Maybe thoughts like these are what you get for having watched "Tron" at an impressionable age. Or perhaps my mind is currently warped from playing "Metal Gear Solid" last night until my eyes went weird.

I always imagine, if those little pixelated game characters had little private lives, they'd be in there thinking "Oh DAMN, I'm being played by that MORON again who gets me killed fourteen times a minute and they haven't even worked out how to get off level one yet."

I always picture them thinking as I make them run around the screen, "NO, YOU IDIOT! Not THERE! Make me go up there! The secret area is up there! (Jeez, I should have taken that job in that other game.) Aaargh, now this dork is running me straight into the laser beams again!"

I picture the goodguys and badguys getting together after the game to gripe about the loser who rented them this week. "Well, that was even worse than that eight-year-old player last Christmas. At least THAT one didn't keep making me walk into walls by accident. My face hurts." "You think YOU've got problems Snake, you should try being a guard. I had to keep a straight face and pretend not to notice you when they bumped you downstairs in the cardboard box while my back was turned." "Yeah, at least you get to run around the whole game. Me, I just wait in this room all day staring at the wall until this moron runs you in there and I mow you down with a machine gun. AGAIN." "I guess it could be worse. I met Abe from Abe's Oddyssey at a party once and he said this player makes him jump into meat saws for fun, to hear the noise he makes."

Also, I ended up thinking how much fun it would be to set up a live-action Playstation game, the way people do live-action chess. You could have an obstacle course or something, with things to collect and things to climb up and swing across and so on, and you'd give orders to your player over a walkie-talkie. I still haven't decided whether it would be more fun to be the person directing or the person being the game character. Ideally, you'd have to swap over for the next game, so that the thought of revenge would prevent your controller from taking *too* many liberties over the tricky bits.

Brunnen-"the more I think of that, the more fun it seems like"G