>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…
>As a younger man, before videogames came into my life, I played a great many board games. I was obsessed with three board games in particular: Mouse Trap, Master Mind, and a game with a cheery exterior but a vengeful, dry heart called Sorry!. My brother was the more creative soul of the two of us. He was perfectly fine with inventing his own rules for board games. But I would not tolerate such anarchy. So, by default, I became the Official Instruction Book Reader of our household. (Another one of my part-time jobs: TV Guide Reader. I enjoyed the…
>I got a call from my real estate agent yesterday–a pleasant woman named Shelly–letting me know that an apartment I’d been interested in a few months ago was back on the market and that the seller was now, in her words, “very motivated.”As with all real estate fantasies, I’d enjoyed a brief, torrid affair with the apartment in my mind, but had since moved on to other fantasy apartments and concerns. Or, had I?I woke up this morning thinking about the apartment, obsessing over it, wondering if I would be happy there. I thought about the cats. What would they…
>The defining moment of E3 2010? It was dapper Don Mattrick at the Microsoft press conference announcing that everyone in attendance would receive a free Xbox 360 Slim. We shrieked like guests on Oprah–myself included (I know!)–then went home and wrote very nice things about Microsoft–well, most of us wrote nice things–and waited patiently by our mailboxes for our shiny new Slims to arrive.Looking back, this moment was not the act of largess it appeared to be at the time, but rather Microsoft’s diabolical way of slipping the media and the industry at large a collective mickey. Slims-for-everyone made us…
>Before leaving for work in the morning, my dad was in the habit of writing out lengthy lists of chores that he wanted me and my brother to complete that day. He always signed his lists with the same two ominious words, always in capital letters: THE BOSS.Bosses are frightening beings. They can make you do things that you wouldn’t normally do, like wear a dumb uniform, and say strange things like, “Welcome to Chili’s!” Bosses also have the power to tell you that you can’t go home yet even if you want to go home, because, as they will…
>In a medium that moves only a couple miles per hour shy of the speed of light, many aspects of gaming are constantly being cast aside and left behind. One such aspect is the old if-you’re-stuck-dial-this-number tip line. Back in the ’90s, before the Internet roamed the earth, you were basically shit out of luck if you found yourself at an impasse while gaming. Your options were to 1) hope the subsequent issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly addressed your particular impasse (sometimes it did; sometimes it didn’t), or 2) dial a phone number for a dollars-per-minute charge and speak with…
>For three days last weekend, Vic and I walked around Toronto’s Fan Expo kissing babies, hugging Wonder Womans–hello again, Wonder Womans–and having our pictures taken with strangers. It was incredibly flattering. We shoot the show in a vacuum, not knowing if anyone really watches.People in Toronto? They watch. Oh, how they watch.We flew home on Sunday night. I cabbed from the airport. I walked in the door of my apartment, and before I even had a chance to put my suitcase down, one of my cats barfed all over the place.Then both cats kind of sat there, looking at me…
>At this point in my life I see my parents twice year: Once in the summer, once at Christmas. Last week, I endured the once-per-summer visit back East, to rural Upstate New York.My father, now in his ’60s, has never used a computer in his life. He does not have an email address. He claims, rather defensively, to have no interest in such things. When it comes to technology, me thinks my dad doth protest too much sometimes. There has always been a vast divide between my interests and his. I pride myself on being different from him, and vice…
>I’m on vacation this week. Sort of on vacation. I’m going East to visit my family for a few days. Which, I don’t expect, will be terribly relaxing. (It never is.) We always drive all over the place, visiting a million relatives. And my parents yell at each other. And I sit in the backseat and completely regress. My dad is having trouble seeing out of one of his eyes these days–his name is Bob; and I’ve started referring to him as “Bobclops”–which should make riding around with him driving A LOT more exciting than it normally is.Whenever I have…
>There’s that scene in The Exorcist where the track-shoes-wearing priest says, “Take me! Come into me!” And the (apparently invisible) devil flies out of the little girl, and flies into the priest, and he and his track shoes go out the window and roll and flail down a flight of stairs. By the time he reaches the bottom step, he’s dead.Sorry if you’ve never seen the movie. BELATED SPOILER ALERT WEE-OOO, WEE-OOO.I’m thinking of this scene because I had lunch on Sunday with my developer friend, Thumb-Blaster. Thumb-Blaster’s ambitious wife was out of town for a few days shooting a…
