I take a deep breath. My teeth are clenched. I work my jaw back and forth and try to relax as the familiar door appears in front of me. I unsheathe my sword. Okay, I think, let's try this again.

The door opens and I burst into the room. The first guard is sitting down, staring straight ahead. As always, he seems surprised to see me. I greet him with the usual kick to the face.

She's got that look in her eyes: hungry and excited, mischievous, just a little bewildered. While I still delight in that expression, now it also fills me with a peculiar dismay. It means that somewhere within her, the unquenchable fire has been relit. As always, it will burn until no fuel remains, until she is spent and exhausted and sick of herself. This fire is all too familiar to me, enough to know that there's no stopping it at this point. She wants to play--but not with me. Hesitantly, and with a hint of desperation, my girlfriend points to the laptop.

"Load up my dudes."

I glare out my window. The wolf is still there, milling about outside my small cabin, undoubtedly eager to take another bite out of my backside. He snuck up on me in the dark, as I was flattening a patch of ground for an herb garden. I'd heard his footsteps but didn't see him until he was right on top of me, so although I was only about two meters from the cabin door he still managed to get a good nip in.

Now I'm locked inside my tiny hut, with a hungry wolf pacing around my would-be garden. No one else is online, and thus there is no one to come to my aid. The town center, while actually quite nearby, lies at the bottom of a steep hill into which I've yet to carve a safe path. As the hill is far too precipitous to be taken at a chased-by-a-wolf pace, it appears I'll have to wait until the creature wanders off. In the meantime, it occurs to me that Wurm Online (Mojang Specifications, www.wurmonline.com) really isn't a game about "wilderness survival". It's a game about starving to death in the wilderness, and then being eaten by wolves.

It's close to noon on a Tuesday, and I'm wondering whether or not I'll be getting out of bed today. It is as yet an uncertainty, even to me; but so far the smart money is on "˜no'. The argument can be made that, as it is almost noon, I have essentially missed half of what this particular Tuesday had to offer. Since I'm already entertaining doubts as to the quality of the second half, I'm considering whether I should just forgo the whole spectacle.

The only problem is that I forewent Monday as well, and Friday the week before. Although I can't really remember back any further than that with much acuity, a glance at my daily planner would tell me I'd opted out of Thursday too. Furthermore, skipping today is likely to decrease Wednesday's chance of making it on the board as well--which means I'm on the verge of giving myself a sorely undeserved week-long vacation from the world. Some strange sort of extra sensory perception kicks in. It tells me this is something my professors might not appreciate.

Something is missing. To be honest, I didn't even notice it until recently, but now that I have, its absence has weighed on my thoughts. There is a narrative void in our medium. Games have thus far ignored a particularly revered dramatic template; a template which Western society holds in quite possibly the highest regard. Why has our most venerated of dramatic modes not yet been satisfactorily adapted to our newest medium? Where is our great videogame tragedy?

As noted in a recent Gamedaily Biz article, the games industry, for a variety of reasons, is not particularly driven by individual celebrity. In it's place gamers have come to celebrate a peculiar kind of collectivist celebrity; we idolize developers instead of designers, teams instead of individuals.

It's clear that to some extent this is stifling the industry's creative growth; but at the same time, perhaps it's the most appropriate form of hero worship this medium could have. While I have lamented their lack of authorial vision, games are to some degree a necessarily collaborative art form, and this odd interpretation of celebrity seems quite apt. That being said, I have to confess: if this industry had the equivalent of a "Seventeen Magazine", full of misty, dream-like photographs of the hottest design teams to cut out and paste on your walls, my room would be a shrine to Valve.

In the Sumba Islands, there is a particular tribe of Indonesians, who weave a particular type of traditional cloth, called ikat. These are intricate, elaborately patterned tapestries, the most complex of which are handed down as heirlooms for generations. The process to create them is a convoluted one, in that it involves more than one person. Over the course of several months, workers dye the warp and weft of the cloth and actually program the pattern as it is woven.

I am somewhat obsessed with ikats. They have an intrinsic capacity for symbolism on so many levels, and I find they are apt metaphors for just about anything. The unrefined thread becomes a piece of cohesive art, and an arguably divine sort of order is rent from chaos; these are all pleasing thoughts for someone as enraptured with symbol as I. But the actual method of creation is what fascinates me most of all.

Warning: This article contains spoilers for a minor but well-done sidequest from Troika's "Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines"

I am a creature of violence. In the past year, I have attacked countless people, savagely beaten them, run them over with cars, and rained down all manner of ordnance upon them. I have killed hundreds, if not thousands; typically in self defense, but occasionally out of pure malice. And I'm assuming you have too.

I stare at the screen. 50 hours? Have I really put two entire days into this game? I did not notice that they'd gone--there was no chime to mark each hours passage from my life into a world that exists only in code--but they most certainly are. If I concentrate I can almost feel the void they filled, a bizarre phantom pain. And as the game's infallible timer continues to remind me rather mercilessly of where they've all disappeared to, all I can think at this point is, "What a strange hobby we have."