The Great Milo Hoax Of 2009

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Hay Kidz! It's the Busy Season!

It's that time of year. Time when I see the Fed Ex delivery man more than I see my imaginary girlfriend. Time when I am literally buried beneath a gamevalanche--that's an avalanche of games, people--and the rescue team won't be deployed until December at the earliest. Time when my wrists are sore, my thumbs ache, and my right eye twitches involuntarily--it's doing it now, even as I type this--because I have stared at my television for a thoroughly unhealthy number of hours in a row.

That time.

Fact: It is not uncommon for me to require an eye exam each January because of all the high-definition damage I do to my retinas in October and November.

Some numbers: I have spent at least 40 of the last 48 hours gaming. Here's a fly-by of what I've seen: Fable 3, Vanquish, the new God Of War on the PSP, Rock Band 3, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, Divergent Shift and X-Scape on the DS, Sonic The Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, Costume Quest, Def Jam Rap Star, random iPhone games like Naughty Bear and Angry Birds Halloween, and, inexplicably, just because I had a strange hankering for it, a few rounds of Star Fox 64 on the Virtual Console. While you've been eating, sleeping, or playing with your kids or pets, while you've been talking to your Uncle Bill on the phone--hi, Uncle Bill--or re-reading a Nicholas Sparks novel, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, I have been gaming.

I now pronounce you Man and Game. You may kiss the Game.

My couch has retained a lawyer in the name of taking out a restraining order against me. Sample of the courtroom proceedings in Jones Vs. Couch: "Mr. Jones, my client claims that you routinely farted into him, with the number of farts often exceeding 20 farts per day. Do you deny this, Mr. Jones? And remember, you are under oath."

Me: [I shoot a how-could-you-betray-me look across the courtroom at Couch.]

That photo up above? That's a shot of the coffee table in my living room. Whenever I run out of square footage on the table, my only option is to go vertical. So what rises up before me is a kind of relief map of the holiday gaming season. It literally becomes a mountain range of discs and game boxes, instruction booklets and peripherals. Like strata in a geological dig, good games tend to stay near the top of the mountains (Vanquish, Dead Rising 2, Kirby's Epic Yarn) while the bad games (Medal Of Honor, The Force Unleashed 2) sink to the bottom, never to be seen again until I get the chance to clean up this godforsaken mess at the end of the year.

It's no wonder that my girlfriend is "imaginary." (Which is only slightly less terrible than "inflatable.")

Vic and I have an acronym that we use during this season. It's A.B.G.: Always Be Gaming. No matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, this time of year it's essential that we constantly game. A.B.G. means making sure that your portables--DS, PSP, iPhone, iPad--are charged and ready to go if you're going to be away from your consoles for a few hours. A.B.G. means starting a download via PSN before getting into the shower, so the download will be completed by the time you've finished washing. It means waking up in the morning and turning on the 360 before you've had your coffee, while it's still dark outside--these days the sun doesn't come up in Vancouver until 7:30 or so--just to squeeze in a few more levels, another boss, another power-up, or more experience points.

Always Be Gaming.

Always.

I can't believe this is my fucking life. Man!

See what happens when you stay in school, don't do drugs (well, except for that one time) (and that one other time), and eat your vegetables, kids? You get to have an insane job.

Cue the "Don't Stop Believing" song.

You know the one.

Confessions of GameStop Employee

A few short days before Crispy Gamer suddenly stroked out, pooped itself, and went to website heaven--R.I.P., old girl--I met a man who had recently done a stint behind the counter at a New York City-area GameStop. As he told me his tales of woe, I began to write them down, hoping to turn the stories into a much larger piece for CG.

Once CG gave up its ghost, I figured there was no reason for this story--which felt important to me--to die along with it. The result: a massive seven thousand-word piece that my friend, writer and editor Susan Arendt, agreed to publish in The Escapist Magazine.

Susan helped trim the story down to a more manageable size, then came up with the idea to split the story into four smaller sections and run it over the course of four weeks. She also urged me to change the pseudonym of the protagonist from "Peppy Hare" to "Ben" (another good call, SA).

Whether Peppy/Ben is dealing with irate moms, learning the fine art of "gutting duty," schooling kids in Super Smash Bros., or putting a stop to budding criminals, his stories consistently offer cool, oddball insights into videogame culture.

A sample:

"Gamers on message boards constantly say - and yes, they typically write the following in caps - 'HOW CAN THEY SELL AN OPEN COPY OF A GAME AS NEW WTFFFFFFF GAMESTOP SUX BALLZ?' The answer from GameStop's corporate perspective is this: Gutting keeps shrink to a minimum. Definition of shrink: Customer theft. Irrefutable fact: If you put an empty box on the shelf, there is no incentive whatsoever for a thief to steal it."

Now that the fourth and final section has been published in TEM, you can read the whole damn thing, in its entirety, right here.

Also: Peppy/Ben, I promised to split my paycheck for the story 50-50 with you. So please come to the window to collect your much-deserved winnings.

And if anyone else out there has a story that you'd like me to tell, you know where you can find me.

One last: follow Susan on Twitter. She's the best.

Who Wants To Get Together And Shoot Some Brown People This Weekend?

On a recent brisk Vancouver afternoon, while shooting our review of Medal of Honor for the show, Vic and I got into a heated Crossfire-style debate over the merits of turning real-world conflicts into armchair entertainments.

We hadn't planned on doing this. Our original goal was to have a semi-lucid conversation about the game's multiplayer modes. But suddenly, there we were, doing something neither of us expected to be doing.

It was awkward. It was uncomfortable. But it was real, and necessary. And not completely unenjoyable.

Vic posits that building a virtual experience, as Medal of Honor does, around up-to-the-minute news headlines helps expose gamers to issues that are currently going on in the world, that these virtual experiences can be didactic and enlightening and fortifying, and, finally, that games need to start attempting to work with, or at least wrestle with, this kind of trickier, more mature material if they are ever going to get anywhere. (I think that's a fair approximation of Vic's points. Vic: If it's not a fair approximation, kick me underneath the desk. Yes, we sit across from one another, just like in old-time detective movies.)

I heard Vic. He made some good points. But I don't agree with him.

Not because I enjoy disagreeing with Vic--which I do (oh, how I do)--but because I can't get behind what he's saying. Games, at this point in time, are simply not equipped to offer any sort of mature commentary on, or virtual approximation of, what's happening in Afghanistan.

Now, I'm not going to pretend that I fucking even know what's going on in Afghanistan. Yes, I read the papers and watch the news. From what I can gather from the media, it's an arid pit of death, misery and despair of epic proportions. Awful, nightmarish shit happens there on a moment to moment basis. Your own soldiers, it seems, are far more likely to kill you by mistake than anything else. Sad, complex dramas play out each day--dramas that are throughly unique to this conflict.

What happens in EA's Medal of Honor, I'm 100-percent certain, has absolutely nothing to do with what is actually happening there.

Nothing.

At all.

Let's face it: At this juncture, videogames are unfortunately still only capable of reducing complex, happening-now experiences to one or two-note entertainments. Which is what Medal of Honor is: a tepid one-note reduction of a complex, painful, fucked-up-beyond-belief story that is so base and lowbrow that it's not an honor at all but an insult.

You can't take all of this fucked up shit and turn it into a high-resolution shooting gallery and put a $60 price tag on it.

You can't.

Worse still, if you're in the mood to shoot brown-skinned people wearing turbans--or "towel-heads," as one of our neighbors so affectionately called them when I was growing up--this is the game for you. EA's best customers, I'd imagine, are the people who show up to protest the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero. Hand out some Medal of Honor demos down there, EA. I'm sure those people will find your game thoroughly entertaining.

The bottom line is this: If you've got something serious or important or profound to say, about the war in Afghanistan, or anything else for that matter, a videogame at this moment in time is the absolute last medium you should attempt to say it in.

Re-watch Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. The locale was different--Iraq, not Afghanistan--but I learned more about the type of horse shit soldiers deal with in the Middle East from that three-minute, claustrophobic barracks fist-fight scene--you know the one--than I did from Medal of Honor in its entirety. I learned more from watching Jeremy Renner's character shop for fucking cereal than I did from Medal of Honor in its entirety.

Look at M.A.S.H. I watched that show religiously when I was kid. I saw how the soldiers lived, in their impossibly flimsy canvas tents. (Which seemed flimsier still whenever bombs would fall on their unit.) Sure, there were plenty of good times between B.J. and Hawkeye and Hot Lips and Colonel Potter, and their never-ending quest to foil nemesis Frank Burns. But there were lots of terrible, shitty, god-awful times, too. Choppers would suddenly arrive in droves at least once per episode carrying the dead and the wounded. Watching doctors exchange quips and barbs and zingers, and flirt and insult one another, all while being elbow-deep inside the chests of dead or dying soldiers tells you volumes about the human condition, and about how people endure and survive these sorts of beyond-hellish circumstances.

Games can't possibly hope to enlighten us in these ways. They will one day--oh, they'll enlighten us in ways that we can't even imagine, trust me--but right now, they can't.

They can't.

How puny Medal Of Honor seems when you hold it up next to Oliver Stone's Platoon, or Coppola's Apocalypse Now, or Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, or HBO's The Pacific, or Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," or Wolff's "In Pharaoh's Army," or Jerzy Kosinski's "The Painted Bird."

How puny. How small. How pathetic.

Man, I am all for pushing the envelope, for seeing games do things that they've never done before, for making me feel things that I've never felt before. But when a game set in a fictional post-apocalyptic wasteland--I'm talking about Fallout: New Vegas now--has more nuance and subtext and depth and intelligence than a game about the war in Afghanistan, and can evoke emotions ranging from heartbreak and anger to frustration and exhilaration, that's a grave, grave problem that needs to be addressed, and right quick.

How Multiplayer Sometimes Does More Harm Than Good

It was Canadian Thanksgiving here last week. Which was strange, because no one really seems to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving. All the shops and restaurants and bars and poutine vendors are open, like any other day. The post office and the banks are closed. But otherwise, it's a day off for people, little more.

I met Thumb-Blaster for breakfast at the White Spot on West Georgia Street. White Spots are the Canadian version of Denny's, only less cheery. They smell vaguely of bleach and depression. Strippers and old people eat here. Everything on the menu is incredibly cheap. Thumb-Blaster and I both got huge piles of cheap, terrible food for less than $10.

The project T.B. is currently working on includes a significant multiplayer component. So he witnesses, in a very tangible way, what building multiplayer does to a development team. At best, it sounds like a nuisance. At worst, it sounds like a time and energy sink-hole, a Kafka-like act of futility and despair for the people working on it.

T.B., despairing a little, asked me why game reviewers inevitably subtract points from a game's review score if multiplayer isn't part of the package. "Faulting a game for not having multiplayer is like faulting a movie for not being in 3-D," Thumb Blaster said. "Imagine a movie reviewer saying, 'This movie was really great, but since it is not in 3-D, I'm docking it a couple of points. Next time, MAKE IT IN 3-D, YOU DOPES."

T.B. had a point. Remember BioShock? (How could you forget? I seem to refer to it in almost every post on this goddamn blog.) Nearly every review across the board fawned over the game, but at some point included some variation on the following disparaging sentence: "There's no multiplayer in the game, which seems like a missed opportunity."

The fact that BioShock 2 included multiplayer--you asked for it, you got it, reviewers!!!!!!!!--is one of those things that will pain me until the end of my days. It is complete and utter shit. No one is playing it. No, not even the reviewers who asked for it apparently can be bothered to play it. And the people who worked on it? They've probably have either hanged themselves, or gone insane, or now manage a Borders in Pittsburgh.

While leafing through the October issue of Game Informer, I found a short interview with Ken Levine, who is given the bulk of the credit for making the original BioShock so terrific. (Note: He had little to nothing to do with BioShock 2.) The question put to him by the writer was this: What is Irrational's approach to multiplayer in BioShock: Infinite?

"Our approach hasn't changed," he says. "Every game we did prior to BioShock had a multiplayer component, and I don't think it mattered. It always came out of a request of a marketing department.

"If you look at multiplayer, either you are going to do something that's profound, or you're wasting your time. Absolutely wasting your time. Because what are people going to do? You're going to have a couple thousand people play it for a few weeks, then they're going to go back to the great multiplayer games [like] Call of Duty, Gears of War, Halo, Left 4 Dead.

"My feeling always has been if there is an idea that is organic to the product and is profound and is going to move people and excite people and really add a dimension to the product that is not just good for the product but stands on its own as a game, then you do it. If you don't have that, you don't do it.

"At this point, we haven't made a determination about whether or not we have something that's profound enough, or what exactly our thinking is here."

I love this sentence so much, that I think anyone who crabbed about the lack of multiplayer in BioShock should be forced to read it once a day for the rest of their lives: If you look at multiplayer, either you are going to do something that's profound, or you're wasting your time.

Go ahead. Read it again. And again.

Thumb-Blaster and I ate our syrup-soaked pancakes in silence. I noticed that there were no windows in the restaurant. It was midday outside, but inside it was gloomy and damp, as if the whole building was submerged at the bottom of the ocean. At a nearby table, an old man let out an overly dramatic, Big Daddy-like yawn...

What Happens In The Studio Doesn't Always Stay In The Studio

There's a lot of naturally occurring downtime during our Reviews on the Run shoots. Lots of low-brow joking--the lower the brow, the better. Lots of playful insults. Lots of toilet humor. And, apparently, lots of spontaneous dancing.

What I neglect to remember sometimes is that all of this is being filmed.

The editors pieced together this montage--without my permission, of course--which I believe is something of an homage to the closing dance number of the Academy Award winning film, Slumdog Millionaire.

And yes, when I am trying to insert my index finger into my clenched fist, the clenched fist is something of an homage to a butthole.

The Proper Way to Pan Halo: Reach

My friend John Teti has a website which he uses as an aggregator for the various writings he does for various publications. (Bookmark it, if you haven't done so already. John's one of the best writers I know.) Taking a page from the J. Teti playbook--this isn't the first time I've stolen a page from you, sir--I've decided to also post links to the stories I write during spare moments away from the show. Last week my review of Halo: Reach appeared in The A.V. Club. Here's a sample:

"The original Halo was many things—space opera, technical achievement, irrefutable proof that first-person shooters on consoles didn’t have to be mediocre—but above all, the first game was a love story between a 7-foot-tall super-soldier and a tiny blue virtual woman. Within seconds of seeing each another, Cortana asks the Master Chief if he slept well during his cryogenic sleep. “No thanks to your driving, yes,” he quips. She smiles, cocks her head, and says, “So you did miss me.” For the remainder of the game, these two flirt and banter like a new-media version of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

The new Halo: Reach doesn’t have a single relationship—or for that matter, a single moment—that displays this kind of relatable humanity. Instead, it gives us a squad of anonymous super-soldiers who, over the course of the game, literally disappear inside their own hyperbolic armor."

Read the rest of the review here. Better still, read the lengthy, sometimes clever, sometimes cruel, but consistently funny comment digression below the review. (290 comments so far and counting.) I'm telling you, these are the finest comment threads in the world, bar none. I love-hate you all.

This was not an easy review to write. Writing a review for a game that perpetuates a beloved franchise, as Reach does, is always challenging. I did not like the game. (I've liked each successive game in the series markedly less than the game that preceded it.) And trying to articulate why I've grown cold towards the Halo zeitgeist, which seems to still be cresting even as I type this--note the extraordinary number of perfect scores on Metacritic--was no small task.

The review went through two drafts, neither of which sat well with my editors. I promised to deliver a third, mind-blowing draft to their desks--well, virtually to their desks; they're in Chicago, and I'm in Vancouver--first thing the next morning. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't stop thinking about the review. What exactly was I trying to say here? I realized I wasn't alone in bed that night. Self-doubt, that old cold-handed witch, had gotten under the covers with me.

Part of me, if I'm going to be completely honest, wanted to quit in this moment. I wanted to say, "Get someone else. Because I can't do this." I love looking back on a piece of writing, and seeing it once it's completed. But the process itself? The actual casting-of-the-sentences? The searching-for-the-right-words? It's messy, and ugly, and it can be, at times, a downward spiral into self-doubt and misery.

But I couldn't quit. It was far too late for that. After you've pushed out two drafts, and the editors are anxiously awaiting a third, you're in, the way that mob guys are in in the movies.

After a sleepless night--yes, my soul was searched; I rifled through it several times, in fact--I got out of bed at 4:30 the next morning. I put on some coffee. I sat down at my desk and stared mindlessly at the blinking cursor.

Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

Empirical fact: A cursor blinks at approximately the rate of a slightly accelerated heartbeat. Whoever decided to make them blink at this annoying pace deserves to be seated next to pop sensation Justin Bieber for the duration of a transcontinental flight.

Vexed with self-doubt and anxiety, I did what I always do whenever I feel this way in my life: I completely vex myself with even more self-doubt and anxiety. I accomplished this by ditching my earlier draft entirely. Everything, every word I'd pulled out of myself so far: gone.

It was just me and cursor now--blink, blink--and a vast expanse of virtual white space.

Game on, fucker, I thought.

I wrote a sentence that didn't make me want to throw up on my shoes. I looked at it for a few minutes. I figured out a way to make it better. Then I wrote a second sentence that I didn't mind too much. Then a third.

I could already feel, at this early moment, that the review was moving in an entirely new direction. What I was saying, or at this point, still trying--and hoping--to say, was dramatically different from the previous drafts. I had a different kind of feeling in my stomach. It wasn't an entirely terrible feeling. I suddenly recognized what that feeling was: It was hope. I felt hopeful, goddamn it. I felt hopeful that things could still turn out OK for this review, and more importantly, for me. Maybe, just maybe, I'll come out of this shit-hell OK after all, I thought.

What was born, in the pre-dawn light of British Columbia, what was cajoled into life by bad coffee and an iota of hope, is the review that appears on the A.V. Club website. (And in print this week in select urban areas.) Trust me, it's infinitely better than the original drafts.

The moral of the story is this, kids: Become doctors, or lawyers, or Indian chiefs. Because this writing bullshit? This is no way to fucking live, man.

Why Boss Fights Sort of Stink These Days

Before leaving for work in the morning, my dad was in the habit of writing out lengthy lists of chores that he wanted me and my brother to complete that day. He always signed his lists with the same two ominious words, always in capital letters: THE BOSS.

Bosses are frightening beings. They can make you do things that you wouldn't normally do, like wear a dumb uniform, and say strange things like, "Welcome to Chili's!" Bosses also have the power to tell you that you can't go home yet even if you want to go home, because, as they will explain, "There is still more work to do." Worst of all, bosses can take money away from you with another pair of words that is even more terrifying than THE BOSS. Those two words are: YOU'RE FIRED.

Maybe this is why I've always adored boss battles in videogames. It's a chance for me to dole out some well-deserved karmic payback for all those mustachioed middle managers who told me that I couldn't go home, that there was still more work to do, and, oh yes, please wear this dumb hat while working or else I will take money away from you.

Bosses--the virtual kind--have technically been around since a screen-filling mothership first appeared in the fifth and final level of Phoenix, an obscure 1980's-era arcade shooter. The first boss encounter I personally can recall with any clarity is Bowser in Super Mario Bros. I remember getting to the end of that white brick and lava level, and seeing this heavily pixellated lizard standing in front of me, and thinking two things: 1. WHAT THE SHIT ASS HELL IS THAT? and 2. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BEAT IT?

So began two long, dramatic decades of boss encounters for me. I've confronted bosses in Contra III: The Alien Wars (ROGUE TURTLE WITH A BEES NEST LIVING ON IT!), Super Metroid (RIDLEY!), Doom (CYBERDEMON, NOOOOO!) and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (DESERT WORM THING!). A fantasy that I've actually had on several occasions: I imagine all the bosses in all the games getting together once a year, maybe in a nice resort like Sandals, and sitting in a room, trying for the life of them to understand how the hell this Scott Jones person keeps beating all of them, year after year after year. "Enough is enough!" Bowser says, pounding one of his lizard fists on the table. "THIS STOPS NOW!"

Yet my beloved boss battles seem to be on the decline in recent years. Gamers, at least most of the gamers who I talk to on a routine basis, seem to be tired of dealing with this artificial ramping-up of difficulty in a game's final moments. Worse still, as evidenced by the lackluster boss fights I've seen so far this year, game makers seem to be growing increasingly tired of making them.

Boss battles have, very sadly, become fill-in-the-blank exercises in tedium. Same way that old movies always ended with the image of two people kissing or a cowboy riding off into a sunset, games still insist on ending with a boss battle of some sort. I've finished an unnatural amount of games so far in 2010. But could I tell you who, or what, I fought in the final moments of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Bayonetta, Alan Wake, or even the vaunted God of War III?

I could not.

And that's a problem.

What I do remember, in each case, is a flurry of noise, and hyperbole, and melodrama, and CG. All of which was designed to give me a sense of closure, to make me feel powerful, and to let me know that I have arrived at the end of a very great experience. Like a Vietnam flashback, I can recall vague explosions, and amorphous, oversized creatures coming into view. And I remember frustration--lots and lots of frustration.

Yet, more than frustration, I remember feeling irritated and pissed off in these final moments. Instead of having a ball in what should be the game's dramatic crescendo, most of the time I recall thinking, Goddamn it all, will this thing just fucking die already, and let me get on with my life. All that stood between me and a hard-earned rolling-of-the-credits of an uneven 8 to 15-hour experience was this big, stupid, bellowing, nonsensical creature with a multilayered health bar spanning the screen. Not once did these creatures, or the moments they were providing me with, give me closure, or make me feel empowered. I didn't walk away with any sort of fist-pumping, woo-hooing satisfaction. Strip away the explosions, and the hyperbole, and the CG, and what you're left with is a dated game design trope.

The fight with Fontaine/Atlas at the end of BioShock, to my mind, is the tombstone at the end of the boss-battle era. After one of the most consistently inventive and evocative experiences I'd ever had, Irrational Games/2K Boston ended the whole fucking thing in the most banal way imaginable: with a dull, unsatisfying boss battle. That milquetoast fight against Fontaine/Atlas still irks me. Even the eerie beating you dole out to Andrew Ryan's smug face with a golf club would have made for a bolder, more unsettling, and more appropriate ending to BioShock.

I've written the epitaph for this virtual tombstone: "Here lies the body of the boss battle. It lived a good life. In the end, its multilayered health bar finally ran out. Rest in peace. 1980-2007. P.S. Yes: It's really dead this time."

The larger question then becomes: As games grow more complex and nuanced and mature, how do we end them?

I'll take a stab at answering that question in an upcoming post. Wish me luck.

1-900-HOW-2-WIN

In a medium that moves only a couple miles per hour shy of the speed of light, many aspects of gaming are constantly being cast aside and left behind. One such aspect is the old if-you're-stuck-dial-this-number tip line.

Back in the '90s, before the Internet roamed the earth, you were basically shit out of luck if you found yourself at an impasse while gaming. Your options were to 1) hope the subsequent issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly addressed your particular impasse (sometimes it did; sometimes it didn't), or 2) dial a phone number for a dollars-per-minute charge and speak with a gaming expert who could talk you through your problem.

I'm not the most skilled gamer on Earth. I think of myself as persistent more than anything else. I don't give up on a game easily, especially if I've spent $60 on it. But even I have my limits. Back then, after a few nights of back-to-back-to-back frustration, I'd usually reach for the phone.

I hated these moments. Dialing the 900 number was an admission of defeat. "I can't do this. This game has gotten the better of me." Etc.

It also felt shameful somehow. I called a few sex lines in college. You know, just to see what they were like. Usually I got some woman who was slurring her words from an obvious vodka drunk, asking me if I was "mama's dirty boy."

I was speaking with a woman named Peaches once when she asked me if I had my "pecker out." There is nothing remotely alluring about the word "pecker." I hung up on Peaches and then moped around the rest of the night in my apartment, feeling ashamed of myself, and ashamed of the credit card charges I'd accrued just to listen to a strange woman slur the word "pecker."

I felt a similar kind of shame when dialing the game-expert hotlines. I'd start pressing the numbers and think: "Am I really going to go through with this?" And then another voice inside my head would say: "Yes, you are going to go through with this because you can't afford to waste one more night of your terrible life searching for the seven Cuccos for that one lady in Kakariko Village."

All the bigger companies -- Nintendo, Capcom, Konami -- had hotline numbers at the time. But the only one I called regularly was the Nintendo hotline. Zelda games were the bane of my existence. There always seemed to be something I needed but couldn't find, or something that I'd found but couldn't figure out how to use. I basically spent the bulk of Ocarina of Time just walking around and playing my ocarina every couple of feet in the hopes that something magical might happen. Sometimes something magical happened. Most of the time, nothing happened.

I've been a gamer all my life, but I've struggled with feeling OK about my love of games. I love them now, unapologetically, but when I was younger I desperately wanted to think of myself as a Serious Person. I brooded a lot in coffee shops. I read "The Iliad" in public. Gaming was not something a Serious Person would do. It's nearly impossible to brood while gaming. Go ahead, try it. See? Impossible.

That said, because of all the years I had wasted on brooding and trying to read very large books that I didn't enjoy, I was well into my 20s when I dialed the Nintendo hotline most frequently, making me without a doubt the oldest regular caller to the Nintendo hotline.

Here is how it worked: The phone would ring a few times. I imagined a phone ringing in a giant castle. The symbolism of calling Nintendo was not lost on me. Nintendo was this amorphous fantasy place in my mind. It was like Santa's workshop, only it was real. The fact that I was doing something so tangible as calling Nintendo was an exciting act. It was almost as exciting as calling 1-900-U-GETOFF1.

A jolly pre-recorded voice would say, "Kids! Be sure you've got your parents' permission before we connect you with one of our Nintendo Game Counselors!" My face would always get hot with shame when I heard this.

I'd wait on hold for a few seconds, listening to some semi-obscure Nintendo tune playing in the background, like the theme music from World 4 in Super Mario Bros. 3. As far as I was concerned, this was the greatest on-hold music that I'd ever heard.

Eventually, a very chipper person would come on the line. "Thank you for calling Nintendo! I'm Greg, your game counselor. What can I help you with today?"

I was teaching literature classes at Syracuse University at the time. I tried to raise my voice an octave or two, trying not to sound too old and creepy on the phone. "Hi Greg! I'm having trouble finding the seventh Cucco for the lady in Kakariko Village. Can you help me?"

At this point Greg would ask me a series of questions. (I will make up some questions here for conversation's sake; do not email me about there not being a "Horn of Triumph" in Ocarina. Please. Thank you.) "Do you have the Ocarina of Woe? What about the Boomerang of Fate? And the Moon Medallion? And the Gravity Boots? What about the Horn of Triumph?" (Yes. Yes. No. Yes. No.)

This was usually the point in the call when I would hear the whooshing sound of my Serious Person rushing past me on its way to throwing itself out my apartment window, down to its certain death in the street below.

I had no idea where Greg was getting these answers from. At the time, I imagined him sitting in front of a wall of televisions. Row 2, TV 4 would have Ocarina cued up on it. I imagined him playing five or six games simultaneously. Now I realize he was probably sitting in front of a row of loose-leaf binders. He pulled out the Ocarina binder, flipped to Kakariko Village, then relayed the information to me.

Still, I romanticized Greg's job to an absurd extreme. Here was a man who knew things. Here was a man with answers. Here was a man who was earning a paycheck for being good at videogames. I imagined him sitting in the Nintendo Castle Cafeteria and eating his lunch, and joking with Shigeru Miyamoto about the fact that THEY WERE SERVING MUSHROOMS AGAIN. (Oh no, not again! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.)

I probably dialed the Nintendo number a dozen times over the years. Each time I spoke with someone with a name like Greg, or Tom, or Mike or Gary. They all sounded like the same person to me. One time I got a Tina. By the end of the call I was basically ready to ask her to marry me. Tina and I discussed the nuances of Super Metroid together. I am telling you, this was far more erotic for me than anything that I ever got from the 1-900 sex-talk numbers. And Tina didn't slur her words, and didn't pause after every other sentence to take a pull from her Smirnoff wine cooler. Tina was friendly and smart and very helpful. And she was a girl who could talk about games. Back in the '90s, there weren't many of them around.

During one of the final times that I called the Nintendo number, before I got into the habit of visiting GameFAQs.com, I tried to strike up a more personal conversation with Greg. (Or maybe it was Mike. Or maybe Gary.)

"You know, I've always wanted a job in videogames," I confided in GregMikeGary. I lowered my voice, and nervously looked over my shoulder, expecting Serious Person to creep up behind me and bludgeon me with a frying pan. This was, I knew, the ultimate betrayal of Serious Person.

I wanted GregMikeGary to tell me the secret. At that time in the industry, it still felt very much like a secret. Was there a password? A special handshake? A giant, golden key that I needed to find, like the one you use in Ocarina to open the last door in the dungeon? I was desperate. I sat in my tiny apartment on Genesee Street. Snow was falling outside my kitchen window. I listened as if the universe was about to reveal its greatest mysteries to me.

"Nintendo is a great place to work and everyone is really friendly here!" GregMikeGary said, to my great disappointment. Then he asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I considered asking him what Tina was like in real life. But then I made my peace with the fact that no mysteries were going to be revealed here. The mystery of the game industry was going to remain a mystery to me, at least for a few more years. I hung up the phone.

Fan Expo, Cats, and Me

For three days last weekend, Vic and I walked around Toronto's Fan Expo kissing babies, hugging Wonder Womans--hello again, Wonder Womans--and having our pictures taken with strangers. It was incredibly flattering. We shoot the show in a vacuum, not knowing if anyone really watches.

People in Toronto? They watch. Oh, how they watch.

We flew home on Sunday night. I cabbed from the airport. I walked in the door of my apartment, and before I even had a chance to put my suitcase down, one of my cats barfed all over the place.

Then both cats kind of sat there, looking at me with little cat smiles on their little cat faces, as if to say, "Don't let your head get too big. At the end of the day, you still have to clean up our barf."

And clean it up I did while the cats sat off to the side, supervising the whole operation. "You missed a spot, Barf Boy," I imagined one of them saying. "That's right. You are our Barf Boy. Don't ever forget that. Barf Boy."

I love my cats. Vic has a cat too--this orange behemoth named Clyde. And my friend John Teti, he recently transformed into a full blown cat man. Most of the game writer-types I know have cats. Cats and videogame people, for some reason, go great together. Teti recently emailed me a picture of himself playing games while one of his cats--I don't know if it was Soupy or Nipsy--was sprawled out in his lap and napping as hard as a cat can nap.

Scientific fact: Cats experience an overwhelming urge to get into any/all laps of anyone who is playing a videogame. They seem to have a special sense that tells them whenever people are in a really tough part of the game--perhaps a boss fight--and things are heating up, and they are in dire need of all of their gaming powers. That's usually when my cat, Bee, decides that it's time for her to get into my lap and do a few cat circles, then proceed to start kneading my belly/crotch region with her claws.

Sometimes I shoo her away. But mostly I yell "BEE!" followed by a "COME ON!" and then I just let her do what she wants to do. I can't say no to her and her cute face and soft fur and her green eyes. So I try to game around her, leaning left and right while she does her cat thing as I shout more BEEs and more COME ONs.

Scientific Fact #2: Cats enjoy getting tangled up in cords and climbing on top of gaming consoles when they are on. Bee does this all the time. I'm guessing she enjoys the heat they give off. Whenever I find her on top of the Xbox 360 while I am gaming, I have about 67 heart attacks, because I am sure that a cat-on-top-of-console situation is no doubt responsible for approximately 88-percent of all Red Rings.

Ah, cats.

Jesus.

When I moved to Vancouver, I purchased a new couch for $2000. What a damn fool I was. I haven't even paid off the damn thing yet, and already my cats have scratched it to hell and back. I've tried everything to keep them from scratching the couch--doubled-side tape, blankets arranged so they obscure the most desirable scratch regions (the arms and sides). I've shouted COME ONs until I'm practically hoarse. Nothing works. Cat-owner Pro Tip: Don't buy expensive furniture, because your cats will just barf all over it and scratch the stuffing out of it.

I went to the Yaletown pet store the other day and bought a cardboard scratch thing called a COSMIC CATNIP ALPINE SCRATCHER. It's basically a $27 wedge of corrugated cardboard that stands at a 45-degree angle.

The cats like it well enough. They climb aboard the Alpine Scratcher and get some good scratches in, so I suppose it's doing its job. They haven't neglected the couch arms completely, though. The most interesting part about the Alpine Scratcher is the artwork on the side of the box. It features a bipedal cat wearing lederhosen and suspenders and a jaunty kerchief. Behind him are two smaller, completely naked cats, both of whom are wielding work tools of some sort. The smaller cat on the left gives a wave, as if he's posing for a wish-you-were-here vacation photo. The one on the right seems less in the mood to be photographed, and more focused on the task at hand. (See the photograph above.)

Next to this trio of cats is a pile of rocks that I can only assume is the grave of one of their alpine climbing companions who didn't have a strong enough constitution to survive their treacherous ascent. The three cats--the clothed one is the leader; the smaller, nude ones are the cat sherpas--paused to bury their now-dead friend beneath this rock mound, and pay their respects, as if to say, Rest in peace, cat climbing companion. May this rock pyramid we have arranged with our non-descript work tools stand tall in your memory.