The Pablum Era

These days videogames tend to be fun, breezy little experiences. They are grin-inducing diversions that leave you feeling like a winner. Do the slightest thing, however banal, and suddenly the game is beeping and booping all over the place and raining virtual confetti down upon your laurel leaf-crowned head.

"Well, now! Look at you!" games seem to say. "What a spectacularly gifted human being you are! I know that you and I barely know each other, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a guess that you, Handsome Face--is it OK if I call you Handsome Face?--are something of a gaming savant. Aren't you? Come, now--no need to be humble. Now, go ahead and accept this oversized check made out in your name. And enjoy another four or five happy little ditties along with all these glorious rainbows shooting all over the f---ing place! IT'S ALL FOR YOU, CHOSEN ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

But there was a time, not all that long ago, when games weren't afraid to be cruel exercises in dark agony (Cruel Exercises in Dark Agony = the title of my grad school poetry thesis); when they'd ask you to perform impossible task after impossible task and, upon completing said tasks, after dozens upon dozens of game-over screens, you'd be given the most meager of rewards for your effort. Games once said to us: "Hey, guess what? After all that bullshit you just went through, it turns out that the princess is actually in another castle. Oh man, if only you could see the dumb expression on your face right now. This is what you look like: 'Dur, dur, dur, dur, dur.' " Games said: "Every doubt you've ever had about yourself? About you sucking at everything and being a huge loser? All of that shit is absolutely f---ing true."

The reward-to-effort ratio these days is, by my far-from-scientific estimates, around ten to one. In other words, gamers typically get around 10 cutscenes, 10 door-opening keys, 10 Achievements Unlocked or 10 variations on a confetti shower for every sole bit of effort that they invest into a game. During the '80's and '90's, the opposite was true. Gamers had to invest 10 times the effort and time into a game in order to squeeze out the smallest, stalest bread crumb of encouragement. (Stale Bread Crumbs of Encouragement = Another solid title for a graduate school poetry thesis.)

To be clear, I'm not waxing poetic for a golden age of thumb-busting gaming here. I'm not saying that one is better or worse. All I'm saying is that most of us are walking the earth thinking that we are better gamers--and, perhaps by extension better people--than we actually are.

Over the last five years or so, games have gone from being a niche hobby to having mass appeal. Part of the reason that the medium has achieved this kind of commercial success is that game makers have become incredibly savvy when it comes to making everyone--including your mom, a.k.a. the very person who once chastised you for playing games--feel like winners. In other words, if you build it, and you create a cleverly designed feedback loop that makes them feel awesome, they will come.

Exhibit A: Game Over screens are an endangered species these days. Think about it--when was the last time you saw a Game Over or You're Dead, or in the case of Bayonetta, the "Witch Hunts Are Over" screen?

Imagine if you could pleasure a lover--a complicated task, as most of us can attest--simply by touching her on the very tip of her nose. One little tiny tap--boop!--and suddenly she is in the throes of passion. Seeing the results of your tap-boop, you would no doubt think, Surely I must be counted among the world's most skilled and gifted lovers. Or, imagine if you merely wrote your name at the top of your SAT only to have an entire marching band suddenly enter the testing hall along with a bald man in jacket and tie offering you a full scholarship to any university--any school in the world--that you'd like go to. Or, imagine if you invested a mere $10 in the stock market only to have--well, you get the idea.

If these things actually happened, the direct result would be an over-developed and undeserved sense of confidence in one's self. Egos would be inflated to Macy's Thanksgiving Parade-balloon size. People would walk the streets thinking, I'm hot shit, even when they are in fact not even remotely close to being hot shit.

That's what's happening in videogames these days.

One of the first games with mass appeal was 1984's Tetris. Blocks would descend from the top of the screen, Russian MIDI music would play, and everyone--even casual gamers--had a high old time. It's interesting to note that there was never any sort of "winning" in Tetris; all you could do effectively in Tetris was stave off inevitable failure. Because no matter how skilled you were, every Tetris player on the planet is eventually overwhelmed by the bricks. If anyone technically wins in Tetris, it's not the player; it's the bricks.

Compare Tetris with 2007's Peggle, which requires minimal, if any, skill, and is nothing but winning. Fire a tiny ball into a row of dots, watch it bounce from dot to dot, then bask in the glow of the message "EXTREME FEVER!" appearing onscreen while Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" blares in the background. If you're feeling a little low today, take in a couple of quick games of Peggle. Peggle can turn your day around right quick.

Peggle marks the beginning of the Pablum Era in gaming. The bulk of what's offered to gamers these days, with rare exceptions, is sugar-coated and dumbed down and already chewed. Few games, if any, dare pose a bona fide challenge for fear that someone might find the game too challenging and stop playing. Games are inherently insecure entities. They show up in our lives all smiley and smelling good, hoping with all their hearts that we really, really like them.

Whenever a game does come along that's not afraid to make a gamer question his or her self-worth--examples include From Software's Demon's Souls, Retro's Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden games--said game garners a reputation as a "hard" game, or as a game that would appeal exclusively to "old school" or "retro" gamers.

I'm not against games that make people feel good about themselves. As I've said many times through the years, I play videogames to feel like a winner and a hero; I play games because I want to see things and do things and experience things that I can't see/do/experience in my regular litter box-scooping, bill-paying, laundry-doing life.

But when I play something like the acclaimed Jetpack Joyride, which everyone on the planet seems to be playing today, a game which requires me only to tap repeatedly on the iPad's touchscreen--no, it does not even matter where I tap; just tap anywhere--only to receive glorious explosions, spinning slot machines, and more coin-jangling sound effects than an Atlantic City casino for my "efforts," it's difficult sometimes not to feel like Pavlov's dopiest dog.

The Artwork of Toronto Hotel Rooms, Part 3

It's my last day in Toronto. There's still plenty to do before I can head to the airport--one more G4 booth hang-out (10 a.m. to noon), one more panel--yet I already I feel that vague it's-all-over melancholy that's an inevitable part of any trip. Make no mistake, going home will be great--it always is (hint: there are cats there)--but part of me wouldn't exactly be devastated if I had to stay put for another day or two.

Maybe that's because this is the closest I ever get to taking a proper vacation. I've never been very good at vacations. I've never mastered the art of rest and relaxation. People who have will tell you that, yes, it truly is an art. I have no desire to sink my toes into a white-sand beach in Bermuda and quaff a rum-based drink while saying something like, "Now this is the life!" I've been to the European Union a few times. I've looked at their old-time buildings and sipped their strong coffee. They're doing some good things over there. But I do not have a try-and-stop-me need to return. If I go back, fine. If not: also fine.

A few years ago, when I was still going out on a lot of dates, the first or second thing a date would often say to describe herself would be this: "I just love to travel!!!!!!!!!!" And I would always think, Well, I don't, while using all of my powers of concentration--and I mean all of my powers--to mitigate the frown that was attempting to unfold across the lower half of my face. (Yes, I was a joy to go out on dates with, ladies.)

Whenever someone shows me photos of their travels--"Here's Linda and me outside the Louvre!!!!!"--or worse still, when he or she shows me the glossy brochures and/or websites of the places that they intend to travel to, I immediately start banging pots and pans together hoping that the din will eventually drive this person away.

Part of the problem is that I've traveled an awful lot over the last 10 years. At one point I logged enough frequent flier miles to routinely qualify for first-class seats on American Airlines. I also recently relocated from one city to another (and, to go a step further, one country to another), which makes me still feel a bit like a vacationer in my new city. Fact: I need a passport to get into, and out of, my new country. Also: I lived in New York for 15 years, which is so massive and diverse that I always felt a bit like a tourist there. Even after 15 years, I could still get lost there, could still find myself wandering around and scratching my head, could still discover streets and even entire neighbourhoods that I'd never seen before. You can live in New York City for your entire life and never quite take in the scope of the whole damn thing.

The second part of the problem, which isn't really a problem at all, is that I enjoy what I do for a living. I love my job and the people who I work with to such an extreme degree that I never really feel any desire to take a time-out from it or from them. I have no desire to stick pins into a voodoo doll that looks like my boss; I don't spend a lot of time saying things like: "Barry in Accounts is just about the biggest asshole I've ever met in my life." For me, work days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and suddenly it seems like it's always January and we're doing it all over again.

Also: as is evident from the last few days in Toronto, there is never a shortage of hotels or airports in my life. So there's always the feeling that I'm perpetually on vacation, even when, technically speaking, I'm not.

A few places I wouldn't mind being dragged to: the Mohonk Mountain House in the Catskills, because it's a big, shambling Overlook-like hotel, which is equal parts beautiful and creepy; Bruges, Belgium, mostly because I liked the Martin McDonagh movie an awful lot; and Copenhagen, Denmark because I was there once in the mid '90's and, of the few places I visited in Europe, Copenhagen is the one I want to return to, namely because 1. it was a bit mysterious, 2. it was filled with tall people, 3. Tivoli Gardens is the closest I will ever come to actually being inside Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Now before you start banging pots and pans in my direction, which you have every right to do after the hypocritical nature of the previous paragraph, here's today's selection of artwork, carefully selected from the gallery that is room 2011 here at the Marriott Residence Inn in downtown Toronto.

TODAY'S ARTWORK: A tall, skinny photograph of a rocky mountaintop piercing skeins of cloud cover. This rather tasteful black-and-white photo--which seems even more tasteful when juxtaposed with yesterday's completely hideous "Jazz Jambalaya" painting--hangs directly above the toilet in my room. Each time I have used the toilet this weekend, I have studied the photograph. I have two observations to share:

1. This looks like a place that The Lord of the Rings Gang would pass through on their way to Minas Tirith. Or,

2. Kratos might shop for real estate here. (PRIVATE, WIND-BLOWN MOUNTAIN-TOP ABODE COMPLETE WITH MENACING ROCK FORMATIONS IDEAL FOR BBQ-ING & ENTERTAINING/HURLING THE CORPSES AND LIMBS OF YOUR ENEMIES FROM/ENJOYING THREESOMES WITH WANTON MAIDENS. MINUTES TO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION. PETS WELCOME.)

Artwork score: 6 out of 10.

Artist: Unknown.

Can I remove said artwork from hotel room wall? Answer: This one came off the wall quite easily.

The Artwork of Toronto Hotel Rooms, Part 2

I got up early this morning and went for a brisk walk around the block. The air was cool and damp. Surprise: it's another gray morning here in Toronto. Gray mornings seem to be a Toronto specialty.

While I was sleeping, a heavy fog was busy blowing in. It's out there now, even as I type this, blanketing the city. It's winding its way between the buildings, coiling around the CN Tower, pressing up against the side of my Marriott, kissing the window of my room.

Side note: Toronto Fog = OK name for a high school jazz quintet.

I love getting up early in strange cities and walking about while the streets are still quiet and vacant. Traffic lights change then change again without any cars around to heed them. Early on, before everyone else wakes up and starts moving about and making their noise? That's the best time of day to get to know a city.

I usually snap a few random photos of the empty streets, thinking that maybe years from now, when I'm in my dotage, in the landfill of god-awful photos that my iPhone seems to naturally accrue, I'll discover these particular photos and think, Remember that one time I got up really early in Toronto and went for a walk? Man. (Pause...) That was kind of a weird time.

A few years ago, when I was traveling more often, back when game publishers were still flying writers all over the place on silly, unnecessary trips, I had the idea that I would take a photo of every hotel room I had stayed in. When I had accumulated a few dozen of those photos, I would arrange them into a collage, have it framed, and give it a pretentious title like "Vacancy/No Vacancy," or "Loneliness #2," or "Tiny Free Soaps."

Side note: Tiny Free Soaps = also an OK name for a high school jazz quintet.

Who knows. I still might wind up doing that.

Another remarkable thing about my Toronto hotel room: There is no phone in the toilet. In fact, this has to be one of the first hotels I've ever stayed in that does not have the de rigueur telephone located in the can. I've never understood the toilet phone as a concept. Who makes calls on those things? If I need to order room service or extra towels, am I going to use the toilet phone to ring the front desk? Answer: I'm not. I'm going to choose the regular phone which, considering the limited square footage of the hotel rooms I have stayed in, is usually only an additional three or four steps away from the toilet phone.

One more thing: Considering the location of the toilet phone, i.e. the toilet, I'm not sure I'd be terribly anxious to make calls from a phone that previous guests, who were all presumably seated on the bowl at the time of their calls, have also used. Then again, anyone interested in using a toilet phone is not exactly obsessed with good hygiene.

The world, once again, can be divided into two kinds of people: those who are for toilet phones, a.k.a. THE ABSOLUTE PINNACLE OF MODERN LIVING, and those who are against them. The eHarmony people should probably query singles if they've ever used a toilet phone--check YES or NO--and save hundreds, maybe thousands of people from unnecessary heartbreak and ruin.

Imagine this: you are on a romantic getaway to a mountain lodge with someone for the first time. Suddenly you overhear this person, who you think has at least a modicum of potential to be the love of your life (no one goes to a mountain lodge unless there is a modicum of potential), placing a call from the toilet. "Hey Tim? It's Fred. How are you? Yep, I'm at the mountain lodge." Etc.

No one--no, not even terrible people--should have to discover this about a possible mate in this fashion.

Anyway, I'd better get to today's painting.

TODAY'S PAINTING: This one looks like a famished, loin-cloth-wearing giant put an entire jazz quintet--saxophone, clarinet, guitar, trumpet and piano--in his giant mouth, gave the quintet a couple of chews with his back molars, then spit the whole mess out on the ground where a terrible painter was standing by with an easel and oil paints ready to record the whole thing for posterity and/or Bed, Bath & Beyonds everywhere.

Painting Score: 2 out of 10.

Artist: The work is, not surprisingly, unsigned.

Can I remove the painting from the room wall? Answer: I cannot. (Though, I confess, I didn't try terribly hard to jigger this one loose.)

The Artwork of Toronto Hotel Rooms, Part 1

I woke up this morning in a hotel room on Wellington Street in Toronto. There are several nice things about my room. One: I have a view of the CN Tower. Two: Free Wi-fi. Three: Firm mattress. Four: One extra pillow on the bed.

While waking, I noticed a painting on the far wall of my room. This painting shows a man and a European-style bicycle. (How can I tell that it is a European bicycle? Because the seat is very small and is located at the very back of the bicycle.) The man, interestingly, is not riding the bicycle. Instead, he seems to be walking the bicycle. Maybe he has just finished a long ride and is tired. Maybe he stopped for a moment to take in the scenery. Or maybe his lover, only moments ago, ended their love affair, and now he is too sad to ride his bicycle. Regardless, his head is extremely thin, far more thin than a normal head would be, which is an example of the artist exercising his or her "Artistic License."

The man and his bicycle appear to be passing through an old fishing village of some kind. I say "old" namely because the painting is rendered in a range of sepia tones. Whenever I see a sepia tone, or even see the word "sepia," boom, I inevitably think "old" and sometimes even start hearing faint clarinet music like the type that is played in fake old-time ice cream parlors.

The tide is clearly out at the moment in the painting. Three boats--two regular boats and a sailboat--are currently parked on the shore. Did the fishermen, who are absent in the painting, pull the boats ashore? If so, where are they now? Are they perhaps lunching inside the small, thin building on the lefthand side of the painting? Perhaps they are smoking cigarettes and telling one another off-color jokes about the bicyclist's lover who has jilted him. Jokes that include phrasings and words like "openings," "24-7," and "that laundromat sign that says 'Last load: 8 p.m.' "

Other points of interest in the piece: the angry-looking rock-formation jetty extending into the harbor, which threatens to cleave the painting in two, and the palm-tree frond which hangs down from the top left corner. At least, I think it is a palm tree frond. Because it looks strange for a frond.

At the horizon, the sepia tones are identical to the sepia tones of the earth beneath the tires of the thin-headed man's European bicycle. This implies that earth and sky are one, and perhaps thematically, that whatever we find here on earth is just as appealing as anything we might long for, or envy over the horizon.

Score for this painting: 4 out of 10.

Artist: The work is unsigned.

Can I remove the painting from the room wall? Answer: No, I cannot.

I Don't Know If I'm an Alcoholic (But I Quit Drinking Anyway)

If you know me, even a little, then you know that I've had my struggles with booze over the years. I never drank every day, or doctored my coffee with schnapps in the mornings, or kept a flask on my person. I never loitered in barrooms often enough to qualify as a barfly. That said, whenever I did drink--typically anywhere from two to five nights a week depending on the kind of week I was having--I always did so to an extreme, with a sense of great purpose. I always drank with the desire to arrive somewhere else, someplace far away from myself.

Those times are over now. At least, I hope they are. As of this Sunday, it'll be 63 days since I've had a drink.

Nearly every day on my walk home from the office, I pass the sun-flooded patio of Chill Winston in Gastown and observe people sipping from what appear to be the tallest, coldest, most spectacularly golden glasses of beer I have ever seen. I always think the same thing: Why can't I have one?

The reason why you can't have one, I patiently explain to my dumb self, is because you could never stop at one. My thinking was always this: Why have one when you can have six? Or ten? Or fifteen?

My appetite for beer has been insatiable since college. Whenever I shopped for beer, I'd always think of this line from True Romance: "It's better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it." Only I'd replace the word "gun" with "beer." This was my way of giving myself permission to purchase an extra six-pack or a spare tallboy, you know, just in case I needed it later. And if I didn't drink it tonight? It would be there tomorrow night, waiting for me.

When I moved to British Columbia in the summer of 2009, I dropped off my luggage at my furniture-less apartment then headed to the nearby 7-11 to buy beer. After a thorough investigation of the store's cooler sections and a brief interrogation of the cashier, I learned that convenience stores in B.C. do not carry alcohol of any kind. Over the next few days, I cased the neighborhood for liquor stores, only to deduce that there were none. The closest booze seller was a good sweat-inducing 15-minute walk away. I thought, Fine. This is the universe telling me that it's time to establish better habits, to start fresh here in this city. I hear you, Universe. And for a while, I was marginally booze-free and feeling pretty good about that.

Then three months later a beer and wine store opened its doors not more than a hundred steps from my apartment building. I anxiously peered through the front windows of the store wondering what, exactly, the universe was telling me now.

I became one of the store's first and no doubt best customers. I knew the owners of the store, and knew all the cashiers by name. And the money I spent there! A 12-pack of Alexander Keith's, which is pretty good beer, costs nearly $30. Six-packs range from $14 to $17 dollars for anything of quality. Trying to be a drunk in this province is no small investment.

It pains me now to do the math, thinking of all the cash I spent there. The store has only gotten fancier over the last two years. I can't help but think that some of the nicer additions, like the dimly lit wine alley on the far side of the store, wouldn't have been possible without my generous donations.

Though the amount of cash I've spent on beer is extraordinary, what galls me further, and makes me despair further, is the amount of time and energy I spent thinking about drinking, planning my drinking, and beyond that, being hungover from drinking. It's a truly staggering amount of time. I could have done plenty of other things with that time. I could have finished writing a book or two, could have gotten married and had a family, could have gotten married a second time and had a second family, could have been a better friend to my friends. I could have finally finished Fallout: New Vegas. I could have written more Jones Report entries, could have done more loads of laundry.

I could have learned to play the goddamn French horn. I could have called my mother more often.

Make no mistake: my life is fine. In some ways, considering all the self-destruction I've engaged in over the past two decades, it's borderline miraculous that things have turned out as well as they have for me. Still, it's hard not to wonder sometimes what I could have done, what path I might have taken, if I hadn't devoted so much time and energy to drinking.

At the back of my mind I suppose I've always fantasized what my life might be like if I really tried, you know, to be the best I could be, day in and day out. I've always wondered what I might be capable of, what fortune, glory or sense of self-satisfaction, if any at all, would come my way. Part of me has always been afraid to learn the answer to that question. I mean, what if I actually tried my best, tried to find out what I'm truly capable of, what I'm worth, only to learn that it's not really all that much?

That's a really shitty thing to learn about yourself. That said, I also know that if I don't at least attempt to learn the answer to that question, if I don't at least make a whole-hearted run at it, I'll never be able to forgive myself.

I went to a couple of AA meetings. It's an excellent organization, and it obviously works for a lot of people, but it's not for me. Maybe I'm being naive here, but I have a hard time accepting the I'm-helpless-in-the-face-of-this and addiction-as-disease approach. I believe you have a pretty clear choice when it comes to addiction: You choose to do it or choose not to do it. And that's it. (This article in Macleans deconstructs the addiction-as-disease way of thinking far more eloquently than I ever could.) (And if you're in the mood for one more booze-y click, it should be John Bowe's terrific story from the Lives section of the NY Times Magazine.)

So am I an alcoholic? Man, I don't know. A diagnosis really isn't even relevant anymore. All I know is this: I no longer liked the role that alcohol was playing in my life. That's all.

Sixty-plus days in, I'll confess: there's a pretty big hole in my life, and in my personality, that beer had occupied for decades. I've realized that I don't know who I am, or what I'm going to look like, or feel like, without beer in my life.

But I'm figuring that out now as fast as I can. In the meantime, I'll put in another load of laundry, then telephone my mom, then get busy attempting to realize my full potential.

Oh, beer-free life: I haven't completely figured out your appeal yet. But I will.

I will.

The Joys of Life at 35,000 Feet

I'm away for the next week or so, in Upstate New York visiting my parents and my brother's family for a few days before heading south to New York City to see some friends there and tend to some business.

Yes, there's a plane involved--two of them, in fact--and a train (Amtrak between Utica and New York Penn Station, and at least one automobile (my parents will pick me up at the airport tonight, in Syracuse, as usual later tonight). Pictured above: the actual plane that will take me from Chicago to Syracuse later on today.

I also understand that I'm flying into what appears to be a sinister, world-class heat wave. If you happen to see a man sweating--and I mean dripping-from-the-tip-of-his-nose sweating--in an airport or train station over the next few days, chances are good that it's me. The heat and I are old enemies.

Packing this morning, as usual, I realize that I'm carrying an absurd amount of game machines. Here's what will pass through customs with me this morning: x1 3DS, x1 second generation DS (I can't live without the GBA cartridge slot), x1 PSP go (Pixeljunk Monsters: you are coming with me), x1 iPhone, and x1 iPad. No one, and I mean no one travels with more gaming opportunities on his person at any given moment that I do. (Except for maybe Victor Lucas. He carries around this amount gaming hardware practically every day, not just on travel days.) (Vic: You're weird.) (And I heart you.) (And Vic's also at the airport this morning, only he's enroute to Comic Con in San Diego. Godspeed, my friend.)

I especially love the moment--or rather, The Moment--when the plane finally levels off after its initial ascent, and the rotund fellow in the seat next to me starts to doze, and all my worries, anxieties, qualms, etc. are left behind me, back there, on the ground, and I reach into my duffel for the first time, as excited as an 8 year old on Christmas morning, trying to decide what system and what game to play first.

Man, I'm getting giddy over here just thinking about it.

I have plans to chime in and write while traveling. But the truth is, I'll likely be M.I.A. for a bit. Try not to miss me too much.

Happy Thursday.

The Offline Lifestyle

As you know, Xbox 360's have failed me for the last time more often than Admirals failed Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies. Most recently, after my Xbox 360 Slim gave up its ghost making it the fourth 360 (and counting) to fail me, I tried to suss out a way to transfer my data from the hard drive of my busted Slim to my older model Elite 360.

Realizing that this process was both complex and risky, I decided to plug in the old Elite and simply start a brand new Xbox Live profile from scratch on the Elite's wiped hard drive. With my Gamer Score set all the way back to zero, no friends on my My Friends list, and that dopey golden retriever picture as my default gamer tag photo, I finally--finally--got back to gaming.

I thought: "I have to remember to let people know that I'm over here, temporarily at least, at this new Xbox Live handle."

But I didn't. Instead, I eased into a few races in Midnight Club: Los Angeles, starting the entire game over again from the beginning. The next night, I powered on the Elite again--man, this damn thing wheezes and gasps at start-up like an emphysema patient--to play Ms. Splosion Man, again planning to friend a few people.

But I didn't.

Nearly a week has passed now. And I still have yet to friend anyone.

It's oddly refreshing to look at my Gamer Profile and observe that I have exactly zero points. I had no idea the degree to which I was using my Gamer Score as a measure of personal self-worth. Like a Stockholm Syndrome survivor, I puzzled over how I ever got seduced into thinking of it as some kind of important metric in my life.

But an even bigger part of the appeal of my new XBL profile is the hermetically sealed isolation of it all. The most indelible gaming memories that I have from the last three decades aren't centered around that one time I pulled off a headshot on Crazzzy8888s1989 in a Wager match on the Silo map in Black Ops. My fondest memories historically involve long, drawn-out single-player games like Shadow of the Colossus, BioShock, and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. My favorite games have always been very quiet, private, and personal journeys away from the sturm and drang of the rest of my life.

I've never been a fan of turning games into social, people-oriented experiences. Exhibit A: the multiplayer in BioShock 2. Games, of course, can be a conduit for social experiences, like the aforementioned headshot moment on Crazzzy8888s1989. But when I game, I'm not looking for way to connect with other people--I already do enough of that throughout my workday. What I want to do, more than anything, is to connect with the people who created the game.

Same way that I enjoy locking psyches with an author when I read a book, when I play BioShock my greatest desire is to connect with the very people who made BioShock. I want to understand how their brains work, what their aesthetic values are, and what their sense of logic is. (Or, in the case of Resident Evil 4, another terrific and completely isolating experience, the developer's complete disregard for logic. Exhibit B: killing a snake leaves an egg behind which you can eat for a health boost.)

In the old days, whenever I would power up the 360, which has been in my life since launch in late 2005, I was in the habit of doing two things: 1. I'd check to see who was online at the moment, and 2. I'd then check to see what those people were doing or playing. I'd study the row of dancing, preening (or, in most cases, napping) avatars. I'd notice things like this: my friend Steve who lives in New York, which is two time zones away from me, is still awake at 3 a.m. playing Trenched. I'd sit on my couch here on the West Coast, thinking to myself, "Huh. I wonder why Steve is awake at 3 a.m.? Did he wake up to feed the baby, then wander into the living room and decide to play Trenched? Is he fighting with Margo again? Maybe she made him sleep on the couch. They have been fighting a lot these days. Man, I hope he's not drinking. He really shouldn't be drinking anymore..."

At this point I inevitably have two further thoughts: 1. I hope that my friend Steve is OK, and 2. why must I go down this sort of digression hole every goddamn time I look at the dancing, preening row of avatars? How did real life and all of its concerns and complications and brow-furrowing and messiness and crying babies and fights with Margo get jungled up with my gaming?

Often I'd observe still other online friends who were, like good gamers should, consuming quality content that I should probably also be consuming. Friends always seem to be playing literate, artful offerings like Fallout: New Vegas, Dragon Age II, and Red Dead Redemption night after night after night. And I'd experience hot-faced shame knowing that they'd be able to see whatever lowbrow tripe I had selected to play for the evening, like Bayonetta (again), or The Bigs 2 (again), or Vanquish (again). "Good for you and your terrific taste, everyone," I'd think bitterly.

I have actually received messages via Xbox Live from online friends--or rather, "friends"--asking me, "Why on earth are you playing THAT shitty game again?" Which only makes me want to bellow the following three words directly into my TV screen:

LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But with my new, completely anonymous profile, which no one, no, not even Victor Lucas, shall know the name of, I can now game again in complete, people-free privacy, with no worry whatsoever that I'll be interrupted mid-game to be informed that, yes, glory be, "Crazzzzy8888's1989 is now online." Worse still, whenever Crazzzzy8888's1989 loads up a game in need of a programming update or patch, Crazzzzy8888's1989 will be booted offline for the update, then ushered back online once said update takes, which means that I'll get a second, even less welcome notice that, yes, Crazzzzy8888's1989 is online, at which point I will usually once again bellow at the TV screen one of the following three things:

1. "I KNOW!" or,

2. "GOOD FOR YOU!" or,

3. "F*** YOU, CRAZZZZY8888S1989. I RUE THE F***ING DAY THAT I EVER ACCEPTED YOUR XBOX LIVE FRIENDSHIP REQUEST." (By the way, Crazzzzy8888s1989 is Steve.) (Hi, Steve.)

My other least-favorite Xbox Live moment is whenever I receive notifications that "friends are playing this game." This can actually sully a game for me before I have even started to play it. Suddenly, this "friend" (Steve) is showing up in my leaderboards. Suddenly, I'm simply doing something that Steve already did last night at 3 a.m., and who, according to the extremely helpful leaderboard, apparently did it 8.2 seconds faster than I did it. It's akin to finding a lost, lonely cave that you assumed was unexplored and that you briefly considered naming Scott's Cave for all of posterity, only to realize that someone has already opened up one of those weird KFC/Taco Bell hybrid counters inside. Whatever mystery, and more importantly whatever anticipation of mystery, there might have been for me has already been drained out of the experience.

Another thing: Why must I be informed that other people are using Netflix whenever I'm using Netflix? (Exhibit C: Friends using this App.) How is this helpful or useful information? If I'm in the middle of watching a blurry stream of David Cronenberg's The Fly, why is *that* designated as a fine time to notify me, usually mid Brundlefly transformation, that Crazzzzy8888's1989 is online yet again? (F*** you, Steve. Try playing less Xbox and kissing your baby and talking to Margo more. Seriously, man.)

Yes, I am fully aware of the fact that I can switch off all notifications. But Microsoft clearly does not want me to do this, as navigating the murky fathoms of menus and sub-menus is a very long way from being as transparent as it could, or should be.

Right now, it's really quiet where I am. The blinds are drawn. The outside world is where it belongs: outside. I'm gaming these days with a new-found sense of focus and passion that I haven't felt in ages. When I click over to the My Friends section of Xbox Live, I see nothing but that non-dancing, non-preening, grayed out ghost friend thing with the plus sign on its right shoulder.

And I'm feeling pretty good about that.

Red-ringing: Part 2

My friend, John Teti, who is a very passionate and very lovely man (see for yourself here), apparently tapped out an ambitious comment that expounded on the reasons why we remain faithful to the 360 despite its tendency have more breakdowns than Liza Minnelli.

Unfortunately, Blogger, in all of its unstable glory, decided to jettison the comment into the void where all ambitious comments seem to go. (Blogger has jettisoned more than a few of my ambitious comments in my lifetime.) (Why it does this, we may never know.)

Anyway, John somehow found the time and energy to recreate the comment. He emailed it to me privately, because, to quote him, "I don't care to have my time FUCKING WASTED all over again."

So, without further pomp or circumstance, here's the recreated comment, in all of its uncensored, passionate glory:

"The reason we always go back to the 360 is that we semi-consciously anthropomorphize consoles, and the Xbox 360 is a friendly sort.

"What do you see when you turn on the 360? A bright, colorful screen that says 'Welcome.' A smiling, dancing cartoon version of yourself, maybe playing with a pet. A seemingly endless, verdant tableau of games, video, and other fun stretching off the right side of the screen into eternity.

"What do you see when you turn on the PS3? A gloomy background occupied by a tiny strip of bland icons. About a million features you will never use, each with their own barely readable text label. Perhaps an advertisement fades into the screen, reminding you to buy some Sony film from the Sony PSN Store brought to you by Sony. (Don't just stand there, kid; buy something.) Everything is so goddamn corporate, like you are clocking into work instead of getting ready to play a game.

"But all of that is relatively tolerable. What really makes the PS3 so irritating is the attitude.

"I have a spare Xbox 360 hooked up to my computer that I use for video capture. Last week I started it up for the first time in a year. I knew I would have to update the system software, and install the requisite updates to the game that I was playing (L.A. Noire.) Do you know how long it took me to get up and running? THREE MINUTES. That's it. That's the 360: 'Hey, buddy, happy to see you!' It's almost embarrassed that it has to tidy up a little bit before the two of you can get down to FUN!

"Meanwhile, the PS3's attitude is 'Where the hell have YOU been?' Can you imagine what this experience would have been like if this were my spare PS3? I think we all know: it would be an ALL-CONSUMING INFERNO OF BOREDOM. The PS3 fucking PUNISHES you if you ignore it for even a couple of weeks. 'What's that, you want to play that new downloadable game you heard about on the TV? How about you sit there and FUCKING WAIT while I update my firmware; I have to delete some of my features because Sony thinks you don't deserve them, and you know what? I THINK THEY'RE RIGHT!!!'

"So you sit there while it updates or upgrades or installs or whatever the fuck this umpteenth progress bar is supposed to be doing -- you don't even know what the progress bar MEANS anymore; by this point the very concept of a progress bar has lost all ability to signify -- and the PS3 is just loving every minute of your misery. Because it's like an insanely possessive friend whom you can never, ever please. 'This is what you get when you don't pay attention to my every need! How DARE you do anything but play with your PlayStation? DON'T YOU LOVE ME?????'

"No, I don't love you at all. I hate turning on my PS3. I'm not talking about the games. The games for the console are great, every bit as good as those on the Xbox 360 (since they are mostly the same games, after all). Gaming on the PS3 is, though, like eating at a restaurant where the food is fantastic but the manager is a total prick. You know you'll enjoy yourself in the end, but the guy running the show has such a bad attitude, you don't want to give him the satisfaction.

"As for the Wii, who gives a shit.

"So yes, of course we keep going back to the 360. He may be a sickly little guy, prone to keel over at a moment's notice. But dadgum it, he's always been our friend, greeting us with an easy, natural smile every time we drop by for a visit. And when you have friends like that, you stick by them."

Thanks, John.

"Red-ring, Mrs. Torrance."

About three weeks ago my otherwise solid, completely reliable, quietly humming Xbox 360 Slim began acting up. First sign of trouble: the machine occasionally struggled to load games from discs. The word "Opening," followed by a repeating tail of ellipses, would hang up the screen for minutes at a time. The tiny green light in the center of the Slim's silver circle winked at me in this cadence:

winkwinkwinkwinkwinkwink

After that, the Slim began to behave as if it was haunted by the demon from Insidious. Games would begin to load up only to abruptly quit, booting me all the way back to the dashboard for no discernible reason. And once, near the conclusion of a particularly trying quest in Oblivion, the Slim just shut down completely, as if someone--the demon maybe?--had yanked the power cord from the wall at the worst possible moment.

The Slim's hiccups became such a handicap that trying to load F.E.A.R. 3 for review purposes a few weeks back required approximately between 10 and 12 load-up do-overs before the game would finally "take." F.E.A.R. 3 is not a great game. But having to endure hardware issues, while on deadline, certainly did not bolster my opinion of it.

I spent 45 minutes on the phone last Friday morning with a peppy, warm-voiced man named Wade. Wade works at Microsoft headquarters where he apparently fields calls from people like me on a daily basis. Wade walked me through a few troubleshooting routines over the phone. He had me remove the hard drive from the Slim--pop open the bottom; yank the drive out by its cloth cord, voila, etc.--his theory being that perhaps corrupted data on the drive was causing games to load improperly.

Yet, even sans hard drive, discs struggled to load. The green light on the front of the Slim feverishly winked at me like an insane asylum patient.

Wade was quiet when I informed him that the problem was persisting. I knew that he was gathering himself--I could feel it--getting ready to deliver THE NEWS--information that he no doubt had delivered to possibly hundreds of 360 owners before me, and would deliver again to many other 360 owners after I hung up the phone.

"Unfortunately, there's no other choice here," he said. "You'll have to send the 360 in for repair."

As Wade described the next steps in the repair process to me--an email would be sent to me which would contain shipping labels, which I will have to print out; the turnaround for the 360 would be two to four weeks, etc.--my anger bubbled to the surface.

"I'm sorry, Wade, so please don't take this personally, but this is the fourth f***ing time I've had a 360 fail on me," I said. "I'm beyond f***ing frustrated at this point. You know, as a consumer, I should hate the 360 as a console and Microsoft as a brand at this point. But the funny thing is, I don't. I don't, Wade. And I don't f***ing know why."

Wade cleared his throat, but otherwise remained silent, allowing me to continue with my diatribe.

"You know, maybe you guys worked some sort of voodoo on me. Maybe you people hypnotized me somehow. Whatever it is, despite the number of times I've been screwed over by Microsoft and its faulty hardware, the thought of having to live without my 360 for two to four weeks sends me plummeting downward into a panic spiral. No kidding. My chest tightens up just thinking about the weeks--weeks!--I'll spend without my 360, not to mention the fact that I also evaluate games as my job, which means that doing my job for the next two to four weeks will be a huge pain in the ass for me.

"If my PS3 or Wii should go down--which they never, ever have, for the record--I think I would be mostly OK with it. But I need the 360, Wade. I need it."

Wade, to his great credit, let me get it all off my chest. Who knows what he was doing on the other end of the line while I was gassing on? Maybe he was listening intently and feeling genuine empathy for me. Or, more likely, Wade had locked eyes with one of his fellow call center mates and was making mock jag-off motions in the air. (If I was Wade, that's definitely what I would have been doing.)

I did a little math this morning. Since the 360 launch in 2005 I've spent an unbelievable two to four months, in total, waiting for various incarnations of 360s to be either repaired or replaced. And here I am, seven motherf***ing years into the machine's lifecycle, and I'm doing it once again.

Another sad 360 story: I once purchased a 360 for a friend of mine a few years back. (He was about to get married, and I wanted him to play BioShock while he still had the time to do so.) While visiting him, the machine red-ringed right in front of us. Mortified, and not wanting to leave my friend 360-less or have him go through the whole Wade process, I simply went to the nearest Target and bought him a new 360 and personally ate the $400 cost.

And yet, after all of this, after all the failure and betrayal and disappointment, the 360 remains my console of choice, and I don't understand why anymore. Wouldn't a group of sane people, two or three hardware failures ago, decide to forego all Microsoft products altogether? If you buy a Chevy and it shits out on you every 75 miles, the next time you go to buy a car chances are most people wouldn't say, "Well, I'm interested in buying another Chevy, since the last one turned out to be such a huge piece of goat shit."

But gamers are a strange lot. We're very, very forgiving. We have an incredibly high tolerance for bullshit. Case in point: By the time Jack Tretton got around to apologizing at Sony's E3 press conference this year, you could feel the tidal shift of goodwill coming from the crowd, as if we were collectively saying, "Aw, come on, Jack. Pshaw. We forgive you for the security breach that may or may not have resulted in the pilfering of our personal banking information! Now show us Uncharted 3, you scamp! Woo!"

And so I sit, brow furrowed, gazing at the gaping hole which my Slim once occupied beneath my television, trying like hell to convince myself that Microsoft f***ing sucks, that the 360 sucks, that the stupid Master Chief eats bags of cocks, etc. and not even coming remotely close to succeeding.

The Notebook

In the mid 1990's my friend John Galvin and I made frequent pilgrimages to one another's city--me to visit him in Boston; he to New York to visit me--to partake in 72-hour--and sometimes longer--gaming marathons. This is how the visits would go: early on a Friday morning, I would board the Fung-Wah Transport, known informally as the Chinatown shuttle--by far the most frugal way to travel between Boston and New York (tickets were usually in the $10 range), and settle in with the incongruous crowd of horny college students and aged Chinese people, who for some reason always seemed to be carrying a million plastic bags filled with beets.

Once I arrived, John and I would gather supplies--groceries, beer, more beer, etc.--then stop at the game store and rent a stack of videogames. Then we'd go home, bolt the door, draw the blinds, and not emerge until we'd exhausted our supplies, ourselves, or both.

At the time, I was still trying to resist the gravity of videogames, still trying to become a serious writer, and still trying to be an adult member of society. John, bless his heart, was the one who made it OK for me to openly love videogames, if only for those 72-hour time periods. In fact, it was from the primordial ooze of those indulgent weekends--the escape from my then semi-hellish existence (bad jobs, broken hearts, many hours spent staring at blank sheets of paper, etc.)--that the current me would eventually emerge.

Ah, Current Me. You are so vastly superior to Original Me.

During one particular visit to New York, John noticed a heap of scrap papers that had gathered next to my TV. He began to leaf through the scraps. What he saw looked something like this:

B. BEAN 3RD 2:22

B. BEAN 1ST 1:14

B. BEAN 6TH 2:52

B. BEAN 4TH 0:49

What John was looking at, as I'm sure you've deduced, were notes I had taken while gaming. I was playing Knockout Kings at the time on the original PlayStation--EA's boxing franchise that pre-dated the Fight Night series--and I was keeping careful records of my progress.

"B. BEAN," of course, is Butter Bean, the rotund novelty opponent who was featured prominently in the game. As you can see from my notes, I was obsessed with knocking out Butter Bean. After each bout, with Butter Bean's mountainous body prone on the virtual canvas, I'd pick up a pencil, and with my hand quivering with my victory adrenaline, I'd scratch down the round I knocked him out in, and the time that had elapsed in that round.

I was in the habit of taking copious notes while gaming back then. I always had a pencil and pad of paper nearby. I'd write down everything--the location of power-ups, inscrutable clues from NPC's, secrets, etc. Sometimes I'd even draw up crude maps of DOOM levels, complete with the locations of monsters and when and where I could expect that pair of Hell Barons to appear. I'd create a narrative in my head for these moments, something along the lines of this: "Approximately 15 Imps will attack from the West"--draw arrow towards center--"but ignore them for the time being and deal with the flaming, flying skulls that float up out of the well at the center of the room. After the skulls have been eliminated, that's the cue for the Hell Barons to appear from the large descending platform in the East. Try to get the group of Imps to inadvertently strike the Hell Barons with their fireballs. The Imps and Hell Barons will ostensibly fight, tearing the asses out of one another. Whoever remains after this battle--Imps or Hell Barons--will be severely weakened. Go in with the chain gun and mop up the mess. Everyone clear? Alright, let's get out there, people. Stay sharp."

A bit of note-taking was absolutely necessary back then. Ten years ago, games didn't have the same obsessive-compulsive level of stat-tracking features that we now take for granted as gamers. Example: the image at the top of this post features actual notes that I scratched down while trying to puzzle my way through The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask a few months back. Getting through that game without notes? It's borderline impossible.

Other note-taking, like the maps and enemy locations for DOOM that I drew up, while not always necessary, were an effective way to let a game bleed over into the rest of my life. Making these maps gave me cause to think about it, and consider it, and feed my obsession for it--and boy, was DOOM an obsession--during the few non-DOOM-ing hours each day when I had to deal with less-compelling issues like paying bills, or working at my terrible waitering job at that terrible restaurant, or wondering why some cute girl didn't phone me back.

While my B. BEAN notes are gone now, lost during one of the four apartment changes I've endured since then, I can still recall John's reaction to discovering them: 1. hysterical laughter for several minutes, 2. ten year's worth of playful insults.

To this day, without fail, John will make a reference to the B. BEAN Incident almost every time I see him.

I don't resent John's insults in the least. He's right to poke fun at me. Those notes are a physical manifestation of my love, passion, and yes, oftentimes outright obsession for videogames. These papers are the smoking gun; they are tangible proof--Exhibit A--in the court trial convicting me on no less than six counts of unbridled nerdery.

And while I might have been red-faced at first--I snatched the notes out of John's hands and tried to futilely deny what they were for a few minutes--I realized that beyond the gentle ribbing he was giving me over the B. BEAN notes, there was also acceptance and understanding. What John was also saying to me was this: I see you for exactly what you are.

I'm certain that I experienced a cosmic sense of relief in that moment. I learned that though there might be ribbing involved, there's almost always love and real understanding on the far side of that ribbing.

Our 72-hour gaming binges? They're a thing of the past now. John's married with a child and a good career. I live on the west coast now, and I can't drink like I used to.

But he and I, of course, remain the most excellent of friends.