of course, backstabs and betrayals. In that setting it was extremely important to sit right across from the other players and read their eyes to see if there was a traitorous glimmer lurking there somewhere.

Because of E3 and E3-related activities, I have had little time to tend to my Animal Crossing town for the last month. But thanks to the miracle of time travel, I thought, I'd be able to take up just exactly where I left off. My animal friends will awake from dreamless sleeps believing the date to be May 5th.

Unfortunately, I miscalculated; I had actually stopped playing around April 27th, perhpas even the 26th. When I opened my town I was crushed. All the flowers I'd painstakingly cultivated were gone. My black and purple tulips, my blue pansies, my pink roses and tulips, weeks of hard work and tender care blown away by April's cruel wind. In their place dozens of weeds sprouted.

I know I have written about this before, but this sort of punishment is too strong for a gamer. Nintendo, you're asking the gamer to love their town, to invest in it, to take care of it; and so we do, but when we stray we're punished for our love. Feelings of loss , frustration, and then - an inevitable hardening of the heart follow.

With my black tulip gone, the town I was once so proud of seems deserted. Why should I stick around?

My boyfriend, Jesse, comes home to find me playing, yes, Oblivion. "Ooh, Oblivion, I've heard so much about this game."

He watches for about an hour, while reading the New York Times on the laptop. Then, "You know, the way you play, when people ask me about the game, I'm gonna be like, 'Oh, it's cool, it's a lot of jumping. Yup, jumping.'"

Come on! I was trying to raise my Acrobatics skill!

Like so many others of you now, I have a secret life. By day I toil in a cubicle, surrounded by the banal trappings of modern life, little electronic emitters that tie me to meaningless responsibilities - answering phones, emails, generating digital reams of content for ephemeral consumption. And all I can think about, every day, is that at 8 PM I will throw off this disguise as an ordinary mortal and embark in a world beset with peril as Thistle Rose, woodland elf and Ranger.

Thistle is an attractive creature, with brown eyes and dark hair, skin tanned nut-brown from spending her days in the woods and fields among forest creatures. She's made a lifelong study of regional plants, driven by her native curiority for ecology, which has allowed her to try her hand at alchemy. She prefers to make potions that help rather than hurt, although she's not above dipping her arrows in a little poison against the evil that stalks innocent people.

Some of you may know that I work at 1UP.com now producing a program called The 1UP Show. Basically, it's the beginning of an exploration of ideas I've had over the last few years, exploring them right here on GGA, and made possible now by the involvement of my friend and colleague Ryan O'Donnell. Before we got hired at Ziff Davis--and we were hired within ten minutes of eachother, funny enough--we had often sat on Ryan's balcony sketching out our ideas, dreaming of wacky things, including a puppet show about games. Yeah, that one didn't work out. Yet.

At 1UP, we got the chance to essentially do what we wanted. We knew we wanted to cover videogames on video, but we weren't sure how to proceed, since Ryan didn't like my puppets. Just kidding. We knew what we liked, and what we didn't. We tried to do a roundtable show early on, but we found it dull as dishwater--so dull that the format actually obscured the interesting conversation and the personalities.

The first time we tried to do something completely different was the one-off "Gaming to the Max" which was the video segment to complement Jeremy Parish's week-long SNES Retro/Active feature, a time warp in which we treated SNES games like current products. Yeah, it was really silly and, looking back on it, really flawed, but given our time constraints and the fact that we aren't actors the project schematic was too ambitious. We definitely learned from that.

I haven't been able to write about this much yet because although it seems silly, but it's still painful to talk about. On the flight back from the DICE Summit, I lost my DS--which had sentimental value for me because my boy gave it to me for Valentine's Day. But more crushingly, the DS had in it my copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World, and my town, to which I had become greatly attached.

After all, I was about 10,000 bells away from paying off my third mortgage.

I had caught all the fish for winter, including the rare one that shows up only when it snows or rains, and had selflessly donated them to the museum. I had bred the purple tulip and was on my way to getting the rare black tulip.

I had collected the "exotic" set of furniture. I had decorated my cozy little house with bonsai trees. I had a "music room" with my favorite gyroids. I had I had gotten pictures from my dearest animal friends, Aurora and Pompom and Dizzy and even the snobby Maelle and Baabara. I'd made a killing on the speculative turnip market. I'd carefully cultivated friendships, writing flattering notes like clockwork twice a day.

I won the fishing tourney.

And most of all, I had the satisfaction of watching my town grow over the winter, with new flowers blooming and every kind of fruit dripping from the trees in my orchards; I loved my town theme song, I designed my town flag; in every way, I had made it my town.

I only hope that somewhere a sympathetic stranger has picked up my DS, turned it on, and has marveled at the fact that I have a golden watering can. Perhaps that kindly stranger will act as a guardian of my town, picking weeds and watering the flowers, posing as me to my animal friends to keep them happy.

But that's the way it is at DICE. You literally run into Will Wright, Lorne Lanning, Sid Meier, David Jaffe, Greg Zeschuk. Ryan ran into Greg in the first twenty minutes of the conference, in the men's room. "Oh hey," says Ryan. "Hi," says Greg. "By the way," Greg adds, "Ray [Muzyka] won the celebrity poker tournament last night." ZIP!

It's enough to make you feel giddy.

We got a lot of material for the 1UP Show, great interviews with Warren Spector, with Ray and Greg, who talked about what an elegant game poker is (it was really all I could do not to go fangirl on them about KOTOR, NWN, Baldur's Gate, and so on).

We had maybe the craziest interview I've ever had with anyone...with David Jaffe. It was the last day, I think we were all low on sleep, and the interview spanned such topics as message boards, cunnilingus (blame my colleague Shane for that one), gross-out candy, and how much the technology of 1UP.com sucks. (Well, it does - we all know it's slow as shit.) By the end David had to run and I felt like I'd been hit by a bus. What the hell just happened? I don't know if we can use any of it but it was surely an experience. You'll see on the next 1UP show.

And now it's Saturday morning, almost noon; I've slept for ten hours but I still feel like I could use a nap!

We tried to get to the DICE Awards show on time. Really, we did. But Ryan and I fell in step with Frank Cifaldi from Gamasutra on our way out of David Jaffe's talk. Well, first I had to do my write-ups. Then I started chatting with the fellow sitting next to me, who was Frank, and who happened to be a Las Vegas native.

After I sent in my write-ups and ran around a bit looking for people to talk to, we saw Frank again. "Want to get out of here?" he asked us. He said he was going to a real bar, off the strip.

I've been off the strip a few times. My band played here...twice, I think?? I can't remember. Anyway, we played in a couple of shitty hole-in-the-wall bars. Also, I've stayed with two people who both lived off the strip, one guy who was attending UNLV at the time, and another guy who was a professional...player, I guess. You couldn't call him a gambler, he'd say he doesn't gamble; he plays the odds. In fact he offered me a job being his partner. I have not yet taken him up on it.

In any case, Frank took me and Ryan to a bar that was near UNLV, but not exactly a college bar since another, cheesier bar closer to the university filtered out a lot of the students.

The bar was a dive, of course, which was perfect; and, according to Frank, it was the only bar in Las Vegas that didn't have a slot machine. And it didn't. It all felt very...real.

Microsoft launched the official website for Perfect Dark Zero. It's bland and corporate.

But what concerns me is, since when do we call these screenshots?!?

This is an ongoing project of mine - figuring out how video games have affected us. There have been several humorous takes on this, and yesterday I wrote up my own, tongue-in-cheeky-like. But the point is real. I've discussed this many times with other gamers. The way we play has deeply affected the way we deal with RL space. Ryan says he's more aware of vertical dimensions now; I think I'm actually a better navigator sometimes. And othertimes, I think I have becomne a WORSE navigator, because of my over-reliance on the HUD map.

As I thought about combat games, I wondered, does the fact that I play so many tactical games actually translate to more tactical experience in the field? This may be especially true now that I'm playing Fire Emblem with a "no man left behind" policy, which makes the game that much harder, but is perhaps more like real combat, where if at all possible you don't want to lose any of your men, especially if you only have a fixed number of them.

Does being good at Final Fantasy Tactics make me a good field commander in the armed forces?

I've been playing a lot of Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones lately. On the way to work, on the way home. Sitting on the couch while watching TV. Sitting on the couch while I intend to play something else, some other, bigger, more important game, like God of War, or Jade Empire.

But it's Fire Emblem that really calls to me, with its 2D graphics and melodramatic, hokey storyline. And as I play it, I have to ask myself, what makes me care so much about this game?

Penny-Arcade just announced that Nintendo would be an exhibitor at this year's PAX! How cool is that? I've often heard criticism that Nintendo is too aloof, too closed, but at least someone in their marketing department is doing something right.

I'm gonna be there this year. How about you?

Now that I am one of the working classes again, I value being able to waste an entire weekend to playing and replaying a favorite game. (Carth, did you miss me?) The downside is, Monday hurts, what with my gaming hangover.

Upside is, my co-workers understand. I walked in from the kitchen to overhear one of my colleagues raving about System Shock II, which he had played all weekend. The International News Editor, who sits right next to me, is a WoW addict. He's only four levels away from reaching the cap. There are games around me all the time. We talk about games constantly. What we like, what we hate, and why. I've got three monitors in my cube and they are lit up all the time. I feel like my brain is going to explode from all the stimulation. But of course I think it's great.

I could do - and have done - a lot of different jobs. But this is the first time that a straight office job meshed so well with my leisure pursuits: not only the gaming thing, but the writing thing, which has been my "thing" since the time I was in second grade and composed an epic poem about dolphins. Writing has been my constant companion in times dark and bright. Getting to - having to - do this day in, day out, is challenging, but exhilerating.

I worry sometimes about burnout. When your money-source is also your pleasure-source, you find yourself doing the same thing all the time. I wondered about this in regard to my music-making, also: if suddenly my passion became my job, would I take less pleasure in it? There's something to be said for having the kind of job you enjoy, but which you can leave at the office. Is it suffocating to want to take that work everywhere with you and have it infuse your life? Is that healthy?

But back to the job. There are offices, and then there are offices. I think in general offices with toys are better than ones without.

Hello my smart readers, I'm interviewing Peter Molyneux next week. What are some of the things you'd want to know? It's always tough to think of questions he hasn't already been asked a thousand times, like "where did you get the idea for x game"; so if you have some interesting questions you've been mulling over, let me know!

We're playing Animal Crossing. The little town is sadly overgrown with weeds, and most animals have moved away. He logs on and explores, it's all new to him. He talks to an animal, who chirps about a resident named "justy". Oh. My ex-boyfriend. We used to play the game together, of course.

Strange how his presence remains here, on this little memory card, in the the memories of my neighbors who rhapsodize about his letter-writing skills or the fact that they used to play and play and play all day.

I've watched a lot of porn in my day, enough so that it's gotten just a little boring. Maybe you have to be male to appreciate the super-genital close-up cam? Or just a fetishist? What I liked about porn was, and I know this makes me a stereotypical girl, the story. The situations the girls would get themselves into - oh my! The anticipation, the (sometimes) danger of seduction - but so few films focus on those aspects. In any case I admit I'd grown a bit disenchanted with the genre.

And then I discovered the Voyeur series. Needless to say continuing to read this will take you into very un-worksafe territory.

A few weeks ago I was deeply immersed in playing Summoner, an early RPG by THQ that I bought around the same time I got my first PS2. I've finished the game, oh, maybe three times already. And I mean really finished it - completed every side quest and maxed out my characters (well, nearly). As the classic Evil Summoner FAQ eloquently describes, the game itself is a piece of shit. Badly designed, badly written (except for one mildly interesting plot twist), frustrating, and inflexible.

"God, I hate this game," I'd mutter while guiding my clumsy characters through yet another prolongued FedEx quest. "You say that all the time," my boyfriend observed. "So why do you play?"

I was chilling at home one evening when I got a phone call from a friend, which I didn't answer because my phone was in my bag and the ringer was too low. Later I listened to his message: "Dude, I just saw you on TV!"

It was the documentary I was interviewed for that aired on the Game Show Network. It's a bit intimidating - or something - to go to the program schedule and see SEVEN HOURS of Jeopardy!. But the network isn't just about gameshows, in spite of the name; because they aired "Video Game Invasion" last week.

I haven't seen it yet. I'm scared to watch myself. This is the third time I've been interviewed for television about games, on three different continents. One was for GamerTV in Japan, the other for a documentary on the Arte network in Europe, and then this one. I don't think I've ever watched my taped self talking about games.

Well, let me know how it is if you come across it.

P.S. GDC rocks. More later.

Videogaming and Its Discontents on Salon.

Maybe an extreme opinion - I wanted to shake things up a little.

It was inspired in part by Bowler's Death of a Hobby article, so thank you! Thanks also to everyone I was able to interview and just bounce ideas off of - your brainpower and perspective were invaluable. Thank you so much!

Chris Hecker emailed me last week: "Masaya Matsuura sent us a copy of Mojibribbon. Doug and I are going to play it. But you need to come translate."

This is one game that won't be ported to North America or Europe. It's far too Japanese. Developed by the auteur Masaya Matsuura at his niche company NanaOn-sha (home of the inimitable Parappa the Rapper and Um Jammer Lammy), it's a game in which you write kana to the rhythm of a Japanese rap.

Yeah, it's as weird as it sounds. But more beautiful than you can imagine.

Gameplay is devastatingly simple to pick up: you use the analog stick to create words in rhythm. You move it up to ink your brush, and press down to write. If you don't have enough ink on your brush, the letter are light and hard to read; if you have too much, they letters are blotchy. If you press down too lightly you skip a letter; if you press too hard, the letters come out thick and clumsy. I've never seen a game before that made aesthetic harmony the goal of the game.

My copy of Manhunt came yesterday from Rockstar. The FedEx guy who dropped it off joked, "Well, there goes your afternoon, right?"

"Oh, right, ha ha." I signed for the package.

The package, this morning, still sits unopened on the coffee table. I stare at it with trepidation. I'm home, alone. I've turned in my article assignments and I deserve a break. The fact is, I am scared to play this game. Scared to even take it out of the package.

Can someone come over? Just let me hide my eyes on your shoulder during the bad parts, and tell me it's going to be okay.

My sister has been playing a lot - and I do mean a lot of SSX3. I've played it quite a bit too. But while I'm busy buying Kaori a tiara and a teddy-bear back-pack, Anne has pumped all her hard-earned cash into attributes.

"How can you?" I say, somewhat perplexed. "Aren't you tempted to buy her new clothes?"

Anne fixes a steely gaze on me. "Listen, Zoe came from a tough background. She's used to poverty. She's not going to waste her money on accessories. She wants to win."

Roleplaying a racing game! I love it.

We broke up. I moved out. We divided our possessions. All the hardware was mine - the Xbox, the Gamecube, the PS2; most of the software, his. A sad sifting of the content of two lives once shared.

It all went fairly smoothly - until we discovered that we both had large game files on one Xbox. No problem, Justin said, I can probably copy them over using ethernet. So he bought a new Xbox and I brought over mine one afternoon and we tried to transfer our respective games. Just to be on the safe side, I had brought along an official Xbox-approved memory card.

Turns out the saved games we want the most - KOTOR, which we both love - won't fit on a Microsoft-licensed Xbox memory card.

Justin is a man of action. He promptly called customer support. "I have two Xboxes," he said breathlessly. "A memory card that's too small and an ethernet cable. Lets try to figure this out."

Impossible, he was told. There was no way to transfer my saved games.

"That's ridiculous," Justin countered. He doesn't back down easily. "There are a lot of brilliant people at Microsoft and you can't tell me that they didn't think of this problem. Now we're going to stay on the phone and fix it together."

Not possible.

"Well, could I get a bigger memory card then?"

That is the biggest memory card Microsoft makes.

Justin started to get frustrated. "Okay, maybe I could talk to someone else who would know how to help me?"

No one knows, because it's impossible.

"So you're telling me it's not possible for my ex-girlfriend to take with her her own saved games? I can't believe that! You make it sound like hacking my Xbox is a good idea!"

Three hours later, the last phone call in a series of stymied attempts to do a simple data transfer was over, and we both stared at the one Xbox that jealously guarded both our saved games. It is unlockable. We've got the book. The great black box sat implacable, a challenge and a dare.

But not today. "You keep it," I said, finally. "You're sick."

I met Todd Holoubeck at the Machinima Festival last Saturday, at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. He's got a laid-back, friendly demeanor and regularly peppers his conversation with "dude". He is part of a live improv Machinima group called Reverend FunnyPants. Taking inspiration from the medieval art of Commedia dell'Arte, the troop perform in a multi-user virtual public space. If you have trouble imagining what this looks like, don't worry - I've never seen anything like it, and you probably haven't either!

Todd teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU. He graciously allowed me to visit. The topic of the day was examining narrative strategies through Quicktime VR - basically, you take a series of photos by rotating the camera in one spot. The cool thing is you can insert objects or people multiple times in one session, thus creating lots of surreal images.

Part of classtime was hands-on, making our own narrative - I got to participate! Todd put up the final product here. Click in the photo area and pull with the mouse to see. I'm in the sparkly pink sweater!

Like many other women, I love clothing, especially shoes. When you find that really killer pair of sexy heels, and you slip them on and they feel so damn perfect on your feet, and miraculously your feet seem to be the most adorable, beautiful feet you've ever seen - well, you can imagine what sort of endorphin rush you get from that feeling. You don't ever have to wear them out; simply owning them is enough to satisfy the covetous breast.

I also have a thing for sleek gadgets. Apple really gets this - the power of the object itself to inspire desire. And when I was in Asobit in Akihabara recently, I saw something that I had to acquire, with a passion that surprised me: the GBA SP in pearl pink.

I'm in the process now of putting together an adventure in a brand-new world which I will administer as Game Mistress. The activity consumes my energy. I have started maps, NPC descriptions, historical appendices, character and location sketches. It's the kind of thing I love to do - get all snarky with the details. But I've never done it before. Sure, when I was a kid, I wrote a series of fantasy adventures that took place in an invented world - but that was all for me. Now I'm supposed to allow other people in who might very well change the way things are!

I wanted some help. So I asked some people for advice, but I also found a great deal of helpful material at Burning Void, which is geared towards publishing your adventure but contains a rich store of good advice, nearly all of it written by Heather Grove. Ms. Grove believes passionately in free will - that is, the players' playing the game rather than the GM's telling a story. The story should be something that emerges from play.

I relaly love that idea. Who knows what could happen? So although the novelist part of me balks at losing narrative control, the obsessive-compulsive detail freak in me revels at the thought of packing in the possibilities. The play space will be Victorian/steampunk, in the middle of an industrial and technological revolution. So there will be all sorts of tensions and potential conflicts. Will my players become rich capitalists? Will they join the workers' cause? Will they fall in with bandits and highwaymen? Will they become arms smugglers or diplomats? Inventors or saboteurs? Or something I haven't even thought of yet?

A few nights ago we were driving to get Korean food along Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. I had heard from friends at Ogre Cave that there was a new games and hobbies store in Oakland somewhere around 47th street, near the Temescal Cafe, so we kept an eye out for it.

We passed the corner. "Hey!" I shouted, "!Hey! isn't there anymore! It's been replaced by It's Your Move!"

I never thought this would happen. My loves pitted against each other - fashion versus gaming. !Hey! used to be one of my favorite clothing stores, small, funky, with lots of unusual and cute clothes in my size, run by a sweet Filippino man who also ran a gallery in the back room. When I used to get coffee at the Temescal Cafe every weekend, I'd also be sure to make a stop in the store, chat with the proprietor, and check out what was new in stock. Obviously I didn't go there enough! Because now it's gone, and with it, all the frilled blouses, slim-cut trousers, and floral handbags. Sigh.

I almost didn't want to go into It's Your Move; I felt it would be a betrayal. But Justin conviced me. We wandered in, around eight p.m., and though I think the store was closed, there were young men gathering at tables in the back.

"Okay, so this is a D&D game," I overheard as I pretended to look at an expansion pack for Apples to Apples, "I'll use some third edition rules and some of the new rules. So let's roll up some first-level characters. Three dice, re-roll ones, and throw out the lowest set."

I felt an expanding of warmth in my heart. "You want to play?" whispered Justin. I think he could see the gleam in my eye. I did, indeed. But we were also hungry. "Maybe next time," I whispered back.

We walked out of the store into the evening. I'll have to find my pretty skirts and lovely accessories elsewhere. Luckily, there's an Anthropologie opening up in Emeryville, very soon. And that's not likely to be replaced by a Wizards of the Coast store anytime soon.

I hope.

It's very lonely to be evil.

That was my revelation playing the Neverwinter Nights expansion, Shadows of Undrentide, last night. Who's going to adventure with you? Most of the henchmen will balk at what you do. Moreover, the evil assassin stalks her prey alone, so even an animal companion or a familiar - like the fire-breathing Hell Hound, which would be a perfect choice for any evil character - gets in the way. With that triple-damage sneak attack and stealth, it's easy to walk up to the unsuspecting and knife them in the back. Even easier if they're not hostile to begin with.

And once you've killed all the townspeople and the guards, who's around to talk to?

Okay, maybe I go to great evil lengths - more than normal even for evil. I racked up the "evil" and "chaotic" points, maxing out after about twenty minutes of play. I almost never play evil - it's not in my nature. But when I'm a villain, I'm a villain all the way. I went on something of a bender last night - a massacre, a killing spree. I was alone, at home, playing with the sounds turned up high for atmospheric intensity. It started as simply an experiment. Who would I be allowed to kill?

(GenCon Journal entry date: July 27, 2003)

An true-blue Midwestern thunderstorm is roiling outside: violent illumination followed by long rolling growling of the sky. It's blood-racing, exhilerating. The humidity in the air, heavy and warm, puts me in something of a trance - a light-as-air sensation, the edges of reality shimmering just a little bit. I've been up all night and I can still taste the cigar.

Friends of White Wolf are commited to adventure. They have something of a wild reputation - rumors of rowdy reveling gone awry, fist fights, outbursts, that sort of thing. It's true that they passionately embrace the good time. When it's time to party, they will party hard. I was swept along on this tidal wave of drink, bonhomie, and singing, and I'm still gasping for air. I think I can prove now what I've always suspected, that when bad boys are baaaad they are so good.