Miscellaneous

APPLICATION FORM HR-042 Job Opening: The Game King's Court Jester 1. Tell me about yourself. Not much to tell. I'm a pig farmer, son of a pig farmer who, was married to another pig farmer. The difference is that I have a sense of humor, which my father, Mr. Pig Farmer, most certainly does not. 2. What interests you about this opening?

A staple of my youth was the Christmas special. (Boy, we're really just jumping into it this article, aren't we?) Every TV show I used to watch had that special Christmas episode, and they always had one of two plots: 1) Curmudgeonly bastard gets the Dickens treatment. 2) Little kid gets to believe in Santa for one more year. That was it.

What makes a game scary? Is it surprises? Is it gore? Is it psychological? Well, yes, it's psychological. It's all psychological. Psychology is largely the study of fear. Just as all crime eventually boils down to theft (theft of property, theft of peace of mind, theft of life, etc.) so, too, all the study of psychology boils down to the study of fear.

It's fashionable to hate GameStop, and I can't deny there are a few good reasons for it. One of the things I love about GameStop, though, is the opportunity it affords spelunkers. A man with five dollars in his pocket and an hour to kill can find some marvelous tombs to raid.