In mission number nine of the Terran “episode” of “Starcraft,” the much-anticipated real-time strategy release from Blizzard Entertainment, Kerrigan must survive. Her death equaled my defeat. I had to start over.

I considered sampling another episode — how about those Zerg and Protoss missions? I knew that “Starcraft” had been getting high marks from hard-core gamers for its imaginative creation of three unique races whose widely varying capabilities imposed radically different strategic imperatives. But I couldn’t leave Kerrigan’s body in a pool of her own blood, either. I desperately wanted to know what was going to happen to the Terrans. A major drama had been unfolding between the rebel forces of Arcturus Mensk and the ruthless, tyrannical Confederacy. I had to be there to see it through. The Confederacy was clearly evil, but I was beginning to have my suspicions about this Mensk character, too.

I was hooked — not by the twitch of a finger but by a dramatic story, one created entirely by the game itself, without depending on reference to some classic science-fiction movie or book.

Judged purely as a game, “Starcraft” isn’t quite the acme of the genre that some fans and reviewers have made it out to be. It lacks the micromanagement intricacies of the robot-war maelstrom that is “Total Annihilation.” The graphics, while stunning, aren’t quite as pleasing to the eye as the historically based “Age of Empires.” But nothing I’ve seen comes as close to integrating a story line with cinematic values into a computer game as well as “Starcraft.” As a game, “Starcraft” is merely great; as a science fiction experience, “Starcraft” is sublime.

“Starcraft” is proof of what attention to production values coupled with artistry at every level — programming, animation, writing, even “direction” — can achieve. Ever since computer games began to stake their claim to the entertainment dollar, a vocal minority of critics has complained that obsessive attention to graphics has entailed a marked decline in the actual quality of game play. And more often than not, the critics were correct: More attention — and more of your computer’s resources — had been devoted to making something look cool, or to creating a 30-second movie clip, than to making the game work as a game. The history of computer gaming is littered with ill-advised attempts to apply cinematic conceits that end up looking clunky and stupid. Anyone remember “Johnny Mnemonic”?

But now, gamers have the right to be euphoric as they anticipate what is yet to come in the wake of games like “Starcraft.” For one thing, new computers are now powerful enough that there really aren’t any trade-offs in terms of allocating computer resources. “Starcraft” has video segments as compelling as anything a science fiction fan might see on “Deep Space Nine” or “Babylon 5,” but they don’t get in the way of the actual game. Furthermore, a major game release of the “Starcraft” sort isn’t the product of just a couple of geeks hacking away at code in the wee hours. A game-developing “studio” such as Blizzard Entertainment employs the talents of a legion of writers, sound engineers, voice actors, coders, graphic designers and, of course, marketing specialists.

In “Starcraft’s” case, none of them appear to be amateurs. From the thousands of words of historical background provided on each race in the “Starcraft” manual to the delightfully “Blade Runner”-esque techno sounds that accompany each click of the mouse, every note rings true. One is almost tempted to cry: Bring on the “Starcraft” novellas, the movie, the television pilot! If “Mortal Kombat” could become a film, what are we waiting for? Arnold Schwarzenegger as Arcturus Mensk? It could happen.

Except it doesn’t really need to. The game is already here. It’s got a plot, it’s interactive and it’s open-ended. Who needs TV or even Hollywood? For me, the power of “Starcraft’s” narrative is such that I haven’t yet dared pick up the alien mantle and start my diabolic efforts to massacre all Terran marines — even if, as a reviewer, I feel somewhat obliged to. So sue me. “Starcraft’s” designers put a great deal of care into setting up a story line that requires individual mastery of each mission before delivering a sequence of dramatic payoffs. I’ve bought into it. I plan to slog my way through.

But it is worth pointing out that no one is required to play each mission episode, or even sit through a single video clip. Contemporary computer games revel in permitting multiple approaches to game interaction. Not only does “Starcraft,” like all state-of-the-art, real-time strategy games, provide numerous options — single-player, multiplayer, missions with set objectives, wide-open skirmishes and so on — but Blizzard, following the lead of id software, creator of “Quake” and “Doom,” has made sure to include software tools such as map and campaign editors that allow game players to create their own scenarios.

Certainly, if the scenarios provided proved to be boring or unchallenging, I’d be happy to grow my own. But for now, I really must find out how the future of the galaxy is going to play out, as the designers of “Starcraft” have intended. Commander Kerrigan will live again. Death to the Protoss!

To anyone familiar with the work of Douglas Adams — and, judging by the sales for his book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” there are at least 15 million readers who are — this kind of gibberish is a jolly good read. Twenty years after he penned the first book of the “Hitchhiker” trilogy, which envisions intergalactic travel and the meaning of life as the number 42, his bizarre science-fiction worlds are still selling strong.

But Adams has expanded far beyond books, and in his most recent incarnation he is at the helm of a modest multimedia empire called the Digital Village. And the above monologue is not from a book, but a conversation held with Nobby the LiftBot, one of the seven characters populating Adams’ new game, “Starship Titanic.”

An imposingly British 6-foot-5, Adams in person is decidedly more sober than his books, and prone to rumination about the future of the digital world. As he recently detailed his vision over tomato consommi: “We are moving towards a position in which all ways we communicate and inform and entertain ourselves are coming down a digital pipe. The Digital Village wants to be in that pipe — content providers, creators and publishers. We’re also happy to drive it by being in other media as well — television or movies or whatever.”

Or as the Digital Village Web site touts its future plans: “Bigger than Texas, better than Birmingham, more interactive than a friend’s skin.”

“Starship Titanic” is the first project to come out of that pipe. The CD-ROM, released in mid-April, comes from the school of post-”Myst” immersive environment mystery games. The premise: The Starship Titanic is the world’s most luxurious intergalactic cruiser — “the ship that cannot possibly go wrong.” Of course, everything does go wrong (sound familiar?), and your task as an unwitting guest on board is to find out what happened and fix it.

What makes this game different from your average “Myst” clone, however, is a purely Adams touch: The Art Deco interior of the doomed cruiser is populated with dysfunctional bots like Nobby — who can talk to you for hours using a proprietary language recognition system that the Digital Village affectionately named “SpookiTalk.” You can hear their voices on the game’s soundtrack and also read and respond on-screen via your “Personal Electronic Thing” — or “PET.”

Explains Adams, “When I was doing the ‘Hitchhiker’ game [a text-based game he produced in 1984], I enjoyed that kind of engagement that comes from being in a virtual conversation between player and machine. Then, when someone showed me ‘Myst,’ I thought, ‘Well, this is terrific. This is a beautiful realization of a world.’ But with graphics games, after a while you feel like something’s missing. What’s missing is precisely what text adventure games excelled at — that real sense of being locked in a conversation with the software.”

“With ‘Starship Titanic,’ I thought, ‘Let’s put characters in here and turn that language technology to being able to converse with a character.’”

To create those characters, Adams and two co-authors wrote 10,000 lines of dialogue, or the equivalent of 16 hours of conversation. Although the bots can reveal clues to the mystery if properly queried, they can also simply ramble for hours in semi-lucid conversation. While Nobby the Liftbot speaks in Kiplingesque prose, other bots spit out surfer slang or the mellifluous tones of a British butler.

The result is like stepping into one of Adams’ novels and having a spontaneous conversation with the characters. The process of producing the game, explains Adams, was in fact just like writing a book: “You’ve got a character in mind, and you say, ‘Well, this little thing he would say would be this, and the way he would react to the situation would be this.’ You make lots and lots of those kinds of notes, and then you have to construct in the novel the situations that are going to illustrate the way they behave.” In the “Starship Titanic” game, however, it’s the player who constructs those situations, and the notes themselves that become the text.

While Adams envisions surreal scenarios, the three dozen employees of the Digital Village have been set up as a kind of cross-media support group. Besides the initial “Starship Titanic” game, the Digital Village has produced a book by the same name, written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones. A movie based on the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is due to be released in the summer of 2000; the Digital Village will likely produce a video game to be released concurrently. At least one TV show is in the works — a sci-fi drama called “Avatar Forest” — and of course, yet more books and radio work. Besides the “Starship Titanic” Web site, which is currently an extension of the CD-ROM, the Digital Village will also be producing online games, retail products, “global events and soft furnishings,” as its Web site puts it.

Grandiose plans for the business of a man who is essentially a novelist. But for his role in the company, Adams describes himself more as a cross-media evangelist.

“Essentially, we want to be able to have our own constituency and customers online, and the way you find them is by doing stuff in the outside world. So I do stuff in the outside world, and the Digital Village provides me with the infrastructure for doing that — something that you don’t normally have as a novelist. Suddenly if I want to do a CD-ROM, if I want to do a TV show, if I want to do a movie, I have the whole infrastructure of people I regularly know, work with and like. It gives me a power base, and I can drive traffic into what we do on the Web.”

As an example of that role, he describes a series he did last year for BBC Radio. To support a five-part reading from a nonfiction book about his journeys around the world as a zoologist, the Digital Village posted a small Web site with related material. An hour after the radio announcer read off the address, the site already had 20,000 hits.

To Adams, “That was significant. Just out of nowhere, from a few little radio broadcasts, you’re getting those kinds of numbers. That massively points the way at how different media can exploit and support each other.”

Boiled down, the Digital Village is essentially trying to do cross-media branding: a buzzword batted around by many money-hungry multimedia companies that, like the Digital Village, figure the profits and reach of traditional media can support the elusive business plans of new media.

Adams has had haphazard success with the idea so far: “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” has already morphed from its original radio program into a book, a TV series, a game and a movie. His future plans, he says, will tie these kinds of products together more closely.

Says Adams, “Moving something from one medium to another is very interesting — it’s a lot like carrying a picture or a piece of clothing from one bit of lighting to another. Suddenly it looks very different. What interests me a bit further down the line is the way in which the different media interrelate — you can hand things off from one to another, you can exploit each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”

For a content producer, the main pitfall with propagating an idea across multiple media is that the content won’t fit the new platform: The linearity of a book won’t work in an interactive game, and vice versa. Instead, Adam says, content producers should think of cross-referencing media as a way of driving down into the layers of a good narrative.

Adams points to his own experiences with television as an example of how this could work. Considered somewhat of a Web pundit in England, he’s often called upon to talk on news programs about related issues. “You talk for about two minutes about a large, interesting subject — it’s absurd that it is so brief and short, but there isn’t time to do anything more. Meanwhile, in
other layers, TV has huge amounts of time it’s desperately trying to fill.”

“There must be some way of trying to solve this problem,” Adams hypothesizes. “If you go with a hypertextual model of television, you instantly see how you could follow any piece of information to any depth a viewer happened to be interested in. The integration of Web and TV will be a medium that allows that to happen.”

As for the ubiquitous “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he sees its next manifestation as the ultimate cross-media product:
Re-creating the fictional Guide to the Galaxy as an actual live service that would dispense personal advice across multiple platforms (the Web, your Palm Pilot, your television) using an artificial-intelligence engine. Certainly, it’s an ambitious scenario. Then again, Adams has never had a problem coming up with ideas that are — pardon the pun — Titanic.

Text-based games are an unusual breed of cat because, essentially, they have no graphics and no linear path to follow. While many gamers eagerly debate the merits of various 3-D graphics cards and the “Riven” story line, others continue to migrate toward “old-school” games that forego graphics for interactive fiction, where gamers create a character and role-play for the duration of the game — where they can go anywhere in the universe they can think of because there are no rails, no linear paths, no real-time physics to worry about.

In other words, MUDs (the acronym stands for “multi-user dimension” or “multi-user dungeon”) are the online equivalent of old paper-and-pen role-playing games, where the only limit to where you can go or what you’ll encounter is what’s in your head. They’re like a version of Dungeons and Dragons, all grown up.

Fans attribute their preference to the complete freedom available in MUDs — you can go absolutely anywhere in the game world, do anything you want, say anything to any character you come across — and to the pleasure of using their imaginations to picture places, other characters and even hunting weapons. “Nobody pictures a ‘sooty yew longbow’ in quite the same way,” says MUD fan Medan (who, like all the fans interviewed for this piece, asked to be referred to by his nom-de-game). “But if you see it there on the screen, there’s no question. Your imagination can picture what you see much better than the computer monitor.”

It’s this sentiment exactly that Simutronics and Universal — creators of the month-old MUD “Hercules and Xena: Alliance of Heroes” — are hoping will capture the fancy of the legion of Xena and Herc fans populating the Web.

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“Given the popularity of the shows on the Internet,” says Michelle Babcock of Universal, “we felt that a multiplayer game would be very popular with our fans. We also liked the elements of chat that are incorporated into this style of game, as that’s what we’ve found our fans like to do when they’re online. They enjoy chatting about the shows and even making up scenarios about their favorite characters,” she says — and the number of sites dedicated to fans writing their own Xena and Herc stories, often erotic ones, is a clear testament to that.

Simutronics, on the other hand, has been in the MUD business since 1987, and is perhaps known best for its massively multiplayer “GemStone” MUDs. With a base of more than 50,000 subscribers (who collectively log roughly 2 million hours of gameplay a month), Simutronics was the logical choice for Universal when it decided to create a Xena and Hercules game. Not to mention that Simutronics could put the game together for Universal in less than a year — a Herculean feat in the gaming world.

“We wanted to get a game out there just as soon as possible,” says Babcock, “and most graphical games take almost two years to produce.” “Alliance of Heroes,” based on Simutronics’s Interactive Fiction Engine, took only eight months.

That, however, was not the main reason for making a MUD instead of a fully graphical adventure, Babcock stresses. What with all the Xena fans online and the lack of the usual restraints an adventure game presents (linear gameplay, specific solutions to puzzles), “It seemed that a chat-type game made good sense for this audience.”

Good sense indeed. Simutronics charges $9.95 a month for access to its games, and if it can draw in not only the regular MUD fans but also the tremendous numbers of Xena and Hercules fans, the company stands to make some serious money. Which is part of the reason Simutronics is hoping to lure stars Lucy Lawless and Kevin Sorbo, among others, into making an appearance or two in the game. Xena and Herc fans are notorious for showing up in droves any time there’s a chance of encountering the stars.

If Lawless shows up, “You better crank up your servers, because they’re going to crash,” warned the pseudonymous “Laura Sue Dean, the Actress” — gossip columnist for Xena fan site WHOOSH.

Right now Universal will only say that it’s “hoping to get the stars in the game shortly.” Even so, Xena and Herc fans are checking into the game. Dean loves it. Part of the reason is simply that the game is tied very closely to the TV show. Scriptwriters clue game producers in on what’s coming up on the show so they can weave the TV plot lines into the fabric of the game. For example, if Xena were to suddenly take a trip to Mars, gamemasters could create a new Mars area for gamers to explore.

Susan “Suz” Dodd, producer of “Alliance of Heroes,” explains the appeal of the game: “You can wear the same kind of clothes Xena wears, learn to do these fantastic acrobatics Hercules does,” she says, and do it all through the same woods, forests and villages where Xena and Hercules do it. For someone like Xena superfan Dean, the idea of being able to grab her Amazon friends, meet up at the temple and head off into Xena’s universe is immensely appealing — and, indeed, the communal nature of MUDs has always been one of their greatest draws.

“When I log into the game,” says Sylverdust, “I connect with a vast neighborhood of friends and acquaintances from all over the place … We get to know each other, make friends and enjoy each other’s company and creativity.” And while other kinds of more graphically impressive games like Blizzard.net’s Diablo also offer meeting places and communal play, MUDs allow for changes in the parameters of the game itself — something that can’t be done nearly as easily or efficiently with a game from a box,
where changes come in the form of add-ons and patches.

“I could add 300 rooms right now,” says Dodd — or, in the blink of an eye, she could create a velvet, butterfly-covered knapsack should a player, for some reason, request it. Boxed games may be graphically intense or beautiful, but MUDs are simply more dynamic.

In the end, that may well be what brings success to the Xena game. After all, these are fans who live for the fantasy Xenaverse and take on alternate existences as warriors and priestesses. For them, the game may be more than the difference between the movie and the book; it may well be the difference between watching the world on TV and actually living it.

It’s a job that anyone could love — as long as you’re comfortable with the you-are-there concept. In the past year, game reviewers piloted a helicopter in Florida, rode a tank in California and took a river-rafting trip in Georgia. And they’ve taken in a World Series game, the Indy 500 and even hit baseballs in 3Com Park.

As the number of games increases, publishers are looking for more outrageous ways to catch reviewers’ attention. The game business is growing into a mature entertainment sector, not unlike the movie or music biz, where junkets are common. But rather than being flown to meet movie stars in L.A., game critics find themselves thrust into an all-too-real first-person adventure.

Last summer, I was shipped out to Fort Hunter Liggett in Northern California for faux boot camp, taking turns with other editors riding an M-1 tank, shooting an M-60 machine gun on a firing range and pulling a lanyard on a 155 mm howitzer, sending a high-explosive charge miles away. Later, we would play an early version of “Armored Fist 2,” a tank simulation game, to get the ultimate side-by-side comparison.

But do these stunts work, or can they backfire? For me, riding the tank was a show-stopping, jaw-dropping experience. The game was, uh, a bit of a letdown. But the point was to get our attention, and focus it on NovaLogic (the company pulling off the stunt) and its tank sim game.

After taking lumps from reviewers who dinged their games for being too arcadelike and not realistic, NovaLogic wanted a change of image. In March 1997, it flew 10 editors to West Palm Beach, Fla., to stay at the plush Breakers Hotel. To promote its upcoming Comanche flight sim, NovaLogic let the editors actually take the controls and fly a real Bell helicopter. Later, reviewers saw a prototype of an actual Comanche attack copter.

“They blew the wad in a big way, and let us fly the damn helicopter,” said Desmond Crisis, a reporter for CNET’s “The Web” TV show, who attended the promotion. “It was not a cheap experience, but it captured our attention for the weekend. Hey, I had the opportunity to put PR people in the back seat and make them puke. Plus, I buzzed Jimmy Buffett’s place in a Bell helicopter.”

Crisis, a diminutive spark plug of a guy, certainly enjoyed the trip, but doesn’t think junkets really make or break a game. “If the game blows, we’ll say it blows, no matter how good the lobster dinner is,” he said. The “Comanche” promo event cost NovaLogic about $50,000, and the game got great reviews, according to one promotions person who worked on it.

“Armored Fist 2″ — the game that hatched the boot camp — fared less well, reportedly selling only 25,000 units. But often, these unusual promos aren’t intended as hit-making deals, but rather to garner attention for a company in a market overcrowded with players.

Smith, the executive editor at PC Games in San Mateo, Calif., has been on his share of promotional junkets and has pounded beers with the best of them at industry parties. Smith shrugs off charges that magazines lose credibility by taking junkets.

“That’s bollocks,” he said, in his British accent, bristling. “They buy my time, not my opinion. It’s basically a way to get people’s time, to stick products under our noses and schmooze. When they fly you somewhere, you have no choice but to look at what they’ve got. If they come to our offices, we can always cut out early from a demo.”

Smith was flown to Cleveland last year by Accolade to see a World Series game, as a promotion for its “Hardball 6″ baseball game. But the crème de la crème of his junket experiences, he says, was the trip to Versailles. Though the trip seems lavish on the surface, Smith reasons that the company would have spent more by taking a promo road trip through the U.S. with an entourage of PR people and developers.

Shortly after taking the boot camp trip, I was given a chance to ride in a stunt plane during San Francisco’s Fleet Week air show. Electronic Arts and its Jane’s simulator subsidiary had hired a stunt pilot to take reviewers up for loop-to-loops, barrel rolls, the whole stomach-turning thing.

Though the stunts are getting more outrageous, gamemakers try to be sensitive to criticism from consumers or game designers who might see junkets as a waste of money.

“We try to make it fun [for press people], but you want to keep it on a certain level, and not appear inappropriate,” said Noreen Dante, promotions manager at Electronic Arts. “You don’t ever want it to come back that a bias on a game was due to the activity instead of the actual game itself. Consumers appreciate that. They’re very savvy these days.”

Angela Edwards, formerly Sega’s PR manager, is now director of PR at MicroProse, a PC game publisher. She thinks things have calmed down a bit in game promotions recently, with greater accountability to the bottom line. But with a more competitive industry, companies still have to do eye-catching promotions to get noticed.

“There are a lot more players [in the industry] now,” she said. “So the pie is divvied up into smaller pieces. Everyone’s done the big party and spent big money, but now they say, ‘What am I getting out of this?’ There’s a lot of competition, so you have to really target your marketing money.”

Edwards helped Sega put on one of the most storied parties in the history of E3, the gaming industry’s biggest annual convention: a House of Blues bash in Los Angeles in 1996. People were scalping invites on Sunset Boulevard, Brian Setzer played and Sega spent a minimum of a “few hundred thousand dollars” for everything, according to Edwards.

She sees the extravagant events still serving a purpose for companies that can afford them, like Sony and Eidos, building a hip image among the younger convention-goers. At last year’s E3 in Atlanta, while the usual big parties drew well, a MicroProse river-rafting event made a lasting impression.

James Glave, former editor at GameSpot, remembers the event fondly. A few dozen editors were taken by bus to the Chattahoochee River near Atlanta. They were instructed to leave valuables behind and sent outside, where they found stacks of super-soaker water guns. Beer was served; a big water fight ensued. Everyone piled into rafts and the battle took to the river, with some filling guns with murky river water or beer, according to Glave.

Then, they pulled around a bend and came upon a restaurant. They changed into dry clothes and received hot towels with MicroProse logos; waiters arrived with silver platters of hors d’oeuvres. An amazing array of food — Southern-style ribs, risotto, oysters — awaited guests under a big tent on the lawn. Night fell, and a mist formed on the river. Then, almost on cue, fireflies came out, dancing in the night.

“The party put everything else to shame,” Glave said. “Trent Ward, who’s been covering the industry for 10 years, said it was the ultimate party for him.”

Nobody who recalled the party mentioned a particular game, but everyone called it the “MicroProse party.” It was an experience — and a company — they won’t soon forget.

Yes, I was a sorry case, but I was hardly alone. My plight had meaning. The term “competitive solitaire” may reek of oxymoronic overkill, but the phrase still works as a potent metaphor for cyberspatial life. We are all, in a sense, playing solitaire when we sit down at our keyboards and log on to the Net. But once connected we tend to find communities we can call our own. And facilitating the creation of such communities is what the Net does best. Since I discovered NetCELL, my solitaire won-loss record has gained a social context. No longer do I face my addiction alone — I am part of a Net-based community of solitaire players.

NetCELL is a networked version of Freecell, an easy-to-win solitaire game with an ancient online history. Indeed, the very first online community — the PLATO system at the University of Illinois — enjoyed a “rich Freecell environment,” according to NetCELL creator Denny Cronin. PLATO users could access computer-generated stats, compete in online tournaments and sample exotic varieties of the basic Freecell game.

Last April, Cronin, a programmer in Champaign, Ill., set out to reproduce that environment, using the Java programming language to adapt Freecell for the Web. He succeeded. Today, the NetCELL server launches some 3,000 games a day and keeps track of every player’s win streaks, winning percentage, average-time-per-game and total hours played. There’s even a little newsgroup for desultory discussion of important NetCELL issues, and Cronin is planning to set up a chat room annex.

“There are a lot of crazed bug-eyed NetCELL freaks out there,” says Cronin, lovingly, while noting with bemused admiration that one Danish NetCELL player totaled a whopping 600 hours of NetCELL playing time over the past year. “The competitive aspect adds some interest.”

“There seems to be this constant struggle of ‘quit while I’m still winning’ or ‘go ahead and play just one or two more games, because then I’ll be in 50th place instead of 52nd,’” says NetCELL regular Annette Hammerberg. “So you go ahead and play and make some really stupid mistake, and boom, you have to play 20+ more games just to make it back on the stats board again. VERY frustrating … but you do it again anyways. Guess that’s why I started playing under the name of I_Need_Netcell_Anon.”

Yep, it’s not all fun and games when you’re locked in a NetCELL dogfight. As Lynne Green, another regular, notes, “the game can certainly have a mind-numbing effect. After 20 to 23 games I have a tendency to get NetCELL brain and couldn’t win even the easiest game.”

NetCELL brain isn’t the worst of it. There are some disturbing privacy implications to the reality of online solitaire surveillance. No serious NetCELL player can be comfortable with the thought of his or her employer or spouse discovering exactly how many hours he or she is spending swapping around digital jacks and queens.

And even that dire eventuality pales before the threat NetCELL poses to frail human willpower. I’m an old hand at addictive behavior: I’ve gone to the mat with the blocks of Tetris, the fickle populace of SimCity 2000, the robot drones of Descent. But whenever I found myself too enslaved, I’d just delete the damn things from my hard drive.

But I can’t delete the Web. I can’t stuff my ears full of wax and slip past the solitaire cyber-sirens. NetCELL will always be out there. Aside from canceling my Web access — and for me that would be like unto death — there is no escape.

Solitaire has been around exactly as long as playing cards themselves and will follow humans wherever they go, whether it be the Net or the frozen tundra. There are some 350 varieties of solitaire, and several card historians consider it to be the most widely played of all card games. There have even been pre-digital outbreaks of competitive solitaire. Klondike, the most popular version of the game, received its name during the Alaskan gold rush of the 1890s, when miners with nothing better to do during the long winter months — no TV, no Net access! — honed their solitaire skills by the light of kerosene lamps. Occasionally, the miners would mosey down to a Dawson City saloon and bet on solitaire games in progress.

But competitive solitaire could only really come into its own in the online era, a fact I soon realized when I found myself checking the NetCELL server at odd times of day or night to see if my dread nemesis Tsai might be riding a new NetCELL streak. Cyberspace evangelists rave about the revolutionary implications of ever-increasing interconnectivity for human society. There’s been talk of meta-consciousness and instant democracy, of the complete reshaping of market capitalism and the breakdown of national sovereignty. Personally, I’ve always discounted such overwrought blather.

But that was before I discovered NetCELL, and saw how isolation could be made collegial. Deal me another hand, partner. With NetCELL, and the Net, even when we are alone, we will be together.