This time of year is a contemplative one for me. I tend to ponder a lot, though others might use different words for what I'm doing. My daughters came over last night and one of them poked her head into my office to greet me with "What are you grumping about in here?" She may have been right. I probably did have a pretty fierce look on my face as I contemplated how I was going to negotiate a compromise between the mined cobblestone to donate to the multi-player server's railroad system on one screen and the balancing game on the other screen of numbers in my bank's online app versus the items left on my Christmas shopping list. But there's a lot of thinking about the bigger stuff going on, too.

I've been taking stock of a lot of things. What I spend my time on and what's really important to me. And every time I turn around I bark my shins on games and how they interact with my life.

On June 27th, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the long-suffering Brown vs. ECA case -- the California statute that was going to impose penalties on retailers who sell violent videogames to minors (transcripts of oral arguments and other goodies available here). The decision holds that the law violates the First Amendment and permanently enjoined it from being enforced. Gamers everywhere breathed a sigh of relief and let out fist-pumping WOOT!

But that is only a beginning. Now that some of the furor has died down over the decision, it's a good time to take a look at what it means in the greater context of things.

I was discussing playing Birth By Sleep (a Kingdom Hearts game) with an acquaintance of mine while in line at the coffee shop, and he was a little confused. The line was long, so we had time to really compare notes. Some of the things he hates about the game don't bother me, because I don't experience the game as he does.

I don't think it's just a matter of preferences. It also has to do with the context of our play—the other things going on around our consoles.

When he plays, he goes into his mancave, shuts the door and bends all his energy to the task at hand. I'm in the opposite boat—a boat full of kids and fuss. I don't get to hide in a cave. I have to play it right out among 'em. It makes the kids' experience of the game as much a part of it as my own, and it keeps me in range of the slings and arrows of everyday life’s distractions and responsibilities.

Besides being the locus of and window to my own addiction, Minecraft provides an interesting new battleground in the cold war that all game developers face between authorial vision and customers’ freedom to make your work fit their needs.

With the standard game development cycle taking years to get to a gold disk, it’s a slow game of chess played out over the course of years. Modders are still fighting with Bethesda’s variant of Numerical Design Limited’s Gamebryo engine, which they married with the Havoc physics engine to create Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout 3: New Vegas. They started arguing about the whole thing back in 1998, when Morrowind went into development, but they couldn’t really drop the gloves and go at it until 2002 when Bethesda shipped it and its accompanying Elder Scrolls Construction Set.

But with Minecraft's alpha release, the modders get their shot way earlier in the process. The advent of social networking has given many new avenues for conversation between the community and the developers, and the weekly update schedule has compressed the whole give-and-take to lightning round speed.

The day before, I got a call from a peppy girl named Ashley who was ecstatic to tell me that I could "pick up my copy of... Rockband 3... on mOnDaY,... oCtObeR... 25th at... midnight". She continued on to describe all the cool stuff that would be happening at their big launch event if "I joined the line starting at... tEn PM". I hung up on her, I'm afraid. I've heard the rest of her spiel with other games.

Five minutes later I get another call. It's robo-Ashley again. Oblivious to my rudeness, she is incredibly happy to tell me my copy of Fable 3... will be available on mOnDaY, oCtObeR 25th at midnight...

Click. Sigh.

Fast forward to the next evening. We've got the first real storm of fall blowing in, it's 11:25pm on a work night,and I'm standing on the sidewalk in front of a mall with 300 or so of my closest strangers and friends.

Why in the name of all that's Whole-ly do I do this? It's not like I haven't discovered the existence of Amazon.com.

Penny Arcade Expo is on its way. If you're joining us and the 60,000 or so of your odder fellows in downtown Seattle over Labor Day weekend, you've got a great time in store.

We've done our homework, and we've got info to help you make the most of your trip.

GWJ is going to be on hand in full force.

• Check the schedule for our luminaries showing up as panel guests. Julian Murdoch will be at Rookie Years: Stories from First Projects on Sunday from 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM at the Serpent Theatre. Several of the podcast crew will be running around, too, so keep an eye out.
• The Official GWJ Slap and Tickle will be held on Saturday, September 4th at the Rock Bottom Brewery. See this thread for details, and I hope to see you all there.
• There are unofficial gatherings, too—peruse the forums and come hang out!
• You fellow forum-goers are going to be all over, and to make it easier to find each other, we have chosen a symbol to identify ourselves—Stan! Here’s a link to Stan in all his radiant, 300dpi glory for your printing pleasure. If you forget or can’t print it or whatever, I will also be printing out 100 blank ones to bring with me and I have real badge clips this year so we don’t have to punt. Find Momgamer or Amoebic for one and sport your Stan in style!

EA's press conference for E3 2010 last Monday afternoon brought all the usual splashy graphics and loud noises, but on one of the games they took an interesting tack. Instead of just showing a bunch of supposedly exciting footage of all the stuff you could do with the newest rendition of the Sims franchise, the presenter gave us a couple minutes of pseudo-philosophical discussion about complex and emergent systems.

I had a complex reaction to the presentation: a frisson of geeky delight that someone would go THERE in the middle of the game industry's giddiest Dionysian hype-fest; old Jeff Goldblum quotes running through my head; flashbacks of a message-board conversation several years ago that ranged all over Jean Baudrillard, John Conway's Game of Life and Cervantes' Don Quixote.

I do complexity, both at work and at home. In real life, my ducks don't ever get in a row. Rather, with all the stuff I've got going on, they're usually arranged in a 3D representation of a Julia set fractal, perturbed by an algorithm derived from the song Henry the Eighth played backwards by four 3rd graders on kazoos. As a software developer, this stuff is my bread and butter.

Thinking it through led me to an inescapable conclusion that at the base, his assertions that The Sims 3 is something new and different in that realm don't really hold water. The emergent behavior in the system doesn't come from the computer; it comes from the player.

I sometimes have to smother a chuckle when people tell me how hard it is to be a parent of a small child. Little ones are exhausting, yes, but these parents' faith that somehow they're on Easy Street once they hit the first day of school is misplaced at best. It's just as hard to live in a sane way with a tween/teen. Even now that mine are grown, there are days when I would give the world for a problem that could be handled with a mop. And if I had some sort of cleaning wipe for the messes that come from broken hearts, I'd be a trillionaire.

But I think the worst of parenting sins I see are committed in the name of trying to be the cool mom or the cool dad. But giving them everything they want and giving in to their every wish and whim is not the way to achieve true coolness.

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.