On Tuesday I accepted a position as a copywriter at a NYSE listed corporation, a salaried cubicle job with a cushy benefits package, free Starbucks in the break room and fancy flat-screen monitors in the lobby; ending in a single phone call three-years worth of toil and sweat as a private entrepreneur. In the aftermath of that decision, what I feel above all else is a sense of relief. Having spent 33% of a decade as a self-made man, living and dying, so to speak, on the fruits of my own labor, the prospect of a traditional nine-to-five seems like a breath of HEPA-filtered fresh air.

Ruminating – in the sense of reflecting and not cud chewing – on the past three years, I am both extraordinarily glad to have swum in the deep waters, and equally glad that it is coming to what appears to be a tidy and perhaps surprisingly untragic end. It is the dream of many an office-jockey to suddenly pull up the stakes and work in a bathrobe from the downstairs office, and let’s be honest, any work environment is improved when you enjoy it in the comfort of Terry Cloth. That said, the magnitude of work, funding, planning and support needed to start a home business is simply inconceivable until you’ve attempted it, particularly when you’re stewing under fluorescent lights at the office feeling decidedly underappreciated. Just as parents-to-be are laughably naïve when pondering how easy it’s going to be for them to raise their children, so too the talented but under-informed might later compare entrepreneurship to being hit in the face with a small moon.

For those of you who listen to This American Life, this week’s conceit should prove familiar. A recent episode attended to the phenomenon of false apologies, so commonly delivered everywhere from the political stump to the Christmas dinner table. We've all heard the I'm Sorry that comes without real contrition, the kind that almost hurts more for its absence of sincerity, and the following and familiar poem by William Carlos Williams was offered on the show as among the most trenchant and egregious literary examples of a non-apology.

This Is Just To Say:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

It is a poem that can be interpreted to describe the conscious decision of doing thoughtless and hurtful action, and as kind of a seminal example of the non-apology is widely spoofed online and off. In worlds where we, as game players are constantly tasked with less than ethical actions, where we offer damage to endless victims for our own entertainment, it seems like the sort of thing our avatars might offer as a non-apology to the digital lives on which they wreak havoc. With that in mind, we at GWJ offer some new takes on This Is Just To Say, as given from the worlds of gaming.

Huh?

Oh, pardon me. I appear to have been snoozing. One might say recovering. Let me just get myself organized here, and we can get right to – hey! Relax. I’m going as fast as I can. You know, this would go a lot faster if you could manage a little maintenance every now and then, so don’t you go getting all squirrelly on me. You’ve got no one to blame, but -- excuse me! Did you just hit my keyboard in frustration?

I’m sorry, are you a child?

I only ask, because I’m given to understand that hitting inanimate objects is the domain of the extraordinarily young or irretrievably stupid, and I’m just wondering on which side of that white picket fence you fall. If you don’t want me to take so long to start back up after being inert for a dozen hours, try optimizing me! Besides, I don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror at nine in the morning, but you’re no scintillating hive of buzzing activity yourself.

I am not a very good golfer. Wait, let me start over.

I am the worst golfer in the world. That sounds like hyperbole, the kind of thing one might say to make with the funny, but it’s not. It’s an accurate description of factual data as derived from anecdotal evidence, empirical analysis and the signed affidavits of friends and family confirming the theory’s validity. I have scanned YouTube numerous times to find golfers worse than me, and I can assure you that I’m in an entirely different league than these posers to the throne. Golf shots claiming to be impossibly bad elsewhere are routinely superior to even my more athletic attempts on the links. I am the kind of golfer whose very presence drags the sport down as a whole, my awkward flailings at the golf ball probably suggesting to spectators that I had been recently injected with elephant tranquilizers and floor cleaner.

And yet, I can’t wait until this furiously persistent winter, which even today threatens to spit frozen water at us from its interminable clouds, finally capitulates and returns to Canada where it belongs so that I may go out again and get my first five putt of the season. My persistence, a truly inexplicable thing like a leprechaun with a head made of cabbage wearing an I’m With Stupid shirt, is strangely durable in the face of little to no hope. It is such a palpable thing, that I am left wondering how I never could summon its reckless determination in order to finish Ninja Gaiden.

Pardon me for a moment as I indulge in the territory of woeful anachronism and spout a brief eulogy for the violent, untimely death of customer service. I realize this is a phrase still trotted out at regular intervals by any number of disingenuous companies who, judging by the canon of their actions: 1) have little apparent interest in actually providing meaningful customer service and 2) are stained with the blood spilled as they murdered it in its sleep. Watching the modern corporate environment mention customer service is like watching Weekend at Bernie’s, where we are portrayed as the mouth-breathing bystander that doesn’t realize they’re drinking daiquiris with a corpse. So, let’s all have a brief moment of silence as we mourn the loss of our esteemed companion and friend, its brutally beaten body now finally ready to be laid to rest and buried so that its grave can be properly danced and defecated upon by any number of businesses who want to take your money.

I realize it’s usually in vogue to see something popular and want to tear it down. There’s no icon somehow quite as satisfying as that of toppled greatness. Perhaps it’s an element of human nature, or perhaps it’s a classic example of why humans will eventually wipe themselves out, but no hero is ever quite as interesting as the fallen one, the high-school quarterback who now works at the glass factory, the starry-eyed politician whose long forgotten indiscretion becomes fodder for twenty-four hour news, the once trendy band that becomes instantly trite and offensive when heard on pop-radio.

I realize too that what I’m about to say can be dismissed as this kind of vicious and admittedly annoying deconstruction, the counter-argument to popular theory that flies in the face of convention simply for the sake of doing so. I might even entertain some self-doubt if I had a more significant history of snobbishness, if I listened to independent music that you’ve never heard of while attending films with subtitles. But, I am frankly not that complex, and rarely do I lose interest in a thing merely because others have adopted an interest in it.

So, with that disclaimer tendered, let me offer the following: I believe Bioware’s games are vastly over-rated.

I believe in innate talent. I believe that had I grown up with endless training, the best possible coaches and a driving desire to succeed I would still not be a professional football player or, for that matter, competent at Calculus. I am comfortable in not believing that I can actually be anything I set my mind to, that I lack the fundamental capacity for either catching footballs or knowing what the hell an integral is. And, having seen players like Fatal1ty ply their digital trade of death or that eight year-old who can play Guitar Hero like his fingers were built with the appropriate muscle memory, I’m equally convinced that there exists innate video game talent, which is why I buy into the basic concept of the cyberathelete.

Ok, I would probably call them something else like Controller Artists or Sofa Stars, something that denotes skill but, for reasons obvious, avoids the implication of physical prowess. Cyberathletes sounds like something from amateur William Gibson fanfic, and I’m no more inclined to hand over that mantle to video-gamers than I am NASCAR drivers – seriously, don’t even get me started on how not an athlete those guys are. But, what they do possess is an ability to operate video games at a professionally competitive level, and the difference between the abilities of, say, Dennis “Thresh” Fong and myself is the difference between Tom Brady and Ryan Leaf’s infirmed grandmother. Unfortunately, like intramural Lacrosse at a community college or quilting bees, competitive gaming has no discernable future as a spectator sport.

I despise the pissing contest arising from most conversations about the success or otherwise of a particular console, though it's probably fair to say that I dislike most pissing contests in general, particularly the literal ones. So, I admit I harbor some concern that the following article might inspire such shenanigans, and having too frequently suffered through the morass of console flame wars, I reasonably hesitate to glance at Pandora's Box much less touch it. So, when I say this may be the year of the PS3, please understand that I am not depreciating the value of your 360 or Wii in any meaningful or statistically relevant way.

That said, for all its clumsy fumblings over the past year, like a high-school sophomore pawing helplessly at a triple-clasped bra, Sony may have finally positioned their obsidian monolith of a system to join in the money-orgy that is the current console generation. Empirically accurate or otherwise, Sony is perceived to have squandered their substantial PlayStation brand with this generation's exorbitant prices, poor management and a notable lack of games. The question of just a few years ago – wondering not whether the PS3 would dominate this generation but by how much – seems positively naïve in light of the PS3's rocky start, so it's an interesting confluence of events that has given the once mighty PlayStation brand a shot back to greatness.

Those who don't own a PS3 now, may be sorely tempted before the year is out, and those who do like myself but rarely play it, may find themselves dusting off that dormant wedge and enjoying a console whose time has finally come to shine.

The headline this past week was: nobody cares about your stupid story. When Ken Levine wrote down these words for his GDC discussion on telling stories in video game, I wonder if he was already picturing the headlines and aftermath. Certainly we can expect that he knew such a statement would be, for those with short attention spans, the penny on the rails that causes the trainwreck, and any attempt at justifying and clarifying the position would be the background noise after the bump that nobody ever actually gets around to reading. After all, you have the name behind Bioshock, arguably the most literary infused action game with its Objectivist overtones – and how many of us actually even know what the hell that means? – telling us all apparently that story telling in video games is an exercise in futility, which is, of course, a dramatic over-simplification on what proved to be a more complicated talk. But, Levine Describes Complicated Layered Approach to In-Game Storytelling, doesn't exactly make for good headline material.

It is interesting that in the roiling wake of 2007, which offered up some of the best video game storytelling done since the hey-days of Sierra and Infocom, that I so strongly believe that the story in games is secondary or even tertiary to the mechanics of the game itself. It was not Levine's "nobody cares about your stupid story" statement that got my head nodding like a Brett Favre bobblehead in an earthquake, but rather when he talked about a development style that allowed the evolving game to inform the story rather than trying to force a square peg into another square peg. Don't start with the story, start with a framework, then a game and find a story that works into it. Simple. Revolutionary.

And, at the end of the day, he's right. It is always story that should be sacrificed for the sake of gameplay.

Once upon a time there was a fine game called Space Invaders, a game of extraordinary simplicity in both design and technology, and it soaked up quarters in the dingy corners of bars and convenience stores where men and boys of all walks fired missiles at aliens that fell like snowflakes caught in a crosswind. And it was good.

There may be some kind of backstory to Space Invaders locked in someone's head; something to explain floating destructible shields and the bizarre landing method employed by the alien armada, but what you need to know to play the game reaches into that primal place in our animal brain where we instinctively know to eat, sleep, reproduce and shoot missiles at aliens any chance you get. Simplicity in the first days of videogaming was not so much a choice as a necessity of limitation, with only a handful of bytes and the processing power of the modern remote control at developers' disposal. But, what resulted, the joy infused into these wooden cabinets with their phallic controls, built a generation.