My favorite games nowadays are Sim City, Sim Earth and HiddenAgenda... I had Balance of the Planet on my hard disk, but I wasso stricken with guilt by the digitized photo of the author andhis spouse that I deleted the game, long before I could figureout how to keep everybody on the Earth from starving....Including myself and the author....

I'm especially fond of SimEarth. SimEarth is like a goldfishbowl. I also have the actual goldfish bowl in the *After Dark*Macintosh screen saver, but its charms waned for me, possiblybecause the fish don't drive one another into extinction. Itheorize that this has something to do with a breakdown of theold dichotomy of twitch games versus adventure, you know, arcadezombie versus Mensa pinhead...

I can dimly see a kind of transcendance in electronicentertainment coming with things like SimEarth, they seem like aforeshadowing of what Alvin Toffler called the "intelligentenvironment"... Not "games" in a classic sense, but things thatare just going on in the background somewhere, in an attractiveand elegant fashion, kind of like a pet cat... I think this kindof digital toy might really go somewhere interesting.

What computer entertainment lacks most I think is a sense ofmystery. It's too left-brain.... I think there might be realpromise in game designs that offer less of a sense of nitpickingmastery and control, and more of a sense of sleaziness andbluesiness and smokiness. Not neat tinkertoy puzzles to bedecoded, not "treasure-hunts for assets," but creations withsome deeper sense of genuine artistic mystery.

I don't know if you've seen the work of a guy called WilliamLatham.... I got his work on a demo reel from Media Magic. Inever buy movies on video, but I really live for rawcomputer-graphic demo reels. This William Latham is a heavydude... His tech isn't that impressive, he's got some kind of