A moment's hurry at just the wrong time combined with two big rackmount Dells, and it was time for a trip to the emergency room. The verdict was some cuts that needed stitches and a broken bone in my thumb that needed 3 pounds of half-cast layered over a bunch of other wrappings. For the record, I did NOT smack the doctor at the urgent care clinic when he couched that verdict in terms like "with your age and condition" and the sort of wheedling, faux-soothing tone that doctors used on my great-grandmother when she didn’t want to take her medications.

The whole thing just sets my teeth on edge. There's a Velcro strap holding this surgical sandwich together, and the exposed-hook side picks up everything but boys and money. It itches. It's a pain (in both respects) to do just about anything. And the cruelest blow of all, it's just about impossible to game. A lot of injuries you can work around, but most games don't go well when free use of your dominant hand is limited to your pinkie.

I've been scrabbling around like a mouse in a Mason jar, trying anything I can think of to make a game work. Consoles aren't going well. I've tried holding a controller on my lap, angling it in various degrees so I can try to reach across with my left thumb. I managed to get myself logged in to Xbox Live that way, but beyond that it's been a bust even in the arcade realms. You can bloody well forget that trigger buttons exist. I spent some time working it different ways, but all I really got out of it was some smart-alec comments about trying to play Mass Effect 2 one-handed (that's what she said!) that my younger son interjected to try to lighten my frustrated glowering and muttering.

The ESRB is a parent's best friend, there is no question. In a large percentage of cases, this organization can help you make sound decisions in your game purchases. However, it's far from perfect, and some game content is bringing the gaps in the system into sharp relief.

The ESRB is not really aimed at "gamers" per se. When it was established in 1994, the concept that people who played games would be parents wasn't on anyone's radar. Its true target was and is parents who aren't gamers. And while we have our own troubles with it, there is a prevailing attitude suggesting that any mainstream parent who can pour Pepsi out of a boot without a road map will be happy if only they pay attention to the sign in the game store and the big white letter in the black box.

That's not at all an accurate stance in the real world. The ESRB's age ranges and content labels are applied inconsistently. Even with the context that the ESRB's descriptions of gaming experience provide, the labels are so vague and overlapping that they're almost meaningless on a practical level. The system is missing labels that are vital to making a truly informed decision about issues that some parents are really concerned about. And beyond that, the "T" rating fails to take into account the giant gap in age and development between ages 13 and 17.

My Playstation 3 console has started twinkling. WTHeck!?

At first I thought it was a problem so I hit the internet to see if anyone knew what I had done to my television's settings. It wasn't me. Apparently Firmware 3.0 causes the wavy thing moving in the background of your system menus to sparkle like Edward in the noonday sun. Why? Well, it's a feature. According to Sony anyways.

A little more Google-fu showed I was even farther behind the times than I thought. Firmware 3.10 came out in November and was part of the download/install that brought our glittery upgrade. It upped the ante with PS3-oriented Facebook functionality. Oooooooh! If I am ever inclined, I can now spam all my Facebook friends with every trophy I've earned, thingy I've downloaded, or as I'm playing certain games various events will be announced to all.

Microsoft isn't exempt here, either. The "new experience" they touted for Xbox Live last year came in with some very mixed reviews. The kids like it better than I do; I give it about a thumb and a half down. Even after all this time trying to get used to it, the organization really annoys me. It reminds me of trying to find something in the phone book. I always have to roll through all the menus trying to guess what category they've decided to call a particular download.

I haven't explored our flashy PSN too far yet, but I'm already not amused. I did find out how to turn off the sparkles, but I can't get rid of their annoying widget that streams marketing headlines at me. And they've plastered what was once a fairly clean menu interface with obtrusive deep links to their store. And I'm not even going to dignify the Wii's number-crunching nightmare excuse for online interaction with a comment.

Game companies are still mostly developing and marketing games and hardware under the assumption that we're all 17-year-old boys, despite years of statistics and real-life data to the contrary. They seem to have no data that they're willing to apply to guide them towards features that actually might be a selling point for any other kind of users, so they've decided to spackle this pig with a heavy coat of lipstick in the hopes that someone will kiss it. It seems we're very far away from seeing games companies understand and address that gaming hardware has to fit into a context of users' and others' lives.

The terms the gaming media uses for everyone who isn't a multi-player FPS gamer leave a lot to be desired. I know it's a hard thing to figure out, but we have got to come up with a taxonomy of gaming that doesn't imply a hierarchy of experience and motivation.

Gamers and the game media all over use the term "casual" to describe just about anything that's not an online FPS. Puzzle games on every platform, platformers, and most lower-ESRB-rating adventure games all get tarred with that same brush. It riddles every discussion of kid's games. It's a real misnomer on every level; there's nothing casual about a kid playing games. He just has a different set of parameters than you do, and within those parameters he's just as picky and obsessed as the very 'leet-est. And if you want to experience some laser-pointed intensity, try Wii Bowling with the little old ladies in the assisted living complex down my street.

We hauled the giant box into the house. It took me about half an hour untangle all the fiddly bits from the plastic wrappings and figure out how to assemble the drum set, but then we were good to go. Not long after the crash of that opening chord we decided it was going to be a Hard Day's Night and rawked the house until 2am.

The next morning dawned way, way too early. I ran into an acquaintance at the coffee stand as I was wrapping myself around a very large cup of java in hopes of getting the pint of blue mush sloshing around between my ears warmed up to the point where it might start passing current before I got into the office. He started talking about his troubles with Back in the U.S.S.R. the night before and it really struck me.

We may as well be playing two completely different games.

In a burst of eco-insanity muddled with a realization that my waistline isn't getting any smaller, I decided that it was time to get off my duff. So I bought my son's unused bike from him and took it down to be tuned. I used to love riding my bike, and this was a nice touring machine that just needed some TLC. When I went to pick it up, I decided I wasn't getting any younger. I threw a leg over it and coasted down the parking lot with nothing but gravity and my rusty sense of balance keeping me upright as I struggled with the unmarked, Japanese shift levers.

The lady who owns the shop shouted after me, "Don't worry! You never forget!"

She's right, but only as far as she went. I hadn't forgotten what it was like to ride a bicycle. The problem was that riding a bicycle wasn't the same anymore. I'm not the same, the bike's not the same, and the world I'm riding through isn't the same. But I found that I had to do it again, just for the hope of what it used to be.

And that's not the only thing that's coming back. Once I get home, I sit down to my computer. My old Sidewinder has made a recent re-appearance, and with it an old habit.

I'm supposed to be a grown up, according to my driver's license. The mirror shows me gray hair. I have responsibilities like work and kids and a house that simply refuses to keep itself clean. But in one respect, I'm no more mature than a middle-schooler. Given even a little time to myself, I'll indulge my love of my various pastimes with abandon. Next thing I know I've overdone it.

It's one thing when you're a kid on summer vacation. You can bounce up and down the level trying to get it just right for just as long as you keep your eyes open. You get no interruptions except whatever social minimums you feel you have to maintain, the house rules, and your Mom insisting on you being the one to take out the garbage. When you're a grown-up with a mortgage and responsibility, finding a balance point where you can keep your life in order on one hand and still scratch your itch for your favorite games with the other is a delicate dilemma.

Go north of Junk City and take the Volcanic Path to the Sage's Tower. That's what Yuki said. Then all the others in the group rephrased and repeated it to me just to make sure I got it. Everyone in the game thinks the main character is a bit dim. And maybe I am, but all this repetition doesn't solve my problem. It isn't that I don't know what to do. It's not that I don't know where I need to go to do it. It's that I don't know how to get there.

You give me a cardinal direction, and I am likely to be eaten by a Grue. Or maybe I'll feed you to it. To me, "north" is one of those mythical things like "free time" and "sleep."

It's not just that it's hilariously funny to your passengers or anyone you ask for directions. It is so embarrassing, and sometimes it's infuriating. My kids like to say that Mom knows her way around. And around and around and around. I can laugh along with everyone when I take one wrong turn. It's not so funny when it takes me hours to find my way somewhere.

I don't even have to leave the house; I can do it at home for free. All I have to do is plug in some of my favorite games and I can have that oh-so-familiar sinking feeling. And I'm not the only one--imagine the fate of the poor guy riding along with me in a game of Rocket Race. Having to struggle with navigation can be a horrible handicap.

"The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears." -- Ellen Goodman

I had a memorable conversation with my eldest son when he was in the ninth grade. We'd started playing Kingdom Hearts and had just gotten to the part where the main character sneaks out his bedroom window for some typical teenage shenanigans and ends up getting dragged off to save the universe. He remarked that he couldn't do that. I would catch him, and there was no way I'd let him go on his own. The rest of the kids would insist on coming along, too. He was fine with it. With them at his side and me making sure that anything that so much as mussed their hair was very sorry, the journey to the final boss would be just a road trip.

That boy is a grown man of 21 now, and a lot has changed. The neon hunting camouflage that was so fashionable back then has given way to a freshly-pressed, pixilated ACU topped off with a tan beret and a Ranger tab. That's no sage avatar of a mystic force calling him to an adventure; it's his squad leader. His journeys to epic adventure in far away lands no longer stay within range of the controller cords. My son is a soldier, and he's being deployed overseas.

I finally have a Playstation 3. It was in the budget since about a year before it launched, but I needed them to ship a must-have game. In my house, that meant either Final Fantasy XIII or MGS4. Kojima won that race, and since June the kids and I have been gleefully playing through the backlog of exclusives that we wanted but weren't quite enough to sell me a system. Heavenly Sword was on the girls' list of games they wanted to try once we got the hardware and I must say it really does make the console shine.

But as I played it I ran into an unexpected philosophical snag. One of those things that made me ponder and question some ingrained thinking, and that turned into a queasy realization. I used to say that if developers just included a female option for the protagonist in a game, it was enough to make me happier with a game's character personification. It was one of the pat answers I would trot out when someone asked me what I would do to change video games to be more female-friendly. I'm not so sure that's always the case anymore. And in discovering this exception, I found a bit more clarity in why I made that suggestion in the first place.