Thirty years later, Miyamoto defined video games during a period of remarkable creativity. He gave games their first story in "Donkey Kong": Ape kidnaps lady, climbs a building, mustachioed fella rushes to save her. It's a classic boy-rescues-girl plot, but before "Kong," games only had beginnings and endings in the sense that a challenge was completed or not. "Kong" had a story arc -- and gave birth to games' most enduring icon, Mario.

But it was that cave that inspired Miyamoto's definitive work, "The Legend of Zelda." The game celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, and no doubt it is under more than one Christmas tree today. Someone in your house might be playing right now. It's become one of the most enduring and popular games of all time; while it wasn't the first to set players loose in a world without direction, "Zelda" was the first to make adventure games easy to understand.

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“Launch” is a bit of a misnomer, as the game already has 16 million registered users in its beta form. The day before the announced launch, Mojang, the small Swedish company that created "Minecraft," quietly released its new smartphone app -- and within 24 hours it became the No. 1 selling app in the U.S. With an Xbox version of the game coming this spring, another 30 million Xbox Live subscribers will be jumping into the "Minecraft" Nether. The Minecraft Generation has officially begun.

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That was the cultural belief the Supreme Court reinforced on Monday when it rejected an attempt to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. Despite the frequent rhetorical link made by politicians and activists between sex and violence in the media, when it comes to First Amendment exemptions, sex stands entirely on its own. The majority ruling states clearly that federal obscenity law applies only to "depictions of 'sexual conduct'" and not to scenes that are "shocking" for other reasons, like extreme violence. The Court ruled in the 1968 case of Ginsberg v. New York that states could ban the sale of sexual material to children, even if the content is not considered "obscene" for adults.

This latest ruling reveals a remarkable double standard -- one that dissenting justice Stephen Breyer calls out in his written remarks. He asks:

[W]hat sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?

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On a 7-2 vote, the high court upheld a federal appeals court decision to throw out the state's ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Sacramento had ruled that the law violated minors' rights under the First Amendment, and the high court agreed.

"No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm," said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion. "But that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

The California law would have prohibited the sale or rental of violent games to anyone under 18. Retailers who violated the act would have been fined up to $1,000 for each infraction.

More than 46 million American households have at least one video-game system, with the industry bringing in at least $18 billion in 2010.

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"You know that new game that I'm playing?"

I said yes, even though my knowledge of the gaming world is vague and inexact, picked up from occasional glimpses over shoulders and back-seat conversations between my two sons.

"Well, I'm currently ranked No. 1."

"No 1? In your league or whatever?"

"Not exactly."

"In the country?"

"No," he said, pausing for effect. "In the world."

I didn't know whether to be proud or appalled. I could only imagine how many hours a week he must be committing to this game, and even though his grades were fine -- even better than fine -- isn't college a time to grow intellectually and socially, rather than to be squirreled away monastically, staring obsessively into a glowing screen?

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"Soul Calibur" is a fighting game, like "Street Fighter" and "Mortal Kombat," but I always found it more appealing than either of those. Its bright color palette and varied character design are immediately grabbing, making fights interesting to watch, even for non-gamers. It also easily translates that appeal to game play. Unlike most other fighting games, "Soul Calibur" doesn't rely on "special moves," wrist-twisting button combinations that give you a major advantage when used correctly. Instead, it has a variety of different actions that make success depend on effective pattern development and recognition. As a result, newcomers can play and have fun alongside experts. Anyone could play, and play we did.

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"Angry Birds isn't a video game," I replied. "You only play it on your phone or iPad."

On a more fundamental level, though, I don't believe that one "likes" or "dislikes" Angry Birds. It's more like the drug Substance D in Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly": you've either tried it, or you haven't. If you've played Angry Birds once, chances are you own the game and your friends have to hide your phone from you so that you'll make eye contact with them during conversation. Perhaps you even wrote a fan fiction about the iOS game. If you haven't played it, you don't understand what's so fun about throwing birds at pigs. So let's be clear: It's not fun playing Angry Birds. You just have to.

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Yet despite its exponential growth in popularity, many in the artistic community continue to walk over the gaming industry like the Mario Brothers over so many mushrooms. While comic books and children’s toy lines have been immortalized on the silver screen, video game adaptations continue to fall flat (for examples, see: "Evil, Resident 1-4"). Will games ever be able to completely shed their macho-nerd stigma? And as their narratives grow increasingly complex, what kind of claim will they stake on our popular culture?

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Filmmaker Joe Nicolosi pondered that very question with a short film he produced for South by Southwest, which began last week and wraps up tomorrow. In it, Super Mario -- now actually just a plumber -- is plagued with romantic abandonment and substance abuse issues. As brother Luigi puts it: "You're a plumber, Mario. You need to stop doing so many mushrooms!"

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Schedule:

9 a.m.: "Crowdsourcing Interactive Strategic Content Design and the Ubiquitous User Experience" (lecture) -- Learn this year's hottest empty buzzwords to use in presentations to possible investors of your start-up from the leading self-proclaimed experts in the industry, none of whom you've ever heard of.

10:30 a.m.: "Malcolm Gladwell: Genius or over-rated hack who has no idea what he's talking about?" (panel) – Several professors and more experts you've never heard of will tell you exactly why it's not cool to like "The Tipping Point" anymore.

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It tracks your gaze and figures out where you're looking on the screen. That means, among other things, that you can play a game where you burn up incoming asteroids with a laser that hits where you look.

In another demonstration this week, the computer scrolled a text on the screen in response to eye movements, sensing when the reader reached the end of the visible text.

In the future, a laptop like this could make the mouse cursor appear where you're looking, or make a game character maintain eye contact with you, according to Tobii Technology Inc., the Swedish firm that's behind the tracking technology.

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In an attention-getting new campaign for EA's soon-to-be-released action horror sequel,  you can get a little taste of the visuals of the game itself, but the real salesmanship comes in the form of the horrified faces of a succession of middle-aged women. The promise? "Your mom is gonna hate it." Freaking out the 'rents -- it's been the driving force of so many decisions in your life already, so why not this?

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"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.

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Some of the posts are vicious:

Would you hit a Handy Cap Child/ Adult? This is a very interesting question….There are mental retarded children. They're possessing teachers that are typing for money. This will never stop….The drug addicts need to be weeded out to be more intelligent. The Principle of this is that them c— educators need to stop being pigs. (posted on April 23, 2010)

Some are graphically violent:

I bet your hungry....Because i know how to cut a body open and eat you for more then a week. ;-) (posted at 12:03 a.m. on May 20, 2010)

A number of related posts showed Loughner's frustration with finding a job and also his psychological meanderings toward a different path:

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At last year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 3-D got its first big push into the home entertainment market, but it looked more like a gimmick than anything most people would care about in the near term. This year, the push is on with renewed strength, with a dizzying variety of new hardware and content ideas. The industry has more than a few hurdles ahead. The highest hurdle will be rational customer resistance to the you-must-upgrade mantra. But there's no question in my own mind that 3-D is going to have a central role in our homes within a few years.

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The preview shows a developer moving his hand this way and that, which causes a disembodied hand to feel up a virtual girl in the game. As some bloggers have suggested, it's like watching Thing from "The Addams Family" get busy -- which is rather unsettling (although, hand and amputee fetishists might disagree). This is a beta release and the preview is limited to "fondling-only mode," according to Nerve, so you can look forward to full-body interaction. Teledildonics are also likely to be introduced so that users aren't just humping air.

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What was he imagining about that fierce, reticulated monster? Did he picture himself doing battle, another armored warrior? Was he contemplating the way the parts fit together?

I have no clue. But when my 8-year-old son creates his very own inner world, a place of solace and inspiration, I know he's developing a crucial life skill. As a writer, I believe this to my bones. I don't know any other way to be.



Yet here's where I question my own biases. My son is also at an age when he parrots the teenagers he knows or sees in exaggerated form in cartoons. He wants an iPhone and an iPod. He wants a GameBoy. He wants to immerse himself in computer games.



All these high-tech toys would put him in his own world, too, a world in which it's easy to avoid the scrutiny of parents. But is this so different from the imaginary worlds inspired by books and daydreaming? Those take you out of adult range, too.



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