Gaming

Recently, one of my sons confessed, "You know, I was playing computer games until, like, 2 a.m. in high school. I just waited until you went to bed."

That was around the time that he was hooked on "Everquest," an online role-playing game that drew in so many viewers that it was widely known as "Evercrack."

And where is that son now? He graduated from a great college, and found a job three days after graduation in an advertising firm in Boston. A company that specializes, by the way, in supporting websites for their clients.

Our oldest son, meanwhile, graduated from a great college as well, and has made his way to Los Angeles, where he's working as a production assistant in the film industry. He was just named second assistant director for a Web TV pilot.

My youngest son, the last one at home, takes bass guitar lessons, does gymnastics, loves to rock climb and hike. But he's also on the computer every spare minute. Once in a while, it's homework-related -- his school gave him a great geography game to play online, and he can now name more countries on a map than I can. He also does math and science online rather than bring home textbooks. Usually, though, his time on the computer is spent pursuing his own interests.

He built a hovercraft after seeing someone do it online, out of a shower curtain, a piece of plywood, and a leaf blower. It actually worked. He learned all about microwaving potato chip bags and building Lego guns through YouTube. He plays his bass along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queen online. ("Did you dress like that in the '80s, Mom?" he asked recently. "God, I hope not.") He learned how to do flips on the trampoline by watching kids demonstrate on YouTube. And lately, he has been learning the algorithms for solving the Rubik's Cube from Dan Brown online.

Does he read books, this boy of mine? Only if I make him. Which I do. I am, after all, a writer and a book collector, and sometimes I fantasize about having one of those dreamy kids who stays up all night reading books like I did. But, let's face it: Kids seem well-equipped to learn online. This particular son of mine knew all about how BP was going to clean up its spill before I did; he also followed the recent elections online. He can tell me where the most shark attacks occur in the world and he's currently looking up the value of individual Magic cards -- his new obsession. If this kid wants to know something, he Googles it.

"It's an age of instant gratification," my sniffy mom friend declared, when I pointed out how much my son learns on the computer. "These kids don't know how to work hard. The computer is making kids stupider."

Her declaration echoed that popular article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" originally published by Nicholas Carr a couple of years ago in the Atlantic Monthly. Carr's piece led to fiery debates about how human intelligence is changing. (Laura Miller wrote about Carr's piece on Salon, and you can read a great summary of the debate put together by the Pew Research Center here.)

Maybe it's true that access to technology, and to such rapid-fire information, is making our children seem like they have shorter attention spans. My son recently declared that when he's reading, "I feel like I'm not doing anything." On the computer, on the other hand, his hands are engaged, and the visuals on the screen are more entertaining than those black-and-white ants marching across the pages of his books. Books are slow, he complains.

Let me repeat: I still try to make him read half an hour a day, if nothing more. Yet, I'm also well aware that I, too, would have learned on the computer if I'd had one growing up. I don't buy my friend's argument that my boys have had their learning stunted by the computer. Whether children absorb information by reading or online, learning new things makes them want to learn more. Children are inherently curious, active learners. Aren't the skills of building cities and fighting battles online -- especially done in teams -- worthy? And isn't the ability to discover, sift through and analyze new information essential to survival in the digital age?

There is an infinite amount of knowledge. Why not soak it up as fast as you can, in a community of online learners, game players and musicians who come not just from your own neighborhood, but from around the world? For kids with computers, learning has no boundaries.

A father has much to teach his son in the ways of geekitude, but this was one decision I knew I had to let him make on his own. Still, I was proud. Eli had never been to a convention of any kind before, much less an assembly of 30,000 avid gamers, worshipers at the altar of Blizzard gaming company's unholy trinity: "World of Warcraft," "Starcraft" and "Diablo." But he knew without being told that his choice of T-shirt for such an august occasion was no trifling matter.

When the tribes gather for an event like BlizzCon, only the most precious of garments will suffice -- no matter how faded and worn from countless washings. Standing in line a few hours later in front of the Anaheim Convention Center -- just around the corner from Disneyland -- I thrilled to a living gallery of ironic, geeky, black humor-inflected T-shirt art. And I suspected that countless attendees had been wrestling that morning with the exact same quandary as my son.

Should I wear my "I'm Not Dead Yet!" Monty Python tribute or my "Happiness is a mushroom cloud"? Should I go with the simple, "No pain, no game" credo, or display all my peacock feathers at once with a copy of a poster for the original "Stars Wars" movie written entirely in Japanese?

How about an endearingly honest plea -- "Just Shy, Not Anti-Social, You Can Talk To Me"? Or an all-out visual assault -- one horny unicorn mounting another against a rainbow backdrop?

Sex, rainbows and unicorns -- that's how fun the gamers wanted BlizzCon 2010 to be, and that's just about how fun it was. Or to borrow the two most commonly uttered words during the two-day convention: BlizzCon was epic, and awesome. Epically awesome, even.

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How does one measure the epic-ness of a BlizzCon? By the quality of the costumes worn by hundreds of attendees -- the Blood Elf princesses, Goblin Mages, Witch-doctors and Terran Ghosts? Or by the sheer grandeur of literally thousands upon thousands of flat-screen monitors assembled in serried ranks, inviting gamers to play kooky modifications of "Starcraft" or as-yet unreleased to the general public versions of "Diablo" and "World of Warcraft"? By the crazed pandemonium of 30,000 people devoting fantastically obsessive attention to panel discussions and dance contests and game art? The larger-than-life statues of Sarah Kerrigan, Queen of Blades, and Jim Raynor, Terran Marine? By the endless queues of people snaking across the convention floor -- a maze of twisty lines, all alike! -- for everything: bathrooms, food, merchandise, opportunities to enter contests?

On a scale of spectacle, BlizzCon delivered -- or as my son observed moments after the doors opened, his eyes widening at the sight of thousands of gamers running like land rush homesteaders in a desperate race to claim a good seat for the opening ceremonies: "This is way more awesome than I even imagined." Giant video screens hanging throughout the convention center blasted cut-scenes and gameplay from Blizzard games at every angle and to the accompaniment of clashing avalanches of sound. For a generation raised on constant digital stimulation, it was mother's milk.

But as I sat through the highlight of the opening ceremonies, an audience participation chant/slide show led by Blizzard vice president of creative development Chris Metzen, I quickly realized that the spectacle was just icing on the "World of Warcraft" cake. The real value of an event like BlizzCon was the opportunity it provided for mass, collective enthusiasm.

Metzen declared that BlizzCon was about celebrating "our collective geekiness." He then orchestrated attendees in a repetitive chant of "Geek is ..." followed by a succession of images flashed on the display screens erected in the convention center's cavernous main hall. The One Ring to Rule Them All. A set of Transformer robots. Tobey Maguire's "Spider-Man" and Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Conan." "Star Wars" (of course). The Mighty Thor!

And a single, 20-sided die, face up on 20.

The picture of that die, the only special equipment needed to play the original Dungeons & Dragons, engendered a particularly mighty roar of approval. Nothing is better, shouted Metzen, than getting together with your best friends, some graph paper, a pencil and your imagination. (Except maybe getting together with 30,000 like-minded compadres to hoot and holler about primeval memories.) A direct line connects the dots between Dungeons & Dragons and the amazing Blizzard success story ("World of Warcraft" alone currently boasts 12 million users worldwide. "Starcraft II," released this summer, almost immediately became the best-selling PC game of 2010.) No other game company has so magnificently captured the fun of collectively inhabiting the fantasy worlds that 1970s-era gamers conjured up for themselves, without any help from amazing computer graphics or legions of creative talent -- writers, artists and programmers.

But that same roar, I came to see over the course of the weekend, came easy to this crowd. Whenever a panelist delivered a good zinger in response to an audience question, the collective hilarity felt like a natural exhalation -- nothing forced, nothing faked. We cheered for nifty dance moves, for Jack Black histrionics (his band Tenacious D played the closing ceremonies) and for the unveiling of a new character class for the upcoming "Diablo III," a dual crossbow-wielding femme fatale -- the Demon Hunter. We cheered because it was fun to cheer -- because what is life for if not to flaunt your exuberance? We positively erupted in the middle of the costume contest, when the boyfriend of a woman dressed as a goblin sorceress ran onto the stage ("Could something epic be afoot?" wondered the announcer), got down on his knees and proposed. When the camera caught the glint of a beaming smile from beneath her shrouding hood -- the only part of her face at all visible -- the audience convulsed in a mass cackle of delight.

We're all familiar with negative stereotypes of the geek -- obsessive behavior, crazed attention to detail, a seeming inability to socialize easily -- but if there was one thing I took away from BlizzCon, it was that an essential thing defining geekdom is the capacity to be enthusiastic. Geeks want to be enthralled, and more than most people, they open themselves wide to that kind of ensorcellment. The bond that Blizzard has with its fans is built from the company's routine delivery on its promise to be ever more epic, to be ever more awesome, ever more enthralling, without sacrificing an iota of its total devotion to quality, to story, and to the art and craft of fantasy and science fiction.

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Sitting next to my son, for whom Dungeons & Dragons carries about the same archaic resonance as a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby on-the-road flick does for me, I was transfixed by Metzen's invocation of the Mighty Thor. One glance at that giant hammer, and a rift in space and time opened up wide.

In 1974, when I was 12 years old, my father took me to a downtown Manhattan book party to celebrate the publication of Stan Lee's "Origins of Marvel Comics." My memories are hazy now, but I recall that there were people dressed up as Marvel superheroes -- the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four, Thor -- and I ended up with the most extraordinary goody bag. It included a copy of the book, which featured reproductions of the original comics introducing the Marvel characters, an action figure or two, and a selection of current issue comic books. There may also have been a poster.

I was over the moon. Although my tastes at that time ran more toward the voracious consumption of science fiction than comic books (95 cents for a paperback novel seemed a much better deal than a quarter for a comic book), I was no different from any other geeky, chess-playing, bespectacled nerd -- I loved Marvel comics. To shake the hand of Stan Lee himself? What could be more epic?

I loved all kinds of adventure and fantasy and sf, and looking back, I see now how my father fed my enthusiasms. As editor of the New York Times Book Review he was showered with free books, some of which he would bring home for me. One day it would be a complete 26-volume set of Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan" series, on another a complete edition of "The Lord of the Rings" bound into one ornate volume. He introduced me to Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series and I will never forget the day, over a burger and fries at a Jackson Hole diner, when he gently explained to me that there were some fascist tendencies in the work of Robert Heinlein. He whisked my sister and me to a premiere showing of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." (The theater gave out free coconuts. We galloped all the way home.)

Right around that time, my father even brought home a Magnavox Odyssey, the very first home video game console ever made! It was clumsy and cumbersome and fairly quickly gathered dust. It didn't really hold a candle to Atari's Pong, which arrived a few years later, and it is a complete joke compared to what you can do with an iPod Touch today, but it all fed the same hunger for play and fantastic escape, for a glimpse at the mysterious sci-fi future. More than three decades later, I see how my father, who could play the high culture game with anyone, who was the smartest, most well-read man I ever knew, paved the way for my passage into geekdom. He threw kindling at the fires of my imagination, and that conflagration has never sputtered.

It was a foregone conclusion that my son would follow that same well-worn path. While he was a baby, I was reviewing Blizzard games for Salon. The bookcases in my bedroom groan under the weight of four decades' worth of science fiction and fantasy novels. We all but declared a national holiday in my family for each debut of a new "Lord of the Rings" film. I still read fantasy novels to him before he goes to bed each night. I am delighted to renew his subscription to the Japanese manga monthly Shonen Jump every year. But BlizzCon, as the gamers like to say, took it to the next level.

It's easier to be a geek in 2010 than it was in 1972, a fact that even the most cursory comparison of BlizzCon 2010 with a Stan Lee book party would tell you. To my 12-year-old self the technology on display in Anaheim would have seemed the purest science fiction. The emergence of computers and the Internet has transformed the geek into a person of great cultural and financial power. Money can be made by geeks and by catering to geeks. Gaming is as big a business as Hollywood. The worldwide appetite for fantasy seems unquenchable. Blizzard has capitalized on this fact as well as anyone this side of Peter Jackson or J.K. Rowling. There is an extent to which my son -- all of our sons and daughters! -- never had a chance for another path, even if one sets aside the influence of my family lore. The seductive power of the entertainment machine has never been more powerful, more immersive or more addictive.

And that's something to watch, because it is by no means an unadulterated boon. A rather hefty subset of BlizzCon attendees could definitely benefit from an improved diet and some exercise. As I noted not so long ago, after years of gaming, I traded in my own Blizzard-induced obsessions for my bicycle, motivated by a desire to get away from the computer for at least a few hours a day. There were some attendees at BlizzCon who blinked under the bright lights of Anaheim as if they had just emerged from caves in which they had burrowed away for months or years. I recognize a kindred spirit in them, but worry that they have gone a little too far over to the dark side. And somehow, while I still can, I know that even as I feed my son's appetite for geeky thrills in virtual wonderlands, I must balance it with shared experience of the real.

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Which brings us back to a theme of recurring interest at BlizzCon -- the relative popularity of "World of Warcraft's" Horde as opposed to the Alliance.

In "World of Warcraft," in addition to choosing what race you would like to play -- Night Elf, Dwarf, Human, Troll, Undead, etc. -- and what character class -- Mage, Warrior, Paladin, Rogue, etc. -- one must also pick an alignment between good and evil. The Horde are the bad guys; the Alliance are the good. (Both sides spend most of their time engaged in constant slaughter, but distinctions still must be made). At the opening and closing ceremonies and during panel discussions (at BlizzCon, a panel discussion on a new character class for "Diablo" was attended by upward of 10,000 people!) every mention of "Horde" or "Alliance" elicited predictable tribal cheers.

But the cheers for the Horde always sounded louder. And over the course of the weekend they seemed to steadily grow in volume, suggesting that the Alliance was getting intimidated by its poor showing. By the closing ceremonies, hosted by smartass, wisecracking actor Jay Mohr, a rough guess divided the audience into about 65 percent Horde to 35 percent Alliance.

But why? Why were the geeks orienting to the dark? In "The Lord of the Rings," who wants to be on Sauron's side? Was there some natural attraction to the notion of transgression? Was it explained by the relative paucity (maybe 1 in 10) of women at the convention? Was declaring allegiance to the Alliance just too goody-two-shoes?

Or could it all be explained by the mere potency of the rallying cry? When Horde warriors rush into battle, they roar, "For the Horde!" And let me tell you, when 10,000 people yell those three words, it sounds very impressive. But the Alliance has no similar call to arms.

During a "World of Warcraft" Q-and-A panel in which "Warcraft" developers took open mic questions from the audience, I had to leave Eli alone for a little while as I visited the bathroom. This entailed a half-hour wait in line. When I returned, Eli was eager to recount something that he thought I'd missed. A questioner had brought up the Horde-Alliance disparity and blamed the problem on the "For the Horde" battle cry. He suggested that the Alliance needed its own cheer. He asked the panel members if they had any suggestions as to what Alliance members could say when confronted with a howling mass of "for the Horde"-shrieking berserkers.

Eli grinned as he told me how one "Warcraft" developer grabbed the mic and quipped: "Have mercy!"

Which did not solve the problem, but resulted in the kind of huge belly chortle that only 10,000 or so fantasy role-playing addicted gamers can generate. The Horde carried the day.

I had actually heard the whole exchange while waiting in line. But I was delighted to hear Eli tell it again, because it underlined something that had become more and more clear to me throughout the weekend: the exquisite delight of the shared experience. This is not particularly profound, I know. It's why we hang out with friends, why it's more fun to go to movies in a group than alone, why a World Series game in a bar full of strangers is more satisfying than when watched by yourself alone on a couch. That's one big reason why multiplayer online gaming is so popular: A solitary activity -- gaming alone in front of a computer at home -- is transformed into a social act. BlizzCon -- which is only in its fifth year of existence -- is a huge success because it feeds that sense of community and sharing. But what was working for the 30,000 attendees in toto was also working just for Eli and me. We had been joking about the "for the Horde" conundrum all weekend. I was touched and delighted by his urge to make sure I didn't miss the latest development in the saga. We stood in lines together, we ate together, we gamed together. We compared the profiles of Disneyland tourists with BlizzCon attendees and pondered the history and future of geekiness. I wish my father was still around so I could tell him all about it.

And I wish he'd been with us for the events of the next day. On Sunday, we drove from Anaheim to Long Beach, to visit my my father's mother in her new nursing home. "What kind of a place is this?" Eli asked as we parked. "It's a place where people go to die," I told him. It was tough. My grandmother has declined tremendously since Eli had seen her last, at her 90th birthday party a year before. She recognized us, she seemed pleased to see us, but she had a hard time carrying on a conversation. "I'm too old for this!" she exclaimed at one point, rolling her eyes to encompass, well, everything.

A nursing home is a scary place at the best of times, and Eli, who had never been in one before, got quieter and quieter.

We stayed for half an hour and then traveled to the suburban town of Lakewood where my grandmother had lived for more than 50 years, to pack up her personal effects -- photographs, letters, artwork -- for transport back to my home in Berkeley. The house was completely empty of furniture. A "For Sale" sign stood on the lawn. I've been visiting that house since I was 7 years old, and it was, as Eli noted, "creepy" to see it suddenly empty.

We die a thousand deaths in a computer game and it doesn't mean anything. But when I held in my hands a box of letters written to my grandmother from her father, who died when she was 12, it was difficult to keep from trembling. When I considered that I would probably never again drive down the street where my grandmother lived, it was hard not to feel a little overcome by it all.

Then Eli reached into a box and pulled out an object, exclaiming, "Is this a brand? In the shape of Texas!"

Yes, it was. With the name of the company, Fluor, at whose Anaheim headquarters my grandmother had worked for decades, first as secretary, then as speechwriter, and finally as director of media relations. I have no idea whether the brand was connected to the fact that she was born and raised in Texas, but for Eli, the unexpectedness of finding a cattle brand in the shape of Texas hidden away in a box in a Lakewood, Calif., garage was a delightful incongruity that swiftly wiped away all the heaviness of the last few hours. Who would make such a thing, he wondered? Why? What would you use it on?

We packed up the minivan, readied ourselves for the the long road home. He pulled out his Nintendo DS-Lite and started tapping away. I didn't mind -- I felt no need to articulate in detail how challenging our shared experiences of the morning had been. I was just glad beyond measure that he was there with me, that I hadn't had to face this quest alone.

And who knows? I might even have to break my pledge to stop gaming, at least a little bit, because I'm thinking that when "Diablo III" finally comes out, it's going to be an awful lot of fun to go dungeon-crawling with my favorite geeky boy.

Since then I haven't kept my own farm animals, but I've grown food on and off in one manner or another for well over a decade. My first bona fide vegetable garden was sown with great purpose and harvested with equal passion. Its footprint, well exceeding that of my small home, was ambitious even for an experienced gardener. After a childhood of raising, caring for and eating farm animals, the craft of producing my own food was deep in my blood.

Today I live on a farm of sorts. Each year, for the past eight years, I've grown a range of fruits and vegetables on a plot of land that just about matches the square footage of my home. My one and a half acre property is surrounded by a 200-acre family farm -- one that produces mostly hay for the small herd of cows and horses they breed and sell each year. From them I procure my weekly stash of chicken eggs and the manure for my garden beds. A few property lines down, another neighbor makes maple syrup and grows and dries enough garlic to keep a small village in Umbria stocked for the winter. Another, who starts a multitude of vegetables in his elaborate system of hothouses, always offers me a few hearty nightshades just in time for planting. While the parameters of my property end at the road, the pastures and the garden, the sense of farm extends well beyond the boundaries of law and responsibility.

This is my farm life.

But over the winter, restless and dreaming of spring, the sight of seed packets and the smell of the near empty root cellar failing to chase away the blues, I shamelessly established an alternative farm life on FarmVille.

FarmVille is Facebook's most popular game application, which enjoys an earned reputation for inciting addictive behavior. And I quickly learned I was not immune. By mid-February I'd become one of the herd, tending to virtual land and animals with an embarrassing vigor. As I garnered a greater yield of soybeans, morning glories, grapes, chicken eggs, swan feathers, goat milk and truffles, I fell further and further into a kind of heady trance. My mind raced toward getting to the next level and the next level and the next, toward FarmVille success -- which was pretty much always guaranteed as long as you stayed in the game. A bevy of instant gratifiers awaited me at each morning's log-in. I fantasized about having enough FarmVille dollars to buy that fancy Provencal Barn I'd been eyeing in the FarmVille market, or getting to Level 30 so I could purchase the greenhouse, or being gifted some bricks for my horse stable, or combing just one more kitten to win the blue ribbon.

In no time it became clear that FarmVille was, in fact, nothing like real farming.

But at first I couldn't help applying my real-life farm thinking to my FarmVille farm. I planned each planting, coordinated each harvest, and fretted over the welfare of my stock. Were my FarmVille animals free-range enough? My crops too monoculture? My stalls overcrowded? One day I commented to a FarmViller friend how I thought it was inhumane of him to provide inadequate shelter, fencing and room for his animals. When I finished my rant, he leaned in and brazenly whispered, "FarmVille: It's not real."

Indeed, he was on to something.

When Bill McKibben warned of technology's sneaky ways, of how it gets us to lose sight of all sorts of things that once made sense to us in the natural world, I doubt pink cows producing strawberry milk was what he had in mind. But for fear I might be losing my senses, I turned away from my quasi-ethical concerns. Besides, none of it mattered in FarmVille anyway.

In FarmVille, the only real threat to one's farm is the occasional withering crop. There's no concern for soil composition, compost, crop rotation, weather patterns, irrigation or infestations. Horses, cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, swans, kittens and turtles nestle together and thrive with no derision. While animals are born on the FarmVille farm, they never die. There's no blood or decay, for in FarmVille no animals are ever harvested for food, and ugly ducklings that wander onto the farm are later transformed into swans.

FarmVille farming is a kind of unfarming -- a model farm fiction. And that, in a nutshell, is its lure. Seduced by the instant gratification and daily success of a well-organized, weedless world with no suffering, I played with uninhibited abandon. And my FarmVille farm grew. But the shift into spring made living these two farm lives -- one real and one not -- weighty and palpable. Because FarmVille was hardly a parallel universe, playing it in juxtaposition to my real farm life of mud, late frost and tender seedlings only exacerbated the inherent dangers of such substitute and secondary spaces that carelessly mask vital work that needs to be done.   

It's hardly news that since the Great Depression the small family farm, both locally and globally, has been on the decline. Those like Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva and Michael Pollan have criticized the replacement of the family farm with the monoculture factory farms of today, ones that drive methods of food production and consumption that are killing the planet. Given the additional concerns that only 1 percent of the population is responsible for growing food for the other 99 percent, and that the average age of farmers nationwide is 57, it's vital that we look for new ways to inspire folks, young folks in particular, to engage in the work of farming.

Deep in the midst of my FarmVille farming, the Poughkeepsie Journal ran a story about a recently retired agricultural educator for the county's Cornell Cooperative Extension and his effort to do just that. To my surprise it read: "Facebook seen as tool for reaching tomorrow's farmers." FarmVille, he assured, had the capacity to inspire the young to return to the land, as it was "an incredible educational tool," and with the number of FarmVille farmers to real farmers at 60-to-1, they needed to find a way to "tap into that ... to get the youth off the couch and get them to play farm in the real world." But the gap between the game and the gate to that subtle dance of earth, air and sky is unfortunately too wide and deep to hold out hope that the key to resolving such problems can be found online. Learning what a farmer actually does requires elemental immersion into muck, manure, worms and pests, being in the presence of the ongoing balance of birth and death, discovering a new world each day and night and coming to find one's place within it. The relationship between our hands and the land is complex, and even the most accomplished and skilled of farmers wouldn't claim to understand it completely. While linear movement anchors FarmVille and its move toward greater progress -- more points, more dollars, more space, more stuff -- real farming is bound to a cycle of uncertainty whose success is measured in sustenance, one we are threatened with losing if kept to our old ways of food production, and one that the orderliness of FarmVille can't possibly assist in undercutting.

If there's anything salvageable about FarmVille for the lessons of real farm life it's that it, too, is fueled by an economy of neighbors, one that the old world of agriculture could not do without. My FarmVille friends gift me trees, nails, chickens, sheep and newborn calves. They help me raise barns and fertilize crops, and they share with me stashes of eggs, fuel and flowers. And I reciprocate without being asked. Such reliance is a reminder that one's farm is only as strong as the commitment and involvement of the community within which it is embedded.

Wendell Berry has noted that local economies "rest on only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence." "In a viable neighborhood," he says, "neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another ... Neighbors cherish and protect what they have in common." In FarmVille, what we farmers have in common is the desire to keep the farm game going, and so we circulate our goodwill for each other's interests. While our virtual survival doesn't so much depend upon it, our farms ultimately do better. But in real farming it's more complicated, because in a local farming economy producing food for community is always, in the end, about survival. 

That's why facing the challenges of a deteriorating agricultural industry will take more than teaching the basic trilogy of plow, sow, harvest to kids on the computer. But because local economies are not the dominant means by which most of us acquire what we eat, there's no imperative to think about our role as neighbors as tied to subsistence. If push comes to shove and if we have the means, we can always make our way to the nearest, and cheapest, supermarket.

While the clarion call of buying locally has been central to fighting for a healthier food system, the principle of neighborhood has more expansive potential. In my real farm life, I both use and share what I grow and my neighbors do the same. Our gifts are not equal -- they can't be measured in terms of the standard economy. While I don't have my own chickens, a good portion of my kitchen scraps are fed to my neighbors' flock. When, in late summer, I'm overloaded with elderberries I gift them to another neighbor who has a deep love for the jam. And her husband's plow is indispensable for the years that a new garden bed needs tilling. A quart of wild blackberries on my stoop midsummer is a reminder to bag up some greens, beans or early tomatoes to hang on their mailbox in the morning. My winter's supply of garlic comes from a good neighbor up the road, not in return for anything in particular -- maybe it was the emptying of a maple syrup bucket, the helping out with a yard sale, or the tasting of some cookie entries for the fair. It's not a quid pro quo economy, but its viability "rests on what we have in common" -- producing and then sharing what sustains us. 

As those at Cornell Cooperative Extension and others concerned with the fate and future of our farms work to elicit interest in tending to the land, it would do us well to remember the tie between neighborhood and subsistence. FarmVille may be made up of a generous group of worthy folk, but the gifts sent and circulated are in the end good for sustaining nothing much at all. Farming will only come alive through getting to know the work and imagination of real grass-roots growers all across the U.S., those whose work represents the knowing that our neighbors are tied to our survival. From community gardens to yard sharing, from CSAs to co-ops, from intentional communities to homesteading, from edible school yards to urban farming, these folks are right now challenging the way we grow and distribute animal, vegetable, mineral.

The sheer number of CSAs has multiplied within the last 10 years fueled in large part by the work of young farmers who are driven by the value of a local/neighborhood economy. Both community gardens and yard sharing have also emerged at increased rates in both rural and urban areas, challenging in unforeseen ways how we think about the terrain of soil around us, while also expanding our sense of farm. While the hardship of unaffordable farmland has challenged many young farmers, it's also forced a rethinking of our relationship to property itself. As stewards of the land, some young farmers are drawing upon the goodwill of established farmers, wealthy landowners, and/or the work of land trusts in order to work the earth. Such creative maneuverings, as demonstrated by the support of the land based nonprofit the Greenhorns, are indicative of the hope and veracity right now fueling the movement and the real farmers who are defying the odds as they carve out space for local subsistence.

These farmers and their movement are our best educational tools, teaching us about our reliance on the land as well as each other. While I haven't yet given up my virtual farm, I know that it's in the sun-kissed faces of such folks where the true rewards of farm life can be known. It's also where the future of food can be found and where I, too, can find my own parallel universe.  

I want to play this game. I spent many happy hours with the original "Starcraft" -- one of the most successful computer games of all time, selling more than 11 million copies since its 1998 release. I was equally proficient playing as a Terran, or the robotic Protoss, or the insect-derived Zerg. I have always been a sucker for well-executed real-time strategy games, especially when they incorporate strong storylines. As a devoted science fiction geek, I was also more comfortable negotiating interstellar warfare than the latest and greatest dungeon.

I have nothing but respect for Blizzard -- the company boasts a Pixar-like track record of consistent hit-making and attention to quality. I am sure "Starcraft II" will deliver a compelling experience. And my kids are out of town visiting family, so I've got some free time on my hands. What's so wrong with taking the new game out for a spin, getting a taste of the latest in PC gaming graphics, finding out where the story goes next?

But I also don't want to play this game. A compelling video game is not like a good movie or a book that captures a few hours or days of one's available attention. A compelling game is a voracious invader that takes over your life and won't let go. A review of a new Nintendo DS game by Seth Scheisel in today's New York Times observed that the game was good for about 50-100 hours of "entertaining gameplay." A hundred hours! I could bike a thousand miles in 100 hours. I could finish all six of the crazy long nonfiction books I'm currently dabbling in. I could watch all five seasons of "The Wire." I could write a book proposal. Life is too short, and I already spend too much time staring into a computer screen, to waste another precious second playing a computer game, no matter how good it is.

Whoa! Where did that judgmental Puritan come from? Has he been lurking there all this time, waiting to unleash a frenzy of sober temperance? Lighten up there, big fella. I certainly don't begrudge other people their choices, and I'm fine with my own son's obsession with video games (under reasonably strict screen-time restrictions, and as long as he gets good grades and plenty of exercise). I don't mean to belittle games as some kind of inferior art form, either, unworthy of our attention. Quite the opposite. My fundamental problem with today's games is that they are just too damn good, and if you have an addictive personality, which I do, they are too damn dangerous.

I've got no one around who can impose screen-time limits on me. There's only my own willpower, and that is a shield as fragile as an eggshell. If I give in an inch, I'm a goner, overrun by a Zerg rush against which there is no defense. The sun will rise, and I'll still be trying to beat that last mission on the hardest level.

My issues clearly draw from a deeper, darker well than can be found within any video game. There is an intersection point between my own weaknesses and the strengths of the industry, a perfect match between my capability for obsessive behavior and Blizzard's talent for peerless engrossment. I have a talent for escape -- whether via college football, science fiction, 100 mile bike rides, junk food orgies, alcoholic binges -- and few entertainment vehicles are as good at facilitating escape as modern games. Guilty pleasures? I know them all. By rejecting the game, I reject them all.

Or maybe it's just guilt. And not playing games is atonement. When friends who still game ask me why I stopped, I'm likely to tell them about how my left shoulder was ergonomically freaking out, and I felt it was in the best interests of my physical health to take a break. This is true, as far it goes. Bike rides keep my cholesterol down a lot more effectively than Blizzard's Battle.net. But that explanation doesn't go far enough. I'm a little less likely to explain that I feel stained by the memory of how much time I spent playing games while my son was a baby and my marriage was falling apart. Killing aliens, no matter how hard the difficulty settings, is way easier than facing uncomfortable truths about real-world life choices.

"Starcraft II" is testing me, but I'm not sure what constitutes a passing grade. Leaving the DVD-ROM next to the family computer, where it will delight my son upon his return, while I head out for yet another bike ride? How about installing it, playing it for a few hours, and then putting it away just to show that I can? (Ha! As if!) Or maybe I'll just keep staring at it there on the kitchen table, mulling over how this latest offering from Blizzard so exquisitely epitomizes the distraction-worshiping culture that has created me, that I flourish in, that compels me, even as I refuse to click the play button, to share voyeuristically, via a convoluted blog post, in the Web excitement that greets the birth of a new video game.

Big deal reveals so far include the launch of OnLive service, covered well by CNET. Nintendo is bringing a Zelda game to the Wii system, making my inner-11-year-old jump for joy. Gamer website 1UP has highlights from the Mario-spawner's presentation.  Microsoft is making a play for Nintendo's "casual gamers" with the new Kinect device, and Wired's GeekDad has a good dissection of the system's potential. 

Just in case you were worried it was nothing but basement-dwelling chubbies with no social skills running rampant over L.A.'s mean streets, rest assured that there is a Hollywood sheen to it all. Not only are there scads of scantily-dressed "spokesmodels," but game maker Activision kicked off the whole shebang with concert featuring Eminem and Jane's Addiction.  Hell, Rolling Stone covered it!

Here's one game trailer: Assassins Creed - Brotherhood.

I'll get the smelling salts. A spokeswoman for Mattel told the BBC that the change would "add a new dimension" and "introduce an element of popular culture into the game ... This is one of a number of twists and challenges included that we believe existing fans will enjoy and will also enable younger fans and families to get involved."

Proper nouns? Why, that would be like letting the rook move diagonally in chess! Building a hotel before you've bought all the houses on Monopoly! Installing elevators in Chutes and Ladders! Playing quarters with dimes!

Faster than you can say "Jeff Goldblum is dead," the media was all over the news -- and the wildfire of outrage it was provoking. As Keith Churcher, chairman of the Reading Scrabble Club, groused to the Daily Mail, "They're dumbing down a classic."  But Mattel's rep told the Daily Mail that "The new quirks will level the playing field. Experienced players with a vast vocabulary could be equally pitted against players with a love of celebrity or football." That's right -- your puny liberal arts education would soon be no match against the awesome Q, X and Z power of your hip-hop loving, pharmaceutical-hoarding adversaries. 

But not so fast. Writing in Slate, Stefan Fatsis, author of "Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players," told lexicon addicts across the land to call off their dogs. The poorly disseminated real story was that "Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble outside of North America, is introducing a game this summer called Scrabble Trickster. The game will include cards that allow players to spell words backward, use proper nouns, and steal letters from opponents." In other words -- it's just a spinoff. And American Scrabble, which is owned by Hasbro, isn't even affected.

Well, why didn't Mattel say so in the first place? Why, instead, did its spokesperson speak of the "old" version, implying a kind of genteel retirement for the classic game? Perhaps it was simple stupidity. Perhaps it was a deliberate -- and weak -- attempt at giving a stately game an edgier bit of rebranding. Add to it an eager, bottomless news cycle, and you've got misinformation gone viral. Misinformation that the hordes who think the sweetest words in the English language are "triple word score" felt pretty passionate about. Lesson learned: You do not mess around with Scrabble players. They will cut you.

Times may change; language certainly does. And nobody rends garments over the fact that respectable diversions like the New York Times crossword puzzle have a comfortable ongoing relationship with the proper noun. But those of us who love words already have to put up with a depressingly "level" playing field every time we open another poorly spelled, emoticon-strewn e-mail. No wonder the idea of a "dumbed down" Scrabble was so horrifying -- and so utterly credible. If the company announced tomorrow it was issuing a lolspeak version, you might be outraged, but would you really be shocked? For now, though, the Scrabblepocalypse is not at hand.  Breathe a sigh of relief, my sesquipedalian-loving friends -- and forget about any brilliant deployments of "Quiznos."