This shouldn’t surprise anyone who pays close attention to Scrabble news, as last year the whole concept of the game went down the crapper when Mattel’s Scrabble announced that players would now be able to use proper nouns.  Oh, and according to the powers that be, there is no “hard and fast” rule over what constitutes a “name.” So what’s stopping me from saying “AAUEEET” (I always get the vowels) is my future son’s name, just so I can get the bingo on a triple word score? Absolutely nothing. The game is basically anarchy now.

These additions are meant to attract younger children to the game, but it does so at the expense of, well, the point of the game. It’s like deciding that chess is going to be played like checkers now, so more 5-year-olds can get in on the action.

In other news, “zen” and “squaw” continue to be unplayable, unless you claim that you have a friend named Zen.

*There is some debate about whether the rules in Mattel’s authorized dictionary, “Collins Official Scrabble Words,” will transfer over to America’s rulebook, “The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.” The U.S. and Canada are the only two countries where the game is owned by Hasbro; in the rest of the world it’s produced by Mattel, and the two conflicting Scrabble-approved dictionaries have led to debate over the discrepancies.

Launched on Monday, the game is 3 months long, with a new “level” unlocked every week on Facebook. The game comes to us via Breakthrough, a human rights organization that focuses on pop culture and new media as the means to getting out its message for social change. We spoke to both Perrineau as well as Breakthrough’s founder Mallika Dutt about Facebook, social issues and whether a game has the ability to enact real-world change.

What got you interested in this project?

Harold Perrineau: My wife told me I had a message waiting for me on Facebook, about doing some voice-over work. And I kind of ignored it. And then my agent called and told me about this game, and I thought, “Wait, this can’t be the same Facebook thing, can it?” Because you never hear about those kind of apps; I’m not sure if there have been any quite like this. And when I became involved, I was just amazed at this multilayered, complex game that this human rights organization had come up with. It was so thinking outside the box: You know, a lot of groups they do great work by talking about the issues, or going places and building houses. But this is something completely different, a way to reach out to so many people.

I think your fans will be interested in seeing where you went after “Lost,” which has a similar puzzle-solving quality that “America 2049″ does.

HP: Well, it’s funny, because when you approach characters like Ken Asaba, you know it’s going to be the players who decide who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. As an actor, I don’t make that call, although I think he is motivated by the right things. And, you know, working on “Lost,” we were only given the information that basically the characters had. So the first season all I knew was “OK, I’m on this island and there is this … thing … trying to kill us.” And as the show developed, we learned along with the audience. With “America 2049,” I was never in the same place as the other actors, I wasn’t given the same information as them, and they didn’t know what I knew. So it played into the same puzzle-like experience for everyone involved.

Can you tell me why you decided to put “America 2049″ on Facebook, as opposed to releasing it through a website or more traditional outlet?

Mallika Dutt: Human rights have to begin at home, and we really feel the best way to reach people at home is through the power of pop culture, which is what distinguishes us from other social groups. We really try to engage and get a conversation going, and right now, millions of communities are all on Facebook. That’s the audience we want to reach.

And why a game at all?

MD: There’s a lot of literature out there right now about how gaming has the potential to be a transformative experience. We’ve always been looking at what’s trending, what’s changing, and where young people are, and try to connect to them that way. Right now the answers are games and Facebook.

See, but I worry that because your game does have a message about social change, some of Facebook’s users might play and then feel like they were duped into learning something, or being lectured on an ideology. Kids are really wary of that type of experience, especially since there are so many groups out there producing games like “Home Front.” [Where players work in a reality where North Korea has taken over the blond, blue-eyed populace of America and imposed a tyrannical reign ... all racist propaganda, basically.]

MD: You know, it’s really important to us that everyone engages in the game, no matter where they’re from or how they feel about these issues. As you play the game, you are immersed in certain roles and the story unfolds … but in the process of playing the game, we think the values it upholds are values that should be important to everyone. So it isn’t about “us versus them” or “good guys and bad guys”: at the end of the day it’s about us as individuals, and the choices we make. That is what determines the type of society we live in.

You can play “America 2049” here, and check out Breakthrough‘s website. For more gaming with a social conscience, check out Games4Change.org. 

But wanting to be a cooler, beer-drinking, girl-bedding kind of guy, I stopped playing D&D when I went to college. There was shame in them thar imaginary hills. So I shelved that yearning for fantasy heroics, which looked so weak and antisocial. I told myself, You don’t need D&D anymore.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I hit 40, I discovered my cache of D&D rule books and dice some two decades after I’d last laid eyes on it. Stirred by nostalgia, I wrote “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks,” a travel memoir/pop culture investigation that records a year spent “re-geeking” myself and reintegrating D&D and its ilk back into my life. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of gaming and fantasy subcultures — from “Lord of the Rings” to “Harry Potter” to MMOs (online role-playing games) like “World of Warcraft” (aka WoW) — that re-geeking was easier than I expected. I emerged from my hobbit hole and saw a kinder, more tolerant world. A real world where it’s safe to make peace with one’s “inner geek” without risk of reprisal from the jocks. And I’m not the only one making peace with my 20-sided die. “Your story is my story,” countless men tell me. We are ready to embrace those nights of unbridled game-playing and storytelling as crucial, formative experiences that were as real and memorable as any heroic feats on the football field (from which, of course, we were excluded).

OK, you check for traps, says the Dungeon Master. The coast is clear.

But wait, you say. Didn’t D&D disappear?

Didn’t the role-playing game succumb to controversy and those evangelical, just say no-era rants that linked the game to overweight kids listening to Judas Priest, practicing satanism and committing suicide? Besides, who has the patience for D&D? The world of books is dying, CDs are dead, and print magazines are swirling the toilet. Word has it the local youths can’t tell or write a story longer than 140 characters. Is it humanly possible in our hyperspeed, hypertext moment that biped mammals, amped on shots of Mountain Dew, could still gather in dimly lit Holiday Inns to scratch out combat strategy with knife-sharpened pencils?

It turns out D&D is alive and well. And it’s being played more or less the way it was played back in the Dark Days of the Reagan administration, on real tabletops, not virtual desktops, with dice and graph paper and miniature figurines. There’s nary a pixel in sight.

Why does this primal form of gaming and group narrative continue to have such a hold on guys like me? It’s more than simply a failure or refusal to grow up. Because I’ve had enough “life experiences” to level-up a 60th-level druid. For gamers of my generation, a sense of wistfulness — or even regret for having left behind these realms — plays a role in the resurgent status of D&D. Gen-X gamers like me, folks in their 30s or 40s (yes, mostly men, sigh), we want back in.

Can I roll again? I want to ask my Dungeon Master of yore.

Yes, the Dungeon Master says in my mind. You may proceed deeper into the dungeon. Pick up where you left off ages ago.

- – - – - – - – - -

Today, those 25-year-old fears of D&D-as-devil-worship seem quaint, even laughable. The harm of sitting around with guys plotting how to defeat a 10 foot-by-10 foot gelatinous cube (not easy: It’s invisible and stings you) and predicting what effect fireballs have when cast down narrow subterranean passageways (think Kentucky Fried Chicken) seems as tame as Tiddlywinks compared to the panic over video games like “Postal 2″ and “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” the latest scourge on America’s youth.

It’s true that Dungeons & Dragons — the first tabletop game to combine strategy, improvisational theater and Cheetos and let players describe their action in character to an impartial referee, the Dungeon Master — may not be as popular or attention-grabbing as it was in its heyday. But I see people rediscovering it all the time (including a fair share of womenfolk, too — certainly more than played back in my youth). In the past couple of years, I’ve been appearing at fantasy, science fiction and gaming conventions, from the biggies like Gen Con, Dragon Con and Pax East (which comes to Boston this weekend, March 11-13) to the many local “cons” that have sprung up like so many regenerating trolls. These mostly low-tech, old-school cons aren’t devoted to the latest first-person shooter game for XBox Live, nor are they backed by a Hollywood studio plugging the latest fantasy, sci-fi or superhero movie franchise. Come to a con like TotalCon, in the metro Boston area near my home, and you won’t see corporate booths hawking the latest MMO on banks of bright and flashy video screens. The bulk of the event is simply hundreds of gamers huddled around dozens and dozens of tables.

“I used to play D&D,” a goateed dude around 40 will say. “I really miss the game. I’m here to get back my mojo.”

“D&D is intrinsically nostalgic,” Tavis Allison told me in a recent e-mail. Allison, 40, is a fundraiser for a hospital in New York City and an avid D&Der who also moderated a panel discussion called “Dungeons & Dragons in Contemporary Art” at a New York City gallery this fall. “The art in the oldest books is weird and crude and like a medieval manuscript; even when it was new it reeked of some strange past, and part of the appeal of fantasy in general is this longing for a past that never was. Can you be nostalgic for something you never had?”

Yes. Yes you can.

Pure and simple, for many, D&D represents a lost age: It was an individualized, user-driven, DIY, human-scaled creative space separate from the world of adults and the intrusion of corporate forces. As Allison rightly noted, D&D recalls that day “before orcs and wookiees were the intellectual property of vast transmedia corporations.” Back when you had lots more free time than money — before girlfriends, job, kids. Life.

But it also reminds me of a part of my creative imagination that I lost touch with as well. Artist Timothy Hutchings curates a Web-based archive called PlaGMaDA, whose mission is to preserve and celebrate dungeon maps, or other maps made while playing text adventure computer games, in all their bad penmanship and wanton imagination.

Looking at PlaGMaDA, I remember how D&D taught me to love maps and hand-draw them myself. In that trove of old gear I found at middle age, I had discovered my beloved backdrops for heroic stories and imaginary derring-do: the Craggy Hills, the Untreaded Lands, the Lorsearch Plains. Mountains called Ramen-Nashew I’d painstakingly scribed with a blue quill pen. Here, an evil wizard’s lair etched in Magic Marker. There, an underground labyrinth guarded by traps and monsters, with rooms numbered from 1 to 37, which I had drawn on aqua-lined graph paper, now smudged, almost sepia-tinged with age.

But by playing RPGs (role-playing games), I was not only teaching myself shoddy draftsmanship. I also learned to be confident and decisive, and to feel powerful. Even feel cocky. Some of the guts and nerve I role-played began to leak into the real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used escapist fantasy to gather strength for later, when I was ready to come out of my shell. In this sense, the wave of nostalgia I’ve felt also springs from a desire to pay tribute to D&D. To thank the game for the gifts of creativity and self-actualization it bestowed upon us.

At a sci-fi event this winter called Boskone, four gamers served on a panel called “Playing With Dice” and re-animated the game’s manifold influences. As Peter V. Brett, 38, bestselling author of the “Demon Cycle” series, said, the Dungeon Master had to build the world and play all the extras: the innkeeper, the drunk goblin at the bar, the sphinx who challenges characters to a riddling contest. He had to improvise. He learned how to work an audience directly, and could see when players just wanted to joke and when all they wanted do was draw swords (and dice) and kill monsters. “I don’t think I would be half the writer I am now without D&D as my training ground,” Brett said.

Myke Cole, 37, another author on the panel — the first in his military-fantasy “Shadow Ops” book series is forthcoming — echoed Brett’s thought but added one more wrinkle: “We are socially enfranchised and successful because of our D&D days.” A nine-year veteran of military operations and federal law enforcement, he’s been to war three times. “I wasn’t raised to the sword. My parents were committed aesthetes who eschewed violence and the institutions that wield it, and worked hard to instill those values in their children,” he wrote me in an e-mail after Boskone. “It was D&D that permitted the pasty, scrawny weakling child that I was to imagine myself as a broadsword-wielding knight of the realm.” He played a lot of fighters and paladins before he became one in real life. “That game gave me a gift I will never forget: It stretched my mind around the possibilities that hover around us, unnoticed, all the time. D&D taught me to imagine, and that was the first step to bending the world to my will.”

And, as someone described it, if you can run a D&D campaign — a months-long series of adventures requiring infinite attention to detail, exacting execution and on-the-fly problem-solving — you can run an advertising campaign. Or run an IT company.

To my mind, the game has finally come into its own as a powerful cultural force. In recent years, I’ve seen it finally taking its rightful place in the Valhalla of other game-changing phenomena. Alongside “The Lord of the Rings” (published in 1954-55) and “Star Trek” (first aired in 1966), one could argue that D&D (created in 1974) had been equally instrumental in establishing fantasy and science fiction’s rule over the box office, bestseller lists and the pop culture’s imagination. And of course, the tropes of leveling-up, collecting experience points, and role-playing a character — “Ha! I will strike the She-orc with my +3 broad sword!” — wouldn’t exist without the D&D adventuring party of dwarf, elf, wizard, ranger, hobbit. They have collectively blazed the trail through dungeons dark ahead of us. Without D&D, MMOs would not exist.

The game can be seen as a common “nerd experience” that taught millions of geeks to socialize, empathize, level-up (in game and in real life) and emerge from the dungeons of their solitude to tell heroic stories. Now in their 30s, 40s and 50s, these geeks have shown their quality. They forge and hew the media you consume: movies, television, music, novels, art and, of course, video games. They are the generation of creators now telling the biggest stories. And for that, they’re thanking D&D.

Every week it seems there’s another BoingBoing posting about troves of scanned dungeons maps. Even Stephen Colbert and Vin Diesel admit to their D&D pedigree. Google “Basic D&D” or “Advanced D&D” (versions of the game popular in the late ’70s and early ’80s) and “art,” “television” or “YouTube” and it doesn’t take long to find a trail of bread crumb artifacts. And when you pore over uploads of the endearingly amateurish artwork from the 1977 edition of the “Monster Manual,” it’s an easy leap to that memory of hours spent in your room, lying on your “Star Wars” bedspread and gawking at pictures of kobolds, owlbears, purple worms and that hot, half-lady, half beast, the lamia.

It was by casting the magic spell called “Internet” that I encountered Tavis Allison, who moderated that panel discussion at New York’s Allegra Laviola Gallery in conjunction with an art show called “Doomslangers” — paintings and drawings of swords, spiders and skeletal hands, and polyhedral ceramic sculptures, all inspired by D&D. The panel looked at art and D&D as “forms of ritualized human creativity.”

“Now we are living with the consequences of a nerd-run world,” Allison told me on the phone, after I’d met him in New York. “WoW is now seen as a public health problem.” We’re in the midst of “the ‘baby boom’ of Dungeons & Dragons” and people are desperate to establish their “nerd cred.” Looking back at your own childhood, he said, people now can claim, “Hey, I was at ground zero when this whole wave was taking over.”

People who were into D&D at its peak of popularity are now in a position of freedom to talk about it. With the shackles of an insecure youth shaken off, confident and mature, they can even get a show produced that’s all about a D&D session. In the recent episode of NBC’s “Community,” featuring a misfit dubbed “Fat Neil” getting his revenge on Chevy Chase’s evil character “Pierce the Insensitive,” the writers both paid homage and poked fun at D&D, in a good-natured way. (Self-deprecating jokes about D&D did not exist back in my day.)

“By referencing D&D, you are not saying ‘I’m just an ordinary orc-killer,’” said Allison, who runs an after-school D&D program in the New York City public schools and just launched a D&D birthday and bachelor party business called Adventuring Parties. “You’re saying, ‘I’m an original D&D gangster.’” You get a new form of respect: street cred points.

Poke around the blogosphere and in short order you’ll find cult hits like “D&D Monster Man,” a video of an actor’s mock audition mimicking monster sounds. Literature too: Sam Lipsyte’s recent New Yorker short story called “The Dungeon Master” evoked the cruel, power-tripping aspects of the game. “The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2” (an adventure for 3-6 players, levels 2-5) is a tongue-in-cheek novel about D&D characters who, once aware they’re fictional, try to find freedom from the tyranny of their players. (The jacket design is made to resemble one of the game’s pre-packed gaming adventure “modules”). In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” author Junot Díaz describes his eponymous hero as “a dork, totally into Dungeons & Dragons and comic books.” In the reality-TV web series “I Hit It With My Axe,” name-brand porn stars play D&D.

In my day, luring a girl to play with my gang would have required a +5 Necklace of Enchantment.

- – - – - – - – - -

When I returned home from TotalCon, a red box was waiting on my doorstep: the new “Starter Set,” a streamlined, no-frills introduction to D&D, released last fall by Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary that owns Gary Gygax’s old RPG empire). The “Red Box” contains two thin rule books, some cardboard counters and a flimsy map, and embodies the appeal of “original D&D,” before the game pimped itself out with cumbersome game mechanics and mountains of hardcover rule books. Wizards wants to lure back your old gaming group that disbanded but still hankers to play. They hope the Red Box is just the ticket.

I spoke to Mark Jessup, 40, Wizards’ director of marketing and communications, who told me about the Red Box and also the “D&D Encounters program,” a weekly game session that takes place at game stores around the world, expressly designed for players whose lives don’t permit them to play an entire D&D adventure

“Everyone daydreams. You don’t have to hold onto those dreams,” he said, recalling his core game-playing years as a teenager. “With D&D, you would build on them, make them more ambitious.”

Which made me think of the other reason why D&D is back: Gamers are married, making babies. They are encouraging their kids to discard their Xbox consoles in favor of the communal storytelling experience that is the cornerstone of D&D. They want their beloved dream-making experience to survive.

“As a parent nowadays, we want to pass that on to our sons and daughters, that gift of the imagination,” Jessup added. “We want to make that fire inside them.” (By the way, Jessup’s brand team got a call from the producers of the “Community” episode, who wanted D&D’s blessing. Jessup worried if the show would be a “lovingly accurate or a cheap character sketch, a lampoon.” He was pleased it was both respectful and funny.)

Like Tavis Allison’s program, other youth programs like the Game Loft in Belfast, Maine, are teaching leadership and social graces via role-playing games. I met an evangelical priest at TotalCon who was running D&D sessions in his church basement. Times, they have a-changed.

But like so many people my age, I miss that Friday night realm of paper and pencil. That camaraderie, that connection to open-ended storytelling. D&D was an experience we made for ourselves, for each other. Was D&D then a “better” imaginative experience than “World of Warcraft” today? I like looking back on my primitive game and scoff at these younger generations of video gamers. All I needed to “immerse” myself in fantasy worlds were pencils and paper, not PlayStation consoles and pixels, I snort.

But I’m not 17 anymore. My hand-eye coordination sucks. And who knows how my mind would be wired in new ways, were I from Generation Y, strapping on my headset and playing “Halo” or “Gears of War” for 20 hours a week

Meanwhile, I feel compelled to post some of my old dungeon maps on PlaGMaDA. Aside from my failing memories, those faded maps and character sheets are the only evidence I’ve got of the places I once created. That I was a hero back then, and I wandered those realms, and that I was victorious.

What’s quaintly adorable about the EA campaign is that, nearly 14 years after “Grand Theft Auto,” the gaming industry is still using the promise of turning kids into soulless little sadists as a selling point. This stuff will taint your mind, we swear! You’re going to have to sneak over to your friend’s house, the one with the alcoholic dad who doesn’t pay any attention to his emotional development, if you want to play this! Because if your mom gets an eyeful of this necro alien zombie carnage, you are so totally in for an uncomfortable meeting with the guidance counselor. Just to drive home the point, “Dead Space” also has the inevitable Twitter stream, hashtagging its twisted heart out to #yourmomhatesthis. You are so badass, “Dead Space”! Your mom probably doesn’t even know what a hashtag is!

But it’s those ads, purporting to feature “real moms,” that are the real pièce de résistance here. Standing in direct opposition to the creepy virtual world of “Dead Space,” they feature decidedly unglam older women exhibiting what EA promises are “real disgust and fear” as they are subjected to the horrors of “Dead Space,” part deux.

Now, I could make the point here that a 2009 study revealed that 40 percent of the gaming community is female, or that a PopCap survey last year revealed that the average gamer is — surprise! — a 43-year-old woman.   It’s true that men and women game differently, but the reality is that a typical lady looking at “Dead Space” for the first time might not be like the slack-jawed female in the blue sweat shirt shaking her head and saying, “That’s just icky. I may have a nightmare over that.” She might say something like, “Yeaaaaah, I wasted your sorry behind!” But I understand that reinforcing  gender stereotypes moves merchandise.

There is, however, something unintentionally hilarious about the fact that the campaign for a game that’s rated 17+ for “Blood and Gore, Strong Language, and Intense Violence” features a bunch of women who look like they could easily be the parents of basement-dwelling 30-year-olds. The gray-haired “Participant 0013″ is surely not currently trudging through middle-school applications. Is EA suggesting that rebellious, “I don’t care what you have to say, Mom!” gamers are adults who really should be able to spend the $59.99 with their own paychecks? Way to make your customers feel like winners, EA.

Yet for all its rather disingenuous button pushing, the EA campaign does flow from that great universal truth — that “a mom’s disapproval has always been a great barometer of what’s cool.” Tragic as that may be to accept for all of us aging hipsters who still fancy ourselves “cool,”  by God, they’re on to something. Oh, we can wear all the hilarious T-shirts in the world and boast of being into Arcade Fire before they sold out, but there comes a time when the torch of embracing annoyingly shocking things must pass to a new generation.

But whether you’re a 15-year-old kid who doodles dragons in his notebooks or a corporate lawyer unwinding at the end of the day, there’s something intensely satisfying in knowing that somewhere, mother would definitely not be happy with your behavior. (Also, anything involving the words “your mom” is always funny.) While the moms in the EA campaign might not look anything like your own mother or that of your PlayStation addicted kid, it’s still refreshing to realize that the generation gap somehow still matters. And no matter how many creepy creatures you can blow away, the most satisfying imaginary war of all is still the one against your parent’s favor.

“WoW,” as it is known, is not for moms, especially ones who think computer-based games are only slightly less harmful than crack cocaine. It is not necessarily for people with jobs or old houses or novels-in-progress. Playing can suck up entire afternoons. At the end of a session, all I have to show for my time is a shoulder twisted by keyboarding and a virtual knapsack filled with ruined leather scraps (you can loot and skin your prey), copper coins and frayed pants, depending on my adventures.

“WoW” is definitely not for someone facing the end of three decades of marriage. Yet I am all of these things as well as a Darkspear Troll mage, with my home in the Barren Lands, a savanna populated with livid pink T-Rexes who wear blue necklaces and matching earrings. I am Level 21 (out of 70), just high enough to get out of the newbie playpen and die suddenly as I stray past cave bears or mega-spiders.

Beside an occasional game of “Pong” played when I waitressed as a college student, I am not a gamer. My son — 9, intensely social, a reader of Greek myths and Marvel Comics and deprived of even a Game Boy — is the one who proposed spending his allowance on a “WoW” installation disk and the monthly subscription necessary to play.

Another summer, I would have enforced the ban on computer-based games. Too many times, I’ve seen formerly healthy, interesting, friendly boys grow fat and sullen in front of a screen. My husband and I treasured our son’s bright interest in the world, his delicious combination of bravado and intensity that makes little boys such delightful creatures.

Until my husband delivered the 10-minute fatwa: He wasn’t happy, had never been and wanted (or already had) the younger girlfriend. Without warning, I joined a great and storied company: the Unwanted.

Summer had just begun. When my husband and I decided to have children and buy a house, we read all of the how-to books. Now, faced with divorce, I headed to the bookstore, struggling to map the terrain of lawyers and therapists and single parenthood. 

At 14, my daughter is old enough to imagine life post-parent. But my son is still in that time (I remember it well) when you cannot imagine living without your mom and dad. That summer, my son forbid me to swim beyond the crest of the waves when we visited the beach. At night, he would sneak into my bed, pressing his feet into mine. He examined me for signs that I was falling apart.

So when he asked for “WoW,” I surprised myself by saying yes. To play, you create an avatar from one of two factions: Horde or Alliance. The Alliance has more beautiful avatars; the Horde more interesting ones. I selected a Horde troll, since I could have tusks like a wild boar. Tusks, I reasoned, would be a useful feature to have in the life I found myself so unwillingly leading, as a divorced, almost 50 mother of two.

In many ways, “WoW” was weirdly evocative of what I faced in life. I was newly alone and, like my avatar, dependent on the skills I had, not the ones I wished for. At each turn, I seemed to be facing new dangers. Often, I died. But I rose again and again, finding within myself a bedrock strength that even this calamity did not erase.

My son and I learned “WoW” together. While he commandeered the keyboard, I sat beside him, to help him choose a path. “WoW” has rightly been praised as a game developers’ masterpiece of landscape. The flat expanse of eastern Colombia, for example, is similar to the Barren Lands. Darnassus looks like a nighttime version of Muir Woods, if only someone had installed glowing purple lights and slime creatures.

My son has a generous, intuitive spirit. Though I’ve done my best to seem normal, like a weather vane he reads my moods. For weeks, I walked like the Undead through the routines of family life. I felt as gaping as the creatures in Undercity, a “WoW” metropolis, with their chests ripped open to expose neon-colored hearts. During the miserable months of August, I felt suffocated by the heat and loneliness, abandoned in some game cul-de-sac the developers had forgotten to populate.

Then my son would invite me to play, his voice shiny with intentional cheer. I would find myself with his arm curled around my neck like the tenderest, toughest vine. His fear of what was happening to us moored me to earth. The end of love is a voyage to an unknown land, with mysteries and dangers that I had to learn to navigate. No wonder explorers need to write accounts of their travels. If the story goes untold, then it is just a lot of pounding down unnamed trails, with no real reward.

So here are my “WoW” lessons, thanks to my son: Adversity earns experience that levels you up and gives you more power. I don’t advise you to head heedlessly into an unexplored place; monsters can smack you down without warning. Read the rule book first. On the other hand, exploring can lead you to a particularly choice piece of treasure. Caution and adventure can be compatible, in other words.

Flying is always a good idea. Watch your health and mana, the “WoW” term for spirit and magical power. But do not conserve these endlessly, since spending some can lead to great rewards.

Repair your armor. Drink water. There is always a king at the center of the castle or the depths of a cave and it is a good idea to talk to him. Help other players when they are in trouble. If you are lucky, another player will help you just when you need it.

I hate seeing my children hurt. But I’ve also seen my son reveal gifts that had, until my “WoW” summer, been hidden to me. My son ministered to me, in his way and with his tools. Yes, it was via a computer game, that mixed bag. He sat with me and hugged me and helped me fire-blast Scarlet Hunters and retrieve crates stolen by Dustwind Harpies. Through these wild characters, all the gore and running, with the shrill shriek of Decayed Morlocks in my ears, I felt his love.

I was never, really, alone. On many afternoons, a little boy carried me.