Mixed Bag Of Fun

I have been putting the final touches on Avadon: The Black Fortress for Windows in the hope of releasing it next week. I have also been shepherding the game through beta-testing on the iPad. The rest of my time has been spent trying to convince myself that I'm not having a heart attack. Also, wishing they made office desks with hutches with space in the middle for a large iMac.

(Boy. It would be funny if I really did have a heart attack now. People would link to this blog post and go, "Wow! Irony!" in the same way everyone gets totally tickled to find the Facebook page of a recent mass-murderer. And remember, if I do die, and you pirate Avadon, I will then be able to totally haunt you and I'll be floating by the ceiling when you use the bathroom, making spooky noises.)


(I'm just sayin'.)

In the meantime, if you want to satisfy your cravings for hearing me discuss finer points of computer design in my weird voice, you should go here. It's a Podcast Interview for The Veteran Gamers, and it turned out OK. It should be worth your time, as I talk very quickly.

Finally, as I write this, the Playstation Network has been down for eight days. What's up with that? Networks go down. That's what they do. But eight days? Wow. Can you imagine the apocalypse of sleep-deprived horror going on at Sony now? Something crazy much be wrong.

Normally I wouldn't care, because most of my gaming is single-player, but my PS3 is my Netflix device. I can't watch Netflix on my XBox because the fans in that thing sound like a jet engine powering up. And Netflix on the Playstation requires PSN to work. Because everything about PSN has always been designed from a place of deep hate.

"Whom" Is Dumb.

This will be one of those blog posts where I go and court controversy. No, it won't be about software piracy. Something worse. I'm going to tempt the anger of grammar people.

I make my living as a writer. Sure, game design and programming are part of it, but the main selling point of my games has always been the stories. Each game I write has over one hundred thousand words, enough for a decently sized novel. That means that many young, impressionable minds have spent hours and hours reading my writing, being infected by my questionable grammar and unwholesome penchant for. Sentence fragments.

Thus, when I take the side of the Visigoths who want to simplify the rules of our language, I get to have a actual (if small) influence on how my young readers write, simply by being a bad example. It is a grim responsibility, and, at times, I must take a stand. I must use my awesome Role Model power to Make a Difference. Therefore, I must make this proclamation.

I will never use the word "whom" again. It's stupid.

Turning My Ignorance Into a Sacred Principle

Actually, I still have no idea exactly when to write whom and whomever and whomungous. I must have had bronchitis the day they covered that in school. (The same day they explained how to tell what syllable is accented and how relativity works.) So, for the sixteen years I've spent writing my million words and counting, I've never used "whom" properly unless prompted by proofreading beta testers. The rest of the time, I used "who" and "whoever."

And you know something? Hasn't done a bit of harm. Hasn't harmed comprehensibility at all. Hasn't earned me a single complaint from a customer in sixteen years. And, believe me, I get complaints about everything.

Don't get me wrong. Grammar has its place, and its rules should be obeyed. First, however, it is fair to evaluate those rules and see if they carry their freight. Does the effort to have the rule justify itself with better communication?

In this case, no. Everything "whom" does can be done with "who." This inefficiency offends my soul.

Also, using "whom" makes one sound really, really affected and twitlike. Which is not usually my goal. (Only sometimes.)

So I'm done with it.

But I Believe In Compromise.

I have to admit that the word "whom" sounds pretty nice. It's an elegant, cultured sounding word, the sort of word that might be used by Jane Austen or an Ent. I can see that some might be saddened by its loss.

Therefore, I propose this compromise: You can use the word "whom" when it would be correct, under the old, dead rules. In addition, you can use "whom" whenever you would say "who," or whenever it would sound good, or at any other point.

For example, by this new, simple, elegant rule, the following sentences are considered to be correct:

"Whom just fell into the wheat thresher?"

"You must be the hobbits whom are from the Shire?"

"Whom whom whom hello there whom whom whom whom whom."

Ahhhh. That Felt Kind Of Good.

I hope that all whom are reading this join me in my crusade against "whom." Being a Visigoth is really lots of fun. Give in.

And I wish upon all of you whom the same blessing I have been given: That, when you want to spend some time tearing down instead of building up, you also have access to at least a few young, impressionable minds. It's awesome. Whom.

Minecraft Makes Little Girls Cry.

I've been playing Minecraft a lot lately (when I'm not porting our newest game to Windows and iPad), and I will have several things to write about this truly fascinating game. For example, my nine year old daughter is addicted to it, and I thought her first experience with it was telling.

Here is a brief summary of my daughter's initial Minecraft session:

Starts game at spawn point.

Walks a long way from spawn point.

Builds most of a house.

Tries to make the roof of the house by placing a block of sand directly above her.

The block of sand falls onto her.

She suffocates.

She respawns at the start point.

She can't figure out where her house is.

She cries.

So what have we learned? First, that Minecraft is truly an educational game, punishing lack of foresight with an almost Eve-like intensity. It has much to teach about planning and forethought, and it delivers its lessons in the most painful way possible. Nothing educational can have value without the possibility of crushing failure.

Second, this would be a great bit of ad copy:

Minecraft - It makes little girls cry.

Third, after she went to bed, I logged in and spent a minute finding her house again. This made me a hero with a ludicrously small amount of effort. That justifies the twenty bucks spent on the game right there.

More to follow, once I figure out how to make a cake.

My Very Brief Review of Halo: Reach.

Every game should have jetpacks.

(Actually, maybe a little explanation. My wife and I play every Halo and Gears of War game together in co-op. It's happy-close-couple-relationship-time.)

(Sadly, the single-player components of Halo games have gotten painfully phoned in. The kick-ass set pieces of Halo 3 have degenerated into long, tedious sequences of interchangeable roads and warehouses.)

(But Halo: Reach has JETPACKS. And that is AWESOME. For the three minutes it lets you play with them.)

(Every mission in Halo: Reach should give you jetpacks. You should be able to boing-boing-boing all over the dang place.)

(Actually, what's more, every game should have jetpacks. Dragon Age. Minecraft. Farmville. Rock Band. EVERY game.)

(Tetris should have jetpacks.)

(Jetpacks.)

Red Dead: Redemption and My Failures As a Parent

Before I take a weekend-long break from writing Avadon to spend a weekend with the family in my favorite place in the world, I wanted to talk about my latest gaming obsession.

Red Dead: Redemption

Since I'm an enormous fan of Rockstar's violent, objectionable sandbox games, and the only person you will ever meet who actually played Grand Theft Auto IV all the way to the end, I'm surprised it took me so long to get around to playing this. It's Grand Theft Auto, but in the old west. So instead of stealing cars, you steal stagecoaches! Instead of killing hundreds of Mexicans in fake L.A., you kill them in real Mexico!

What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse.

So she wanted to play it. A lot. But it's a Rockstar game, with all of the obscenity, gruesome violence, and graphic sexuality that entails. (Along with an unusually high frequency of rape, which I don't consider an improvement.)

So I let her play the game, but only in sandbox mode. She got stuck early on in the missions, and I haven't helped her. Thus, the things she are exposed to while questing for horses are only damaging, not totally traumatizing.

Of course, when I walked into the living room yesterday, I saw her chasing down a pack of bandits and shooting them all in the back in an admirably businesslike fashion. Also, she is trying to hunt down every animal in the game. She'll say, "Daddy! I shot a snake! And an armadillo!" And she'll bounce up and down like the happiest little girl in the world.

So I either suck at parenting or am really fantastic at it.

Two Key Differences Between Red Dead: Redemption and Grand Theft Auto

In Grand Theft Auto, when I left my car to go on some dangerous mission and returned to it later with like eighty guys chasing me and a need to get away very quickly, I never found that my car was missing because it wandered off to eat a particularly tasty clump of grass a half a mile away.

In Grand Theft Auto, when I was peacefully driving somewhere, my car was never suddenly killed by a cougar, who then ate me.

I mean, sure, sometimes gang members would shoot at me, but this was never really a problem. Gangbangers with AK-47s are a walk in the park compared to cougars. Cougars are serious business.

Oh, and Some Shameless Self-Promotion

In October, we had our 15th anniversary sale, celebrating an alarmingly long time being in the business of writing Indie role-playing games. The sale was a huge success, one of the best sales we've ever had. As a result, and as a thank you to everyone who has been nice enough to keep us in business all these years, we are resuming the most popular part of the sale: the big discount on CD bundles. For the entire month of December, all of our Game Collections on CD are 25% off.

The Ugly American's Guide To Britain, Part 3.

(One more vacation journal, and then I'll go back to writing about games for a while. When I'm not making games, I love to travel foreign lands and write snarky and occasionally helpful journals about what I saw. This is the third article about my recent two-week trip through Britain. Some of the content is a little more adult that what I put on this blog. If you are below sixteen or so, you should go here. Anything offensive or misguided should be blamed on the dysfunctional American educational system.)

General Notes on Britain, Set the Third

Despite the island's reputation, we have eaten a lot of really delicious food here. That's not to say there isn't a lot of terrible food here. I'm sure there is, but that's true everywhere. I've eaten a lot of totally crap food in France and Italy.

But if you keep your eyes open and choose carefully, there is a lot of deliciousness, even in pubs. And it makes sense. Britain has excellent meat (most of it grass-fed), great fruits and vegetables, fantastic cheese, and really tasty candy bars. My advice if looking for good food? Look for a place that brags that its ingredients are "locally sourced." That means that at least its heart is in the right place.

Also, we have started each days with the legendary, much feared English Breakfasts. It's pretty much the default tourist chow at any B&B you care to name. It's an egg, a sausage link, a piece of bacon, a roasted tomato, tinned beans, toast, OJ, and the caffeine of your choice. And black pudding, if the place is awesome.

It sounds scary, but it's really not. Laid out on the plate, it is, by American standards, a pretty modest meal. Hell, I've picked less food than that out of my teeth and belly folds before I go to bed. But it's a jolt of protein and energy that's perfect for powering you through 12 hours of high-octane touristing. The one day I went without it, I was headachy and miserable by the end of the afternoon. So I am addicted.

Also, speaking of giant jolts of fat. I am very pleased to say that, after vacations being intimidated by the delicate and gazelle-like French, I have to say that the English are of a body build I am ... let's say, more familiar with. As a picked-last-for-sports tubbenheimer from back in the day, I feel very at home here.

Stop 3 - York

York is, even by British standards, old. It was a major Roman fort and local capitol. They built big walls around it. Then the Normans took it over and made the walls bigger. Then the English came along and made the walls bigger. Most of those walls are still there, albeit with big holes in them. But I met a Scot who knows a guy who knows a guy who can fix those holes for thirty quid.

When you're in York, everywhere you go, you can turn and see ancient walls and parapets and arrowslits and murder holes. So, for a Dungeons & Dragons goober like me from back in the day, being there was like a 36 hour orgasm.

York is very generously laid out for the sore-footed tourist, as just about everything an outsider would want to see is inside the city walls, in one small, easily traversed clump. There is the expected street after street of gorgeous old architecture. Wood buildings that somehow survived from the middle ages. Rows of Victorian townhouses. A working portcullis by the east gate. (Squeee!)

Visiting towns like this, it's easy to imagine that all of the British live like this, in gorgeous, architecturally interesting five story houses. They don't. Actually, a huge chunk of them live in cruddy flats, like we do, sitting on the couch, watching boobies on the lookybox (again, the British word for a "telly") and eating pie.

But then again, looking out the window of the train, I have seen countless developments of row after row of brick houses with heavy tile roofs, each of them built like a brick shithouse, if that brick shithouse was then expanded into a full house. Even their suburbs have great age-envy. Their 20th century houses haven't been around for 500 years, but they look pretty good for lasting the next 500.

Anyway. York. Like Bath, much of the fun was just walking around and gawking. Seeing a six hundred year old building slumping lazily toward the street is always amusing. But the two name-attractions for us were York Minster and the Castle Museum.

York Minster is a gothic cathedral, the largest of its kind in northern Europe. Apparently, there are people out there who get super-excited about cathedrals, but I'm not an aficionado.

York Minster was started in the 13th century and only finished 250 years later (isn't that just like contractors?), full of cool art and medieval stained glass. It's also full of history. For example, it's where Edward the First ("Longshanks" to you, because nicknames were awesome back then) convened parliament to figure out how to kill Mel Gibson before he could impregnate his daughter, or something. I don't know. All the kings and wars and sieges are starting to get a little bit tangled for me. At this point, whenever a tour guide shows me a wall or alley or something, I just say, "Did dudes get killed here?" and he's, like, "Totally!", and I nod and take a picture and we move on. There's a gorgeous shard of ruined abbey wall sticking out of the ground, from when Henry the 18th destroyed it to save Catholocism from the Huns, or something. I'm sure that's what my guide said, but I think the English breakfasts are giving me ham-hallucinations.

If you're going to England, you should know that at no point in the last thousand years has a week gone by without a civil war or beheaded queen or pope-stabbing or Celtic insurrection. Do not, under any circumstances, try to keep any of it straight. If you try to figure out the difference between Henry the Third and Richard the Twelfth and Edward the Umpty-Tumpth, you will go mad, and anyway all that intrigue was made up to sound good for the tourists. Mary, Queen of Scots actually has as much historical reality as the Loch Ness Monster. In reality, from 1000 AD to 1900 AD, Britain was ruled in constant peace and tranquility by a secret circle of elves. So, now that you know that, you can let all the stabbings and dethronings wash over you without letting them worry you too much.

Anyway. York Minster. Almost every day, they have a free Evensong service (a lot of cathedrals do this, by the way), where you can sit in the grandeur and listen to a gorgeous sung service. Now, it's officially church, so you have to be respectful and stand and sit when they tell you to and pretend to pray, but it's very cool and it'll make you feel in touch with the centuries of violent crazy people that came before you, and I highly recommend it.

Oh, and it's free. They don't charge admission for church, which kind of makes sense.

The other stop we truly enjoyed was the Castle Museum. It's in a castle, not about castles. It is a museum dedicated to displaying every detail of life in Victorian and 20th century times. There are displays about housework, and mourning, and the home front in WW2, and the sixties, and so on, complete with antiques and highly detailed recreations of rooms from the times. This sort of thing can be horrible, but the place was completely fascinating.

I also found it very helpful. Most of my fun comes from sitting around and listening to adorable accents. After listening to adults for a while, I felt that listening to small children talking in their cheery little pip pip tally-ho voices would be the living end. So I considered hanging out outside a school when it lets out, but then it occured to me that any plan that begins with "Hang out near the school when it lets out" might be ill-considered.

But the Castle Museum was full of flocks of British schoolchildren, walking in lines in their uniforms and being educated and bored. It was adorable. So that was covered.

One of the big reliefs on the trip has been that, even in very touristy cities, unless you are actually in a museum or other attraction, the vast majority of the people on the street are locals. People live here! I went to a great deal of effort and expense to go somewhere and be a foreigner. I see Americans' fat, slack-jawed faces all the time, thank you very much. When I travel, I want to see the dull, pallid faces of unappealing strangers from all around the globe.

Fun British Fact #3

The U.K. currently has a huge problem with alcoholism. This is an actual true fact. However, this does have the happy side-effect that the drunken idiots who paraded shouting past your hotel room at 3 in the morning were probably locals, not ugly Americans. So don't be ashamed!

The Ugly American's Guide To Britain, Part 2.

(When I'm not writing games, I love to travel foreign lands and write snarky and occasionally helpful journals about what I saw. This is the second of five articles about my recent two-week trip through Britain. Some of the content is a little more adult that what I put on this blog. If you are below sixteen or so, you should go here. Anything offensive should be blamed on a hormonal imbalance caused by too much haggis.)

General Notes on Britain, Set the Second

People in Britain have an accent. And, by that, I mean that they have about 400 accents. While watching the telly (or, as they call it, the "Looky Box"), I saw a comedian do a bit about how everything sounds more reassuring in a Manchester accent. So there is a Manchester accent, and that means something. Societies that develop on islands can get a little bit odd.

Still, just listening to people talk is one of the funnest things about coming here. I simply can't get tired of it. My main attraction is going to a pub (which is not difficult, as every building is a pub) and listening. I also try to talk to people, but I have to be careful and not say any of my opinions about the ridiculousness of soccer or how cute it is that they have, get this, a queen. Otherwise I might say the wrong thing, and someone might hear me and be feeling all drinky-punchy, and I'll hear someone behind me shout, "Oi!" Which is British for, "Pardon me, but I am about to give your ass a truly extensive kicking."

The language on this island is an intriguing dialect of English. They have lots of funny words for things. For example, the primary currency is the "pound", but they will often refer to it as a "squid." A sample conversation might go: "Can you give me change for this squid?" "Sure, luv. Here are one guinea, three farthings, two bob, a crown, six ha'pennies, a half crown, a mega-crown, a mecha crown, and a pennywhistle." "That's not enough! There should be another farthing. You have cheated me, m'lord." "Oi!" "(Sound of face being punched.)"

Also, the British, like most of the rest of the world, love a sport called soccer. I got to watch them watch a World Cup match where their team fought Algeria to a scorching, hard-fought 0-0 tie.

I know. I know. While I'm there, I'm supposed to call it "Football." But, if you live in the U.S. and are in the U.S., calling soccer "football" is truly affected.

Also, football sounds like it should be the name of a cool, kick-ass, exciting sport. Any sport where a 0-0 outcome is not only plausible but, in fact, common isn't sweet enough to have an awesome name like Football. Soccer isn't even cool enough to be called Soccer. I think it should have a more appropriate name, like "Fancy-pants grass-prancing."

I also got to be there when Germany beat England 4-1 in what was, based on the media reaction, the worst thing to ever happen to anyone anywhere. Apparently, England scored an unquestionable goal that would have tied up the game, but it was disallowed because the referee wasn't close enough to get a good look at it and there is no goal referee and no instant replay review. Hey, just because it's the most popular sport in the world doesn't mean they should drop a few extra bucks to actually get the thing officiated properly. After a couple weeks of exposure both to the alleged entertainment of World Cup soccer and to the people who love it, I've come to the conclusion that I could like soccer, except that I don't hate myself enough.

Stop 2 - Edinburgh

Before I start, I have to send a quick message out to the Scottish people.

I can't understand a goddamn word any of you are saying.

This is not to be taken as a criticism. I love ya', baby. Don't ever change. I am instead saying it as a way of fostering greater understanding between our peoples. I would only point out that the Scottish crime thriller Sweet Sixteen, which came out in 2002, had to have subtitles, and it was entirely in English.

I may be exaggerating here slightly. Most of the time, I could kind of understand what Scottish people were saying. But there is something about that accent that just lends itself to being dialed up to 11.

But I still completely love listening to it. I could listen to Scottish people talk all day, and since all of them that I met seemed inclined to talk all day, we were a good fit. For example, when my wife and I were sitting in the park, a crazy old woman just in from her tiny village in western Scotland, sat down next to us and started telling us all of her racist terrorism conspiracy theories, I just sat, back, relaxed, and let her brogue wash over me. Sure, her thick accent made it impossible for me to tell exactly what she was saying about the Jews. (My guess? Not a fan.) But it was still lovely until she started explaining how Barack Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist. Then we lied about our urgent dinner reservations and ran off. Sorry, crazy Scottish lady. We get enough of that particular shit at home.

Also, I have pretty much fallen in love with Scottish women. Bear in mind I am only writing based on my own personal observations, but they are all completely punk and scary and thoroughly tattoed and hot and ready to cut you at a moment's notice. I'm not saying I want to be 20 and single again but, if in some horrible Twilight Zone future I was, I would save up my pennies and hop a flight to Edinburgh. Then, in a bar somewhere, I'd catch the eye of some pierced lass and we'd talk and I'd swoon and the next three days would be a blur and I'd wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a broken heart and no kidneys.

Yes, the northern half of this island is pretty scrappy. Their women all look ready to get to it and breed the next generation of Scottish warriors. And yet, Scotland's birth rate is very low. Perhaps, inspired by the arachnid, they eat the livers of those they love in moments of unguarded coital enthusiasm. The theory sounds crazy until you see these women. They're pretty awesome.

And believe me, the Scottish don't mess about. Edinburgh Castle isn't just some frou frou toy castle where nobles ponce about at each other. That's one of those ancient occasionally-razed-to-the-ground spires where the shit gets real for real. And the National Museum of Scotland is a glorious and unapologetic monument to all things Scottish. Not just Roman artifacts but plants and stuffed animals and the curling stone they used to win a gold medal but also plenty of swords and thumbscrews and The Maiden, a big alarming pre-guillotine contraption used to behead people for several productive centuries. See, if you're going to build a big shiny expensive history museum, by God it's going to be full of the remains of Pictish human sacrifice and machinery used to kill hundreds of dudes. Scotland is a serious place.

Fortunately, I passed three days without referring to anyone as English. The Scots and the English have a ... complicated relationship. I'll put it this way. One display in the National Musuem mentions that Scotland's largest immigrant group is the English. Think about that one. Look at it this way. When someone moves from California to Seattle, they're not considered an
immigrant.

(I might want to call them that, but that doesn't make it true.)

The guy who ran our B&B was a loud, boisterous, opinionated Scotsman straight out of central casting. We were the only people staying there, so, based on the odor in the hallway, our innkeeper divided his time evenly between looking after us and smoking joints the size of my forearm.

Scotland's primary scary local delicacy is, of course, haggis. Based on what I could tell from those I talk to, it does get eaten. Not a lot, and often with other things (chicken stuffed with haggis is a common dish). I mean, they're not dumb, and they know Pizza Hut exists, so they aren't eating it every day. But it does get eaten, and the canned haggis I saw in the supermarket proudly proclaims that it is 45% lung.

We ate at one truly superb modern fine British cuisine type restaurant, where I had Scottish venison with venison haggis. I asked our loyely young waitress what parts they use in the haggis. She looked at me like I'd just asked her what the color blue smells like. "So what is in the haggis?" "It's ... haggis." "I mean, what organs go into the haggis?" "It contains haggis." She then braced herself for me to ask what the ingredients of the salt were. I guess, when you mince all of an animal's internal organs and boil them in spices for long enough, they are transmuted into a new, indivisible base element.

(And, in case you were wondering, haggis tastes like boiled, heavily spiced meat with that unmistakable tinge of organ meat flavor. Whether you would like it depends entirely on your opinion of organ meat. But, considering that they have no shortage of McDonalds, their willingness to tolerate lung meat in any form should be taken as an inspiration to us all.)

Also, you can walk into any pub and get a shot of 16 year aged single cask whiskey that will blow your face off with its awesome for four bucks. That alone would be enough to make me completely fall in love with this city.

It's gorgeous and the food is good and the people-watching is great and the accents are gorgeous. Pretty much took dynamite to blow me out of that place. But I had to go back to England, the only place on this island where you can say anything nice about England without getting beaten up.

Fun British Fact #2

The British words for 'crisis' and 'opportunity' are the same. And that word is "cripeitunity."

The Ugly American's Guide To Britain, Part 1.

(When I'm not writing games, I love to travel foreign lands and write snarky and occasionally helpful journals about what I saw. This is one of six articles about my recent two-week trip through Britain. Some of the content is a little more adult that what I put on this blog. If you are below sixteen or so, you should go here. Anything offensive should be blamed on jet lag hallucinations.)

In June, my wife and I went to the United Kingdom for a two week vacation. We did not take our two young daughters with us as we wanted to, you know, have fun.

Whenever we tell people we meet on the road that we left our two girls at home, we get a funny look, a mix of sympathy and harsh judgment. How, they wonder, could anyone leave adorable little moppets at home, when they could be here, costing lots of money and keeping us from ever focusing on anything for one minute without squealing, "We're bored!" in perfect unison. It is a mystery. But I digress.

Though we have visited many foreign lands, going to Britain is a unique pleasure for two reasons. First, my wife and I were exposed to Monty Python and Doctor Who at an impressionable age and are thus lifelong anglophiles. And, second, Britain has not, for the most part, subscribed to the irritating and pernicious affectation of speaking languages other than English.

We are writing these journals as a way of sharing our experiences, to teach the reader something about this mysterious and exotic land. And, of course, to make fun of it.

General Notes on Britain, Set the First

First off, we're going to Britain. Or the U.K. It is not a vacation in England. That is because we are also going to Scotland, and the Scots can get rather tetchy when you refer to them as English. And then they will punch you, because they are drunk.

We are traveling using the Rick Steves philosophy, as described in his Europe Through the Backdoor series. According to him, we are supposed to strive to have a "backdoor experience" when we travel, where you meet with the locals and bond with them and understand their ways. I don't know why I'm going along with this, as I do not, in fact, like people. I think it's because, try as I might, I just can't stop giggling whenever he says, "backdoor experience."

Heh. Backdoor experience.

Anyway. Britain. They drive on the left side of the road there. This scares many tourists into not renting a car, even though the really scary part of this isn't the driving. It is the walking. Already, several times, I have, in my practiced city way, reached a street, looked to the left, saw no cars, stepped into the street, and thought, "Oh. I could have just been killed." Both driving and walking are insanely dangerous. Just hide in your B&B and try to digest your pork-laden British breakfast. It's for the best.

Stop 1 - Bath

Pronounced "Bahth."

Bath was, in Roman days, a religious and leisure center, and Romans came from miles around to bathe in natural springs there. They went to take baths. Thus, Bath. A literal-minded people, the British are.

Then, in the 1700s, it became the fashionable place to be, and kings and lords, mistresses in tow, came to wear fashionable clothes and take the waters and prance and gad about. About this time, many gorgeous buildings, houses and shops and whatnot, were built. Time went on, but the buildings remain, because if you live in one of the pretty tourist-friendly buildings, you can't change anything inside or outside without official permission.

It's a gorgeous city, really lovely and fun to walk through. And Bath is determined to keep everything beautiful so that five hundred years from now, humans (or radioactive cockroaches) will be able to come here and feast their eyes (or chitonous sense-appendages) upon their beauty. It's a huge tourist destination, and, like Venice, it's lousy with tourists all the time.

The people of Bath seemed to have a real pride in their city and a desire to show it off, which I found really charming. Apart from the ruins of the Roman baths, the main tourist attraction is the free two hour walking tour, where the city gets explained and shown off by an elite cadre of local volunteers. They walk you around, explain the architecture, and get hilariously angry over some plate glass windows that got installed in the 1860s, or a few oak trees that got planted well over two centuries ago.

It's really not like the US, where a 30 year roof is considered a serious investment. Everything there, even new stuff, is built out of huge blocks of stone in the 1700s style, and made to last, like, forever. When I asked the guide about it, he got a little defensive, as if he thought the Yank was going to pick an argument about it, but I totally wasn't. All of the buildings there are held in trust by the residents, and they want the citizens of Bath centuries from now to be able to have the same lovely town/tourist destination. You may buy a house, but you're only borrowing it from posterity. It'll be here long after you're gone. If you paint your 18th century townhouse purple, you aren't just being an idiot now. You're screwing the tourist trade for centuries to come.

But I can't work my head around your town being this eternal thing. When you move in, you're just the next tenant in a long line, and you'll be there in that stone shell until you die and they scrape you out and someone else gets slotted in, and so on forever. Having grown up in a disposable world, it's a really fascinating thing to see, but a place where every single window and fence is older than my entire country is very unnerving.

Stonehenge

Several companies offer day or half-day bus trips from Bath to nearby sights. We took one to Stonehenge, because you have to. We dutifully got the audio tour and walked around the big mossy rocks and got sunburnt and there were sheep everywhere and it was very nice.

Nobody knows why Stonehenge was built, but the audio tour helpfully gave a full selection of theories. One of them was, I swear to god, that Satan built it because Merlin asked him to. I feel that even bringing up this nonsense was a violation of the sacred trust between an audio guide and my ear. Look, I don't want to come across as Mr. 21st Century Super-Rational Know-It-All, but, while I don't know who built Stonehenge, I am reasonably confident that it wasn't Satan.

Also, the bus tour showed us many houses that still have actual thatched roofs. This is taking the history preservation thing way too far. Once the roofing material of choice for the seriously poor, thatched roofs are now insanely expensive to maintain. And yet, they do. So pillory me for having a closed mind, but I going to draw the line here at living under a shelter of black, rotting, delightfully flammable straw.

Our bus tour also went to a small village called Lacock, which is being preserved in as close to its original, charming, medieval appearance as possible. They can't have satellite dishes, but the houses all have cable, so they don't have to live like animals. It's very scenic, and lots of TV and movies get filmed there. There's a million old buildings on the isle of Britain, but very few of them ever got to be Harry Potter's house.

I should have appreciated the village more, but I was too busy giggling, in my unendingly juvenile way, over the pronunciation of the town's name. It's Lay-Cock. Heh. Anyway, the town is very pretty, and you should drive there. It's on the A350, between Ballmouth and Oralshire.

Fun Britain Fact #1

The British are completely addicted to tea, but they don't call it tea. They call it "skag." Just say, "I am really desperate for some skag," and everyone will nod knowingly.

The Outgoing Goblin's Guide to Gaming Etiquette

(This is a slightly updated article I wrote for the late, lamented Dragon magazine back in the day. It is a humorous summary of all I learned from many years of playing Dungeons & Dragons. It is also darn funny. I haven't checked to see how many of the rights to this article I signed away when it was published. However, since they never bothered to pay me for the article, to Hell with them.)

The Outgoing Goblin's Guide to Gaming Etiquette

Etiquette is the art and science of living together happily. It is the set of rules which maintains the peacefulness of civilization. It is the salve which soothes society when it becomes chafed.

Have you ever been in the middle of a long, happy session of D&D, with everything going great, when suddenly you said the wrong thing, and your whole party suddenly ganged up on you and killed you?

Wow. Me too.

Fortunately, I've learned from all the times this has happened to me. This guide is a way of giving something back to the community from which I have taken so much. Follow the advice within, and you will shine as a beacon of politeness to all your fellow patrons of the geekly arts.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Just because you're playing a chaotic evil thief doesn't mean you should be rude. Read on and follow my advice, even when every ounce of common sense tells you you shouldn't! You'll be glad you did!

Do's and Don'ts of the Proper Role-Player

It is a terrifying thing to play a character, massively outnumbered by monsters, surrounded by huge forces you can't understand, trying to keep your dice from mingling overmuch with the dice of the player next to you. Here are some simple rules to help hold off your inevitable, grisly death a short period of time.

• DON'T stand up, point at the DM, and shout "You're not the boss of me!"
• DO regale your friends with tales of high role-playing adventure. What's the point of having Frodalf make 3rd level if you can't tell your pals about it in intense, soul-crushing detail?
• DON'T ask the magic user how much mana is left in his pool.
• DO give your characters classic fantasy names, to help get people in the proper mood. "Bilbo" and "Mel Gibson" are excellent choices.
• DON'T blow cigarette smoke in the DM's face after casting a fireball, no matter how much it helps him to "feel the fantasy."
• DO adopt a special voice to use when your character speaks. Your fellow players will feel much more immersed in the fantasy after thirty minutes in a room with "Squeeky, The Gnome With A High-Pitched Voice."
• DON'T try to get an automatic rifle for your character. The DM will be forced to give the orcs rocket launchers in the name of game balance.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Well, this may not be so bad. In my games, the ogres tend to come equipped with energy pistols and canisters of the bubonic plague. But then, my campaigns tend to be more lively and fast-paced than most.

Good manners are, of course, not for the player alone. Believe it or not, sometimes the Dungeon Master should play nice too. Not too much, of course, or the players will take advantage, shifty vermin that they are. Never trust them for a moment.

• DO blow cigarette smoke into a player's face after an enemy throws a fireball at him or her. It will help that player "feel the fantasy".
• DON'T give the ogres canisters of the bubonic plague until a character in the party can cast Cure Disease. Fair is fair.
• DO make fantasy speech mandatory. Common use of phrases like "Prithee, my liege." and "Huzzah!" create an environment that makes the players feel blissfully adrift in time and space. (Example: "Prithee my liege, but if mine +1 dagger doesn't end up back in my pack on the nonce, I will have to kick some serious elven butt, huzzah!")
• DON'T forget to encourage serious thought. Try making your players have to answer a riddle before they can leave the dungeon. Nothing builds the self-esteem like coming up with that brilliant answer after a mere three hours of saying "It is the sun? No? Then how about a snail?"
• DO encourage role-playing by enforcing an "If you say it, your character says it!" rule. In the middle of a dungeon, do you really want your elf to say "Hey, Jason, get me a coke?" Or "Arrgh. My chest. Aaaghh! Where are my nitroglycerine pills?" Certainly not.

See? Nothing but good, simple, common sense. If any of this seems strange or inappropriate to you, well, it's a good thing you read this article before you really embarrassed yourself, isn't it?

Helping Build a Balanced Party

Remember, the central element of every great drama is conflict. When creating your character, be sure to do so in a way that maximizes conflict! Keep things interesting! Does your friend plan to play a shifty, untrustworthy thief? You must play a Paladin. Is Erik playing a laser gun toting alien hunter? Then be an alien in human disguise, and lay your eggs in his torso as soon as possible. Is the DM's girlfriend in the game? Then do something to tick her off, by all means!

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Any campaign in which the DM's girlfriend plays is destined to be rich, exciting, and complicated. Especially after they break up.

There is no better time for exciting role-playing and intrigue than when splitting up the loot. Look at is this way. Think about how important it is to get paid at your job. This of the loot as your character's salary. Imagine working hard at, say, McDonalds, cleaning the grease traps and mopping the floors and waiting for the end of the month when, finally, you will get that Girdle of Hill Giant Strength you've been busting your butt for. But then, when the time comes, the shift manager tries to stick you with a lousy +1 Glaive-guisarme instead! And you're not even proficient in Glaive-guisarme!

I'll tell you what, that is the time for some serious, noisy role-playing.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Remember, if your party is created with enough conflicts, you will be able to have hours of wild, noisy action without even making it to the city gates.

Creating a Proper Gaming Environment

All right. The game is at your house tonight. Everyone will be coming over in three hours. You look around your living room. Everything is neat and clean. There is no debris on the couch. The carpet is freshly vacuumed. There are no strong odors of any kind. So everything is perfect and ready for the game, right?

No! You dunce! What were you thinking?

Remember, we are trying to imagine ourselves in a fantasy environment here! Were the middle ages sterile and clean? No! They were pretty stinky, actually. So, before your players come over, you must provide a fantasy-like gaming environment:

• Pens. Pencils. Paper.
• Spare dice and rulebooks.
• Tortilla chips.
• Comfortable chairs.
• A fair amount of grime, lint, and dirt.
• Open flames.
• Live snakes.
• Ethereal, fantasy-themed music on the stereo. I recommend Rush. Or Jethro Tull, in a pinch.
• Numerous copies of Dragon magazine. We can't stress this one enough.
• Mysterious "blood stains" on the floor. If you can't figure out a way to create realistic looking blood stains, I recommend using blood.
• A large pot of suet, organ meat, or other appropriate medieval food.
• A rich, musty, dungeon-like odor.

And remember ... science has shown that if something is good, ten times as much of it is ten times better, at least. Thus, you should strive to provide everything on this list. That way, if the screams caused by the presence of snakes distracts you, you can always just turn up the stereo.

Follow the Standard Rules of Etiquette

When we spend a happy evening gaming, we create a new, fantastic world in our caffeine-addled minds. However, our corporeal bodies, sadly, remain in this world, growing older and rounder. This means that, since we remain in this world, we have to live by the rules of etiquette everyone else lives by every day.

Your mother was right. Please and Thank You are magic words, just as capable of opening doors as any magic spell. There are lots of other magic words, too. Like Critical Hit, and I'm Bleeding To Death, and Huzzah! These are phrases which make every gaming session run a little bit smoother.

When your host has you over for a gaming session, be a gracious guest. Compliment his collection of Star Trek novels. Don't spill Mountain Dew on the Firefly DVDs. Don't point how lame he was for buying a Wii, when Playstation III has much better graphics and plays Blu-Ray. Instead, compliment his taste in furniture and wall decoration, and, if he has crusty dishes stacked in the sink, just think of it as his effort to create a "dungeon-like" atmosphere.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: How can you role-play exploring a gruesome, dungeon-like atmosphere when you're not actually IN a gruesome, dungeon-like atmosphere? You think goblins fold and put away their laundry? No!

And, finally, after a good session of gaming, one should always send a proper thank you note, hand-written on some sort of lovely stationary:

Dear Mr. Dungeon Master,

Thank you very much for having us over for that lovely adventure last Saturday. Also, thank you very much for the lovely +1 longsword. It was exactly what my character needed, and the experience points I received for getting it really hit the spot. Ha ha.

Also, I'd like to apologize for that little misunderstanding that we had. I was mistaken. You are, in fact, the boss of me. I'm sorry for any upset my loud and unexpected outburst caused you.

- Warmest Regards,

Jeff Vogel

The Importance of Timeliness and Understanding

It is a sad fact of our role-playing lives that most campaigns are killed by indifference and the absence of players.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Well, actually, most of MY campaigns are killed by a natural 20, an orc, and a rocket launcher, but, as I mentioned earlier, my campaigns are a bit more lively and high-spirited than most.

If you are the DM, it is important to be flexible when players miss sessions. If Sue can't make it, let another player play Sue's character. Give that player one of Sue's magic items as a gratuity for the extra work. Or, you can run Sue's character as an NPC. Playing Sue yourself will give you a chance to humorously satirize some of Sue's more notable personality traits and verbal tics. This will help you work out frustration over the time Sue spilled Mountain Dew on your Firefly DVDs.

If you are a player, on the other hand, try to meet the DM halfway. Suppose that the gamemaster for the evening, Frederick, walks in carrying a copy of the module Scum Orcs of the Hills. He sets out a box with twenty carefully painted Scum Orc miniatures. An issue of Dragon magazine drops from his pack and falls open to the well worn article "Ecology of the Scum Orc." For the sake of realism, he has carefully cultivated a personal scent very similar to that of a Scum Orc. He lays out a map of the hills surrounding your village. And he asks you, "What do you do now?"

This is NOT the point where you say "We go to the lowlands and hunt kobolds." Not unless you want to find yourselves face to face with kobolds wielding rocket launchers and canisters of the ebola virus.

A Helpful Example

In closing, I would like to present a transcript of one of my recent gaming sessions with four of my friends. It was a pleasant experience for all concerned, and everyone was so polite that I could barely stand it. Read, and learn.

The group for this session consisted of Player A (chaotic-evil thief), Player B (chaotic-evil thief), Player C (lawful-good paladin), and Player D (chaotic-evil fighter/thief). The DM was, as is ideal, me.

(Note that this is a near-perfect group for the creation of exciting role-playing. A group like this can have hours of enjoyable treachery and intrigue over the discovery of a single healing potion.)

Me: OK. The gnoll is dead. Unfortunately, your attacks damaged its kevlar vest too much for it to be of use.

Player A: OK. We head west.

(I bend down behind my screen to see what comes next. As I look, someone slaps it with the palm of his or her hand, smacking me in the nose. I jump up.)

Me: Who did that?

Player B (pointing at C): It was her!

Player C: You sneak!

Player D: Huzzah!

Me: OK, Player B. You get 500 experience for helping.

(Always be polite and reward people who help you.)

Player D: Prithee, my liege!

Player C (to Player B): I'll get you for this.

Me: And Player C, your character catches tuberculosis.

Player C: I'm breaking up with you.

Me: OK, done. You also lose your paladin-hood.

Player C: OK. I become a chaotic-evil thief.

Me: Excellent! Done.

Player A: OK. Like I said, we head west.

Player C: I backstab Player B.

(All right! Now we're getting some interesting conflict! Now none of the players will find out that I forgot to design an adventure.)

Player B: Ow. Dang. I drink my healing potion.

Me: You look in your pouch and realize that it's gone.

Player B: OK, who has my healing potion?

Player C: I run behind player B and backstab her again.

(And so on. This goes on for about an hour of pure, scheming fun.)

Me: Suddenly, you are distracted by an explosion. You look up and see a dozen scum orcs on the crest of a nearby hill. One has a rocket launcher, and the rest are holding small metal canisters of some sort.

Player A: I pull out my wand and shoot a magic missile at them.

Me: Your wand is gone.

Player D (stands up, points at me, shouts): You're not the boss of me!

Great, huh? Like I said before, there is nothing like a little bit of good manners to create a lively, non-stop, action-packed gaming session. See you in the dungeon! Huzzah!

The Last, Best Article On How to Fix the Olympics!

I don't just spend my time writing games. I have interests. I have passions. And that is why, every two years, I plop my well-rounded self onto to couch for several weeks to watch an abusive amount of the Olympics.

And we're serious about it in this household. We were dumb enough to renew our Tivo subscription for the Winter Olympics, just so we wouldn't have to sit through commercials like animals.

Of course, those who feel that they are oh so superior to any mere sporting event have totally tuned me out by now. Good. They don't deserve the Olympics. Sure, the event is expensive, commercialized, and occasionally full of corruption, stupidity, and incredibly tight-assed officials. But there is an awesomeness there that the bad parts simply can't obscure.

However, speaking as a game designer, the Winter Olympics could really, really use some tightening up. There are countless ways to make the events more interesting for the people who count. That is, us. At home. But I'm not going to suggest, as some have, dropping sports. That is cowardly and Unamerican. Also, if some young, strapping lad has spent his short life wrecking his body to be best at something that is almost surgically absent of interest, I'm not going to be the one to tell him that his sport sucks beyond redemption. Even if it does.

So here, offered free and out of my pure love for humanity, are my ways to make the Winter Olympics much more cool and watchable. I'm not the first to make up such a list, but I plan to be the last.

Downhill Skiing, Speed Skating, Slalom - Here's a rule. Any sport where you can't tell with the naked eye who is winning is dumb. These events are always decided by a margin of three squintillionths of a second, periods of time too small for the human brain to process them, and only magic, time-telling robots can tell us who won. And maybe the robots are lying. Because robots hate us.

My game designer powers tell me that this is an easy fix. Just add a factor that will cause a greater variance in the finish times for the athletes. A polar bear randomly wandering halfway down the course should solve the problem. And, for extra exciteness, put a ribbon on the bear's tail. Pull it off on the way down and we shave five seconds off your time.

Ski Cross, Snowboard Cross, Short Track Skating, Any Four-Person Roller Derby On Ice - These are how downhill skiing and speed skating should be done. Fast races. You can see who won. Awesome crashes.

And in Short Track Skating, on average, 90% of the skaters are disqualified. Anyone can win! Heck, I just got a Bronze for the men's thousand meter, and I never left my house!

Anything With Ski Jumping That Doesn't Involve Lots of Nifty Flipping In an XTREME Manner - These are the most tedious sports to watch that don't have the word "luge" somewhere in the name. Every jump looks exactly the same. Also, these sports are harder to fix, as the slope doesn't really have a good place to put the polar bear. The only way to fix this is to change the rules and equipment to make ski jumping exactly identical, in every way, to snowboard halfpipe and hope that nobody notices.

Any Event With a Snowboard - Thank God for XTREME sports for keeping the Olympics watchable. Enjoy it while it lasts. Give it a decade or two and the Olympics-fun-sucking-machine will have its way with them. Remember, a snowboarder got booted from the Olympic village for getting photographed displaying his bronze medal in an (ahem) erotically suggestive way. The fun window is closing fast, folks.

Hockey - Basically soccer on ice. Which means it's boring. The best way to fix it is to force the players to play 60 minutes straight. No rests. No interruptions. Watching their desperate efforts to flail the puck into the net around the 50 minute mark will be awesome. Also, the profound fatigue will make it much harder for them to keep away from the polar bear.

Figure Skating - The perfect sport for the Winter Olympics. No sense of fun or spontaneity. Comically corrupt judging for us all to argue about. And sparkles, sparkles, sparkles! Plenty of excitement, but not the sort that is ever, you know, exciting. Perfect viewing for those of us with cardiac issues.

There's still room for some minor changes. First, no skaters under eighteen. I want to be able to watch some contestant pull out her sultry Salome dance without feeling like my name should be on a list somewhere.

Second, three nights isn't near enough for Ice Dancing. We need a minimum of eight nights to fully appreciate the splendor of whatever the hell that is. Oh, and finally, the entire current pool of judges could perhaps be removed and replaced with ANYONE AT ALL.

Bobsled - In my brave future world, everyone in the bobsled will be forced to switch places halfway down.

Curling - There is a general progression that goes on with curling. People hear about it and go, "They do what? What brooms? That sounds dumb!" And then they sit down to watch it for a few minutes, hoping for a good laugh. And then they say something like, "Wow! How lame! They're just playing shuffleboard with brooms. And they ... Ooh. That was a nice shot. And the shouting and the snacks and they're all middle aged. This is so dumb. And ... Sweet. Completely knocked their rock out of there. ... Where was I? This isn't a sport. This ... This ... ... ... SWEEP HARDER, BITCHES!!!"

Curling is the ultimate sport of the Winter Olympics. It moves relatively quickly, compared to, say, hockey. A lot of points get scored. There is strategy. You can tell who is winning with the naked eye. And there is an eccentric, low-tech charm to the thing, an "I could do that" air (even though you really can't) that makes it far more approachable than watching wiry, teenage pixies jumping eighty feet into the air.

So to fix curling? Show more of it. Especially the woman. A lot of them are totally hot in a kind of naughty librarian sort of way.

Oh, and One More Thing - The best way to fix the Olympics is to get rid of the tight-assed, suffocating self-importance of the Olympics. After the Canadian hockey-women won their gold medals, they took to the ice and drank champagne and smoked cigars. Look at the pictures. They are awesome! And so some officials got angry and made them apologize. Hey, we aren't talking someone performing an act of love on a bronze medal here. It's celebrating your hard-earned victory by cracking a cold one on the back of a Zamboni.

The Olympics is about (i) insanely dedicated young people (ii) doing crazy things (iii) for our enjoyment and then going off to have (iv) mind-bogglingly athletic sex. Anything that does not directly contribute to one of those four key factors must be destroyed without mercy. Preferably before 2012, when the next Real Olympics will happen.

A Big N00b Visits Las Vegas

(Please be warned that this article might have more adult content than other articles on this blog. For that reason, it should not be read by anyone below seventy years of age. Everyone else should go somewhere more family-friendly.)

I have long been in love with the concept of Vegas. I love games. I love theatre. I love math. And Las Vegas is a city that is built on games and theatre (of a sort).

And, even better, it is an outpost in the middle of a desert that is built entirely on the concept of punishing people for being bad at math. How could anyone not be thrilled by this?

And yet, my love has always been from a distance. I studied probability for too many years to be able to kid myself even the slightest about the end result of most any gambling endeavor. I learned to count cards while playing blackjack and started to get the hang of it, but that felt too much like work for me to want to keep at it. I already have a job.

So I stayed away from Vegas for over a decade. However, since my wife had never seen it, in all of its gaudy splendor. It really is something every American should experience before death, so we went for a few days. We didn't gamble (much). We just took in the experience. These are a few observations about my stay, which might aid and amuse those who aren't so familiar with the place and are planning to go.

Vegas Is Fun

Las Vegas, as it exists now, was constructed by some of the smartest, savviest people in the world, using many billions of dollars, in order to be the most fun experience possible for the largest number of adults possible. They have succeeded. I don't care how superior to it you think you are. If you have a few hundred bucks to burn, Vegas will provide you with two or three days of enjoyment, crass or sophisticated. There are some really smart, funny shows and some restaurants that are fantastic by even the most picky standards. You don't have to gamble a cent.

However, Vegas is a money town. If you have no money to spend, it hates you and you suck. There are free entertainments, but not many of them. It's not New York City or Paris. Even a city as legendarily expensive as London has awesome things to do for free. In Vegas, nothing is cheap except the escort ads they pass out on the Strip.

Some Things Are Cheap

It is possible to get hotel rooms for very cheap, as long as you avoid the luxury joints. For example, as of this writing, you can stay at the Hooters Casino Hotel for $29 a night. Oh, and the Hooters Casino Hotel is a thing that exists.

Valet parking at casinos and hotels is always free. Since most of the tourism in Vegas involves driving to various hotels, this is awesome.

You can occasionally still find dollar shrimp cocktails, if you enjoy frozen shrimp and vomiting. If you are determined to pay bottom dollar for seafood in the middle of a desert, you deserve what you get.

Vegas Is a Hotel-Based Ecosystem

For most tourists, the Vegas experience involves going from one enormous, mind-bogglingly expensive hotel to another. Most of these are on Las Vegas Boulevard South, also known as The Strip. It is also where restraint and moderation went to die.

The warrenlike reputation of the hotels is accurate. Once inside, it is impossible to find anything without walking through the casino eight times. There are no windows and no clocks. There will be shiny things and people carrying open drinks and lit cigarettes. Coming from Seattle, which is basically Communist Russia with more salmon, seeing people actually smoking indoors without shame is marvelously exotic.

When touring the Strip, I strongly recommend visiting The Venetian. It is very nice, with murals, marble, and a shopping mall with an indoor canal. It is also the only hotel on the strip that is actually less touristy than the real-life location it is based on.

The Planet Hollywood Resort, also on the Strip, features a Pleasure Pit. Basically, it's like every other set of gaming tables, except that all of the dealers are young women in lingerie. So, if you ever dreamed of visiting a place called the Pleasure Pit, I regret to inform you that it contains far less pleasure than you hoped for. Though it is wonderful to find any place that makes Hooters look classy.

Oh, Yeah. Some People There Will Sleep With You For Money

One feature of walking up and down the Strip is that guys will constantly be trying to stuff thick packs of cards into your hand. Each card bears clip art of an attractive young woman, an improbably low price, and a phone number. Dial the number on the card and a woman who looks nothing like the picture will come to your hotel room and charge an amount nothing like the listed price to give you an experience nothing like what you were hoping for. Alternately, you can collect several handfuls of these cards, stack them up, and pretend you're about to play the most awesome game of Pokemon evar.

You can also find thick magazines full of escort ads. These work just like the cards, only there's many more pictures of women that look nothing like the women you will get. Also, the descriptions of the escorts within are frequently awesome. Actual example:

"I'm half Japanese and half American. People call me an Amerasian. I am independent and an Amerasian. I am independent and available to entertain you."

In other words, Rain Man is now a Vegas prostitute. Please try to be done quickly. She gets really upset if she's not out of there before Wheel of Fortune is on.

You Can See Shows

There are many shows in Vegas. There are shows that feature magicians, ventriloquists, singers your grandmother loves, and, of course, boobies. All shows in Vegas are 90 minutes, on the dot. Because why would anyone ever have a show last for more or less than that? It would be unthinkable! A 92 minute show? An 88 minute show? Pure anarchy, I tell you!

Happily, you can always go see Cirque de Soliel. They have six shows on the Strip as of this writing, soon to be seven, and only a few of them suck. I saw Mystere and Ka, and both were great (the former far more than the latter). They also feature isolated moments of quiet subtlety, and elegance, because someone in Vegas has to.

We also saw Penn & Teller, which was a great show. A lot of remarkable bits and well worth the large cost. My general opinion of magic shows is the same as my view of improv comedy: Neither should be performed by anyone under any circumstances whatsoever. But I'll make an exception for Penn & Teller, bless their cynical, arrogant, atheistic hearts.

One More Thing, Which I Think Says a Lot About the Whole Tenor of the Experience

I saw one bar (in Mandalay Bay) which featured a 100 oz. daiquiri for $35. What sort of person sells that? And, my God, who would buy it?

Why the People on Your Side are Always Ripping You Off.

Recently, one of my friends was trying out my newest game (which is awesome). He called me out on something that has annoyed him in such games since the beginning of time ...

The following is a perennial complaint that I have had with these kinds of games since the beginning of time; Here I am, going around killing monsters, rescuing people and finding desperately needed stuff. I keep running into fellow government employees, who need my services, who will not teach me important skills unless I massively overpay them. Their excuse? "I have expenses". F*** that. At the very least you need a better story, or a sub-plot dealing with the massive corruption within the system. Just saying.

(I have added *'s to swear words to maintain my blog's family qualities. Show it to your kids!)

Now, this was a friend, not a beta tester. If it was one of my friendly, volunteer beta testers who was bitching me out, I would have come up with a very calm, polite, non-profane response. Since this was a friend, I felt no such limitations. I thought the answer was simultaneously amusing and enlightening enough to be included here.

This is awesome! Of all the things that are completely unrealistic in the system (Like that you can't climb a ten foot wall, or that you can use MAGIC), you get angry at the one thing that basically corresponds to how things work in the Actual World.

For example, suppose you work in some government agency. Say the Department of the Interior. And you need to mail out a thousand letters for some reason or another. So you put them all in a big box and you take them to the post office and are, like, "Please mail these." And the guy behind the counter will say, "You have to buy stamps." And you'll say, "But we both work for the government! It's all the same money! So help me out!" And he'll be, like, "You have a budget. And we have a budget. You can't use our resources without sharing your resources. So f*** you! Pay me!"

Or, more to the point, look back at your military history. When our big, fat, rich country goes to war, in the chaos of the thing it's inevitable that some soldiers get too much of one thing and others don't get near enough. Thus, bartering occurs. (To see a lot of this, I highly recommend Generation Kill by Evan Wright.) Say you're a marine and your night vision goggles ain't working because you never got batteries. And you see someone from the next battalion over carrying a crate of the batteries. And you're, like, "Hey! I need batteries! Give me a few of yours!" And he's, like, "Cool! Our machines guns don't work because we don't have enough grease. Give me a can of grease." And you're, like, "But we're both fighting together! On the same side! Semper fi! Ooo-Rah!" And he'll be, like, "Yeah. Ooo-Rah. F*** you! Pay me!"

Or you're a guy in a fantasy world, and you see some archer training her troops, and you're, like, "I see you're all busy and stuff, and you don't know me from a hole in the ground, and you have work you need to be doing and defenses that need shoring up and maybe you want to sleep sometimes, but you should drop everything now in order to give Bow and Arrow Lessons 101 to my sorry ass. OK?" I'm sure you can see where this is going.

"F*** you! Pay me!"

I hope that this brings some clarity to this perplexing issue.

Also, game balance, need to give you something to do with money, blah, blah, blah. This is my main justification, and I'm sticking with it.

Our Children Must Be Bred To Master Pokemon

Since I got a pretty positive reaction from my post last week about raising a child, I thought I'd say a bit more about that most blessed of childrens' fantasy entertainments: Pokemon.

When I was growing up a misunderstood little nerd in a small town, I had lavish daydreams in which I obtained joyous revenge on those kids (and teachers) who tormented me. I fantasized that, when they picked on me, I could summon a swarm of killer bees to terrify them.

Yes, that's right. Killer bees. Can you imagine anything so lame? So faceless and uninteresting? It makes me wish I could travel back in time to beat up my younger self and take my lunch money.

Happily, 21st century children are spared such indignity. When they feel put upon and need an imaginary friend to fight for them, they are provided with an assortment of AWESOME creatures. Whether you want your spirit animal to be a dragon, a yellow rat that can shoot lightning out of its ass, or a pink, orb-shaped pop singer, it's there for you. And you can get a card with a picture of it. And a stuffed version. And watch TV shows about it.

Do you think anyone would watch a half hour series about a swarm of killer bees that wandered around and learned valuable life lessons and made honey and occasionally totally stung some farmer? No. I don't either.

Remember, we live in the 21st century now. We don't grind our own wheat or make our own clothes or lance our own boils. Why should we make our own imaginary monsters? Especially when the Japanese will do it for us for entirely reasonable prices.

Pokemon provides both the awesomeness of loyal monster slaves and plenty of food for the child mind's odd desire to memorize long, meaningless strings of information. (Pokemon are the baseball statistics of the new millennium.) This odd world is the best thing we have provided for children since vaccination. If you don't understand the appeal of Pokemon, you don't understand childhood.

Properly Molding the Gamer Child

I grew up a serious gamer in a family of people who really, really weren't. I was, while loved, regarded as an oddity. A peculiar mutation. Harmless, as long as I was kept from sharp implements and encouraged to not discuss such concepts as "armor class" or "hit points" at great length.

But now I am, if the calendar is to be believed, an adult. And I am raising two small daughters (one 3, one 7) who are showing their own gamer instincts. Though, these days, their Pokemon and Nintendo obsessions only make them "normal."

However, as a gamer parent of gamers, I am finding that the rules of our household are different from what I grew up with.

For example, there is a sacred, almost sacrosanct right to be able to save one's game. When I need a daughter to put down her DS and do something, she always gets one or two minutes to save her progress first. It is only in the cases of extreme lateness or severe punishment that she is forced to shut off the game with her progress lost. It is the Ultimate Sanction.

(Also, when you quit Animal Crossing without saving and start up the game again later, a cute animal comes out and severely lectures you for your carelessness. It is in this way that I outsource my disciplinary duties to Nintendo.)

Also, my children are allowed to play educational games almost without limit. However, my ideas of what makes a game "educational" might differ from those of the stick-in-ass types that normally determine these things. My seven-year old girl is allowed to sing on Rock Band as much as she wants because it forces her to read the lyrics. Also, her cultural education will be incomplete without at least some exposure to Elvis Costello.

And I have long felt that high-end raiding in World of Warcraft has a strong educational component. It requires strong organizational and teamwork skills, not to mention people management. At least, that is the justification I am going to give when I pull her out of bed on a school night to tank an instance for daddy.

I strongly encourage both girls' fascination with Pokemon. Pokemon provide fulfillment to every human being's basic desire to have an army of monsters. Also, Pokemon spend all their time fighting each other, which is good. For what other reason would one want to have an army of monsters?

Yes, we have truly created a new world. An exciting, technological, shut-in, pasty world. Now, if you will excuse me, my daughter is old enough to realize that there is something called Dungeons & Dragons, and she wants in. And you think I'm going to trust some wormy, unseasoned, prepubescent Dungeon Master to run her first campaign? Not likely.