It's convention season again. Every weekend between now and Labor Day somewhere in this native land a large group of freaks and geeks are going to gather and celebrate whatever particular brand of geek/freakhood they practice. I'm a geek of the sort that attends conventions, and I help out at several. I have quite a bit of experience nerd-herding. With that in mind, I have a few bits of advice I'd like to toss out there for everyone heading off to one of these affairs.

I bought a new computer. I have been getting by on cobbled together hardware since someone broke into my house last fall and took my laptop and my Wii. This one's different than all the other systems in my house - it's a gaming computer. I fell off the PC gaming bandwagon several years ago due to budgetary issues and a couple of my favorite franchises dying. I knew when I decided to do it I was quite a ways behind and the learning curve was going to be bad. The obligatory BSOD level at the start of each new installed game is only the start of the problems facing someone trying to get back into the PC game.

I get the beast home, wrestle it into position under my desk and crawl around behind. I grab the bundle of cables and start trying to fit the ends into the proper slots. Power cord goes into the power jack. CAT 5 goes into the network card, not the onboard jack. It's not like this is rocket surgery. Or wait. Maybe it is.

It's that time of year again. All the experts are weighing in with their take on videogames and how they're harming our children. The National Institute for Media and the Family released their 2007 Mediawise report to much self-generated fanfare.

"The Musicman" must be required study material for these guys. In case you've never seen the movie, a huckster trying to fraudulently sell band instruments comes into a small town and attempts to bilk them into protecting their kids from the evil influence of a pool table installed in the local billiard hall. He convinces a bunch of the locals they would be keeping their kids moral after school by starting a marching band. It's a tactic certain people are using to great effect in the real world.

My mom and I have gone several rounds in her quest to join the 17th Century, technology-wise. One day a couple years ago she called me all upset because she was trying to sort out the concept of RGB colors for her genealogy club website. I told her what to do, but she just didn't get how adding green to red and blue could combine to make purple turn to lavender. She had the phone in one ear and was mixing paint to prove me wrong right there by the keyboard to compare and contrast. I tried, but I couldn't find a way to explain the difference between mixing colors of light and mixing paint and how it needed to be coded. After two hours of this I gave up on the W3C and resorted to using colors with words as names. She got her website up, and that was fine. But the struggle is ongoing.

Today we're going to discuss an issue of growing concern.

Naru-tards.

What is a Naru-tard? Simply speaking, it's someone who likes the Japanese television show Naruto to the point that they begin to display a characteristic set of behaviors. Some people would call anyone who enjoys the show a Naru-tard, but in my book only the most over-the-top fans garner the designation. Even with my stricter definition, there are plenty to go around. Believe it.

Their numbers at local anime and gaming conventions are growing rapidly. Since its translation and release to the American market the show has gathered new fans in droves, and they are encroaching on other species' territories at a rapid rate. Their numbers will soon will begin to rival established species such as the Sailor-suited Bishoujo and the Vinyl/Furry Pseudo-Goth. We have to learn to understand them so we can find a way to peacefully co-exist.

In their Games section, Slate recently put up a slide show discussing various traditional game conventions. It wasn't horrific as far as mainstream media articles about games go, but it sputtered badly when it tried to take on the topic of cutscenes.

The author started off with an iconic example - Aerith's death scene in Final Fantasy VII. He didn't much care for Aerith's scene. He dogged it for it's original Playstation polygon counts and for what he refers to as "stilted acting". The sample they include was only one minute long, and he totally dismisses the impact of that one minute. Not only on that game, but on games in general.

Square's style of storytelling took it's first leap into 3D in FFVII. Its primitive models may not look like much today, but the challenges met in the underlying technical work on concealing loading screens, realistic movement animation in three dimensions, new cinematography techniques, and the sheer effort it took to fit the huge amount of content (for the time) on a Playstation CD gave them a working primer for their continuing movement forward in that area. Its artistic and monetary success made it a blueprint for many other developers who have followed in their footsteps . Whether or not you agree with the need for cutscenes in games, that one qualifies to use the movie critic term "important".

Slate's writer isn't alone. Back in 2004, Stephen Spielberg remarked to a class of film students that he thought games weren't quite there as a storytelling medium. He was quoted as saying, "I think the real indicator will be when somebody confesses that they cried at level 17." Well, as many gamers know, quite a few of us cried at this one. And we'd done it seven years before. What is the disconnect here? Is it the technology? The ever-growing list of quality CGI titles on top of the box office listings and the growing machinima scene seem to suggest that others are getting meaning out of this type of imagery. Does the story suck? Well, that's kind of subjective.

What has been missed here is the context for the scene that comes from playing the game itself.

Well, here we are. Sunburnt and slightly deafened, but back in the office. Now what?

A lot of people are going to be out the rest of the week, but some of us are stuck punching the clock and making sure that the cogs of progress keep turning. That's okay. You may not be out playing in the sun, but there are ways to have some fun.

Office games are simply ways to keep yourself amused at work (without the Internet). They are often derivations of regular pastimes. Each workplace has their own versions. They can be very elaborate or very simple. Some are very solitary, in others you have everyone on up to the manager playing. Some places you have to keep it very secret, others have leagues with t-shirts. If you work in a technical field they are nearly traditional, and as the movement towards more enlightened HR policies is rippling out through other industries, so are they.

I'm not talking about office pranks here. Your level of creativity in expressing your feelings about the guys who got to take the whole rest of the week off and you didn't is entirely your call. I'd recommend a thorough reading of your employee manual before drywalling over their office door. I'm just saying. Besides, you have to paint the whole wall to make it match and that's a pain. Individually shrink-wrapping everything in their office is more fun anyways.

Good old Lara Croft and her faithful sidekicks are back again. And by sidekicks, I mean her chest, her short-shorts, and the perennial argument about the portrayal of women in video games.

There seem to be two common approaches that get dragged out every time this comes up. There's the usual "this doesn't matter" and it's usually accompanied by some landscape appreciation for Lara. And on the other side I have a former colleague who is of the opinion that every female character should look like Velma from Scooby Doo and if they don't then it is a slam against women and anyone who even brings up any other viewpoint on this issue is just defending the status quo (and therefore should be burned at the stake).

I maintain neither one of them see the whole picture. The problem is not just sexism, but rather personification in all its forms and the disconnected way the issues are being handled in game design.

Massively multiplayer environments of all sorts are under attack from within. Gankers and vultures of all sorts litter the landscape of any MMO that allows for player-vs-player combat, we have griefers a-plenty for the ones that don't. Unless you're playing Neopets, online servers are full of foul-mouthed, racist junk-monkeys. The hate-filled miasma they spatter around them has reached the point where many people who could be on those services won't go, and those who do brave it won't go without a posse and riot gear. Virtual community sites, blogs, message boards and lists spawn their own sort of virulent, cruel muck with moderators scrambling to keep things scrubbed down to a socially acceptable level.

Is this the brave new digital world? Why do we put up with this? What do we do to stop it?

I played some Halo2 with my son a couple weeks ago. We got out the old Xboxen so we could play SystemLink, with a system in each room so there could be no screen-looking. I had been practicing, but it didn't help as much as I would hope. I got my arse shot off. It was so bad the girls left the anime they had running out in the living room to watch. We have a house rule that the ultimate loser for the day has to use a profile with lavender armor and a screen name that's an abbreviation for "Grenade Magnet" for the next day. I lost so bad it was duly decided among all of them and with much laughing and joshing that I had to use it for the rest of the week.

I pretended to be grumpier about it than I was. They expected it. But it was hard to pull off. I kept having to hide a rueful smile. I don't appreciate getting my arse handed to me, don't get me wrong, but I really wasn't upset. I love that I can have that time and that connection with my kids.

But it wasn't always this way.