Replayability means, simply, that players don’t tire of the game: After finishing it once, they still want to go back and play again and again. Zelda has so many secrets that once you finish it, you’ll be sure to want to go back not only for the sheer pleasure of it, but also to see what you missed the first time around. Balance is the delicate art of creating challenge in game play without making it so difficult that it’s frustrating — something that Zelda excels in. There are some tricky puzzles, but you never feel cheated when you solve them, never feel the solution was implausible. Miyamoto is a master of both replayability and balance — an extraordinary feat, and one that has brought him fame in Japan and among American gamers.

Though Miyamoto himself may not be well known in the United States outside gaming circles, his characters are. And given how famous they are — Mario is a household name, Donkey Kong’s not far behind — it’s surprising to hear Miyamoto say that the characters are actually of secondary importance in creating a game.

“We first set up the rules,” Miyamoto explains, “and then we make the best character to appear on the game system. And then finally we think about the whole game story which will be best suited to the game system and the game character,” he says through his translator.

For example, he says, “In the case of a Mario game, you can see a tortoise character. I didn’t intend to make a tortoise character from the beginning, but I thought it would be nice if there was one enemy character which would be in trouble once flipped.” From that came the speckled turtle who, once you jump on it, is flipped upside down and can’t move for a short period of time (then it rights itself and becomes a threat once more).

In the gaming industry, Miyamoto is better known for his innovations than for his characters — and with good reason. He has been responsible for some of the most critical developments and changes in video-game design over the years.

“Before Donkey Kong,” which debuted in 1981, explains Miyamoto, “those who were making the video games were the programmers and engineers, not the character designers and other artists.” Miyamoto himself was trained in industrial design, not engineering. When he was put in charge of his first game (“because no one else was available,” he adds self-deprecatingly), he couldn’t program. What he could do was conceptualize and design the game, then pass his ideas on to programmers to actually build it. And so the concept of a game artist, or game designer, was born — of necessity.

“I was not an engineer. I was not a programmer. All I was doing was making the designs, and I asked the programmer to cooperate with me to make the game. Probably I was the first, or I was one of the first, game designers to have the discretion to make the game as a whole. So in those days I sometimes joked that I was one of the five greatest game designers in the world — simply because there were no other game designers in the world.”

It’s a funny thought, because in truth Miyamoto is one of the best game designers in the world. Zelda excels on every level, music and sound among them. Miyamoto is ultimately responsible for just how good that music is — and in many ways, for how much video-game music has improved over the years.

“The music — or sounds — in [the old] days was just terrible. Because the pure engineers and programmers — who had no knowledge at all of music composition — had to make music and sounds for the games. They were just terrible, incredible, unthinkable in those days,” he says — and anyone familiar with Pong can attest to that. “I think I was one of the first to ask music composers to master this basic programming of the music and sound,” he says with a modest glance away.

While Miyamoto may joke about being the world’s best game designer, among his peers his skill is no laughing matter. Nor is his influence.

“Miyamoto is probably perceived as one of (if not THE) best game designers,” says Benoit Arribart, the project manager for Mission: Impossible, a popular Nintendo 64 game from the French company Infogrames. “The legend says that the release of the Nintendo 64 was delayed until [Miyamoto] was fully satisfied with [Super] Mario 64 [one of the launch titles for the Nintendo 64], and that some of the features of the Nintendo 64 were added because he wanted them in Mario 64.”

Miyamoto is certainly a powerful man at Nintendo. At a conference at Nintendo’s headquarters earlier this year, Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln was fielding questions from unhappy journalists — all of whom wanted to know why the release of The Legend of Zelda, which had been delayed numerous times, was being postponed again. Lincoln’s response was clear: Mr. Miyamoto is not yet satisfied with it, and who are we to question his judgment?

It’s difficult to overestimate Miyamoto’s influence in the industry. Says Arribart, “Even if Mission: Impossible is really different from Mario 64, Mario really influenced us. It somewhat set up a standard for 3-D third-person games … The camera, and the main character handling, in Mission: Impossible were really inspired by Mario 64. The outdoor camera mode was internally called the ‘Mario mode’ by the Mission: Impossible development team.”

And his influence is felt even in the PC games world, where John Romero (Quake, Doom) is reputed to be a big fan and legendary PC game designer Peter Molyneux (Populous, Dungeon Keeper) glows with admiration: “He is without doubt the greatest games designer in the world,” Molyneux says of Miyamoto. “No one else comes close.”

But mention this to Miyamoto and he’ll smile and nod, taking it all in with good grace. As he smiles, his eyes will wander over to the TV screen in the corner where a Team Nintendo member is playing Zelda. It’s as if, charming though he may be, the interview is distracting him from what’s really important.

I went home to Texas over the Fourth of July. A bunch of my girlfriends here in San Francisco had expressed an interest in the great mythology of Texas and in my home, so we packed up and went for a weekend. We barbecued, went country dancing, planned water-skiing excursions and lounged by the pool. While I was there, entertaining and eating and shooting off fireworks, I also helped my mother clear off my father’s hard drive.

I sat with my mother that weekend and opened all his files. We’d tried to do it a couple of times before and just hadn’t made it through. But this time we were giving the aging machine to his favorite charity, and so anything that wasn’t saved would disappear forever. This time we had to finish the job. So we opened each file, read it, chose which could be discarded and tried to figure out what to do with the rest.

Searching through his documents evoked dozens of visceral memories. When I lived in Ireland, I had a lot of trouble with my friend Kevin. Kev and I had been lovers and were trying to learn to become friends. Dating had been intense, and being friends was even more so — when we fought, the air around us reverberated with the power of Kevin’s anger.

My father had a temper, too. All his life he fought the blind rage gripping the center of him. He was pure, my father, pure in his love, in his way of seeing life — either good or bad — and pure in his rage when it consumed him. Like Kevin.

So when one particularly bad fight caught us off guard, I wrote to my father. I wanted to know how to help Kevin. I wanted to know how to handle him, how to get through this to the other side where I could love Kevin once and for all, love him completely and live with his rage. I asked my father for help.

I remember the tone of his response — it was warm, concerned, deeply sympathetic, to both Kevin and me. Dad knew exactly what was going on with Kevin, and he knew how hard it is for someone else, even a close friend, to live with that rage. The letter was compassionate, loving — I felt him holding my hands as I read it, clearly saw him sitting at our kitchen table as he tried to guide me through something he alone understood the difficulty of. It was a wonderful letter, and it drew me closer to my father. I loved it.

That letter was destroyed when the drive on my father’s computer was reformatted for my brother’s use. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have it back. But it’s gone. And now, after my weekend at home, many other things are gone. Notes to potential clients and investors, old business plans, new business plans, outlines — things that we couldn’t reasonably justify saving. Where would we put them? What would we do with them? Deleting them was like slowly cutting our fingers off, knuckle by knuckle, one at a time, but it had to be done. Things that we couldn’t bear to part with, things that simply read so much like him that to destroy them was unbearable, we saved to diskettes. A stack of a dozen full diskettes sits on the corner of my mother’s desk now. Black diskettes, carefully labeled and lonely.

I think about this now, about what will happen each time someone dies. My friends and I all communicate by e-mail. My mother and her friends do as well. I am annoyed by anyone who doesn’t have e-mail access, because it is my preferred method of communication, as it is for so many. What happens now when people die unexpectedly? What do their families do with their e-mail, their to-do lists on the hard drive, their personal notes and ideas and plans? Burning a journal would be a sacrilege, and e-mail should be no different.

I called a number of psychologists and psychiatrists in San Francisco — a town so wired that grocery store clerks discuss their modems with you when you check out. And none of them had encountered the problem. Their clients didn’t discuss issues of data left behind. What to do with old articles of clothing, yes. What to do with photos, and memories, and heartaches, yes. But not e-mail. And when I think about my mother, sitting at the long desk she used to share with my father, her face raw and ravaged by the sadness of still missing him — a look that I know will never entirely leave her — I know we can’t be the only people facing this.

And we’re not — exactly. There’s a site called AfterLife, where volunteers agree to maintain personal Web sites after people die. There’s memorials.org, where you can create a Web site to honor a loved one. But neither of those is of any help to me or to my mother. Where is the brilliant start-up company that will take old e-mails and archive them permanently, or bind them into a beautiful journal to keep for generations? A journal that would allow the children I hope to have to get to know the wonderful man who would have so enjoyed being their grandfather?

One of the things that is hardest for me about my father’s death is that I am denied so much knowledge of him. I was 21 when he died. Twenty-one is not an age when you know your parents as people; they are still your parents. I am discovering my mother, the person, every day — something that I will never have the chance to do with my father. And when I opened his files, saw his words, heard his voice so clearly, pored through notes about his marriage, about his battles with his self and soul, about his hopes and about how to strive to be a better person, I at least began to understand him in a way that I might have been granted had he lived another 20, 30 or 40 years. He was only 45, after all.

Last week I fell in love. Blindsided, hit-by-a-truck, from-the-middle-of-nowhere, madly in love. Yesterday this man e-mailed me what is surely the first of many love letters. The joy of being loved by an articulate, passionate man is extraordinary. The joy of not being alone — after locking away my heart for so long, fearful that I would love someone and he would die — is extraordinary. I read and re-read the letter, created a new mailbox to store it and pulled it up again and again throughout the day simply to thrill to it.

Should I die tomorrow, should my heart stop beating, my lungs stop working, it matters to me that that letter continue to exist.

Walking the E3 floor is a lot like dropping acid and going to an arcade: Suddenly you’re actually in the middle of a game universe where lights flash, game voices surround you and everything is four times as big as it should be. Companies with games to show go all out to draw attention to their booths, giving away T-shirts and prizes and setting up unbelievably elaborate booths. Konami — promoting what was arguably the game of the show, a 3-D shooter adventure for the Sony Playstation titled “Metal Gear Solid” — created a military embankment replete with buff men and women holding really big guns guarding the entrance and a synthesized voice warning you about the danger ahead. Some of the biggest exhibitors, Sony and Nintendo, created whole worlds inside their booths, big enough to get really lost in.

However, the vastness of the booths themselves is an indication of just how big a business games have become, how important selling hundreds of thousands of games is and how much money is at stake. This is now a $10 billion industry: hence the giant marketing push and amazing booths. But among many attendees and longtime gamers, there was a small sense of disappointment this year — or perhaps disillusionment — at the feeling of maturity on the march.

Growing up in the gaming world is not necessarily considered a good thing, and the number of suits seen — not only at the show itself, but also at the related parties and events — was cause for some consternation. Games aren’t supposed to be for grown-ups.

But gamers are becoming grown-ups. Kids who spent the ’80s with Mario and Donkey Kong are now heading into their 20s. Fifteen- to 18-year-olds are still prime targets for gaming companies, but the first generations of hard-core gamers, the ones who’ve been playing since they could push buttons, are becoming adults and entering the work force (often, of course, in the game industry in some form or another).

Even the phenomenon of “booth babes” (or “booth bimbos,” if you’re feeling more expressive) is experiencing some subtle shifts. As recently as last year, scantily clad women wandered the show floor, drawing attention to certain games by what they weren’t wearing. And while you could hardly say there were fewer half-naked women at this year’s E3, they seemed to spend more time in their booths than wandering the floor.

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One rumor had it that the IDSA (the Interactive Digital Software Association, which is responsible for the show) had regulated the traffic of the babes, limiting them to their respective booths. However, IDSA spokespeople denied any such regulation, saying simply that the association charged a fee for permission for someone to walk the floor distributing freebies, just like last year.

Not that there weren’t still women in what could be construed as degrading positions — the caged dancer gyrating while a DJ spun records, the shadow dancers at MGM’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” section and the bouncing Eidos women with white T-shirts stretched so tightly across their chests that you couldn’t miss their nipples. (As they flung T-shirts into a large crowd of men fixed before the Eidos booth, they shouted “Who has the best booth?” at the crowd — but I swear it sounded like “Who has the best boobs?” I kept waiting for the three girls to line up and have the crowd judge.)

Still, some subtle shifts have occurred in the realm of games and their tortured relationship with women. Christina Kerzner of GT Interactive, the company behind the notoriously politically incorrect “Duke Nukem” games, pointed out that the woman modeling at their racing game wore a jumpsuit, and that while the ones in the “Duke” section were costumed like Vegas show girls, “at least their breasts were real.”

Another longtime industry vet, a woman, offered the suggestion that the booth-babe syndrome had gotten more “sophisticated.” Years ago, it was simply cute, cheerleaderlike girls handing out goodies, she argued — but today it’s matured into the frank sexuality of the Eidos girls. In her view, the star of Eidos’ “Tomb Raider,” Lara Croft, took the traditional video-game vixen to new levels — she may be busty, but she’s also been featured in fashion magazines, given interviews and may yet make her film debut in a “Tomb Raider” movie. Still, even Lara (animated on a video screen) and the Eidos girls stayed in their own booth — you had to go find them.

More interesting yet, one of the greatest E3 rumors — one that played perfectly into adolescent male fantasies — was debunked for me this year. It’s long been said that at a certain party given by a certain company, the upstairs VIP room holds a den of sin featuring prostitutes for selected press members and special friends of the company. At the party, you can actually see beautiful women upstairs, languorously sipping cocktails and gazing down with inviting eyes. As it turns out, a friend with carte blanche to enter this room at will told me there was only one difference between the upstairs and downstairs rooms: When downstairs ran out of alcohol, upstairs still had plenty. As for the women, well, apparently they just know where the good drinks are. No fantasy — just plain old ordinary business reality.

Next year E3 is going back to Los Angeles, where the first two conventions were held back in the golden, olden days — three and four years ago. There’s a sense that the move might reinvigorate the show, bring back some youthful freshness and excitement.

Jason, a “beyond hard-core” gamer by his own account, e-mailed me a week or two before this year’s show opened. He’s 15, trying to start his own game magazine, and wanted advice on how to get interviews with the big guys in the industry and tickets to the parties. We corresponded for a while, planning his attack, when it suddenly struck me that his age would make it impossible for him to go to the alcohol-laden events or even get on the “You must be 18 to enter” E3 show floor.

When I pointed that out to him, he instantly replied: “I have a fake ID (even a edited birth certificate! My Dad even helped! He encouraged me! I got cool parents), not that it matters, the brochures for E3 said ‘NO ONE UNDER 18 ADMITTED!’ and I saw little kids, so THEY don’t care about that part, I guess … Can I sneak in [to the parties]? I’m good at that.”

Maybe there’s hope for E3 yet.

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 Friday in January at DigiPen — only the second week the U.S. campus has been open — and 40 would-be video game programmers are prepping presentations of ideas for new games. Claude Comair, a Lebanese man of extraordinary energy and the president of DigiPen, is explaining that the students are in the initial stages of their first project, a puzzle game. It’s a process that will be repeated each semester at DigiPen. The second semester project is a side-scrolling game (like “Super Mario Bros.”), the third a single-player strategy game, and so on.

One group has created a puzzle about a potato trying to find its way home. Rilla Jaggia, a former assistant professor of finance at the University of Massachusetts and current video game student, shows me preliminary sketches of levels — the green will be trees and forests, that X might be a bridge — and characters for players to help home.

Potatoes are a far cry from finance, but Jaggia is excited about the outline of the game. “I was searching for a career that would involve both my artistic skills as well as my love for mathematics,” she says. “I love music, I love to paint. I wanted to put them all together … so I wanted a school that would allow me to make my own interactive graphics.”

Jaggia doesn’t fit the stereotype of the gamer and, in fact, by gamer definitions, she isn’t one. She’s played adventure games like “Riven” and “Zork” and is anxious to find a few hours to begin “The Curse of Monkey Island,” but she hasn’t lived and breathed games all her life. She’s the exception.

Eric Housden and Bradford Ayres, two members of Jaggia’s group, are much more what you would expect — baggy pants hard-core gamers just beyond the grasp of adolescence. Asked if they miss having a “normal” college experience with dorms and parties and roommates, they’re very clear. “If I was into those kinds of things I wouldn’t be here,” Housden says. “And since I’m not, I don’t regret it. And I’ve always, always wanted to do this all my life, and I finally got here.”

Here, for Housden, is the Redmond campus. The original DigiPen Institute, however, began in Vancouver, B.C. When DigiPen Corporation, a computer engineering firm (the name is short for “Digital Pencil”), was approached in 1990 to create 3-D animation for a feature film, it simply couldn’t find enough talented people with the appropriate training to complete the project.

“We were, in a major way, lacking manpower,” Comair explains. “So we started getting in touch with local schools and universities and asking them whether they could send interns we could train … We were expecting maybe a few interns and we were surprised to find about 100 people interested.” DigiPen began teaching the interns and “got so much interest, we started the DigiPen educational branch and began taking on students in 1994.”

The Vancouver campus is still active, but the base of operations has moved to the new school in Redmond. DigiPen has long had a close association with Nintendo, which provides some funding, equipment and expertise. And when Nintendo offered to share its Washington campus with DigiPen, the school moved stateside. The move not only brought DigiPen
closer to one of its main benefactors, it also gave a financial boost to the school’s predominantly American student body. While DigiPen was in
Canada, U.S. students had a much harder time finding financial aid — and with tuition running at $12,000 a year, financial aid is critical.

DigiPen is expanding academically as well as physically. Plans now include implementing master’s and Ph.D. programs in the next five years, and adding an arts degree. Next year, students will be able to enroll in storytelling, game scripting and 3-D modeling classes for a B.A. in the “literature-oriented part of video game making.”

The school itself is small — only 200 enrolled — but some 20,000 applications were requested this past semester (figures aren’t available on how many were actually sent in). Transcripts are reviewed carefully, but GPAs are only the beginning of the process. All references are checked with personal phone calls, and candidates themselves are called twice. The first interview is by appointment and consists of the usual college interview questions.

The second interview takes the form of a surprise phone call. The questions are all about math, the core element of the program. “That second interview is very, very decisive,” says Comair. “We ask questions, simple questions, in mathematics that we believe a student should know without having to actually prepare or think: What is the sine of zero, what is the cosine of 1? Very simple … We do spot checks with every single candidate and we make sure that we are satisfied.”

The screening is rigorous for the simple reason that the workload is. Weekdays are 10 hours long, Saturday labs are six. And students had better show up. According to university policy, even brief student absences
need to be excused in writing, and according to the student handbook, “Only medical-related absences that are accompanied by a note from a family physician recognized by the medical association are accepted without extensive review.” No Friday afternoon ultimate Frisbee for these guys.

None of these rigors seems to faze the students. “It is extremely hard work,” says Jaggia. “It is more intensive than any school I have been to, and I’ve been in school all my life. But the payoff is far more exciting … to see it’s your game and it’s your game interacting with you.” Ayres echoes the sentiment. “Once you get into it, it’s not like work. You’re just working on making your project better.”

But it’s Housden, a lifelong gamer who’s dreamed of making video games as long as he can remember, who puts it best: “I love it. Of course it’s fun. I’m having the time of my life.”