The result is below, roughly divided into three categories: a look back at the significant trends (or lack thereof) in gaming this past year, an idiosyncratic handful of mini-reviews of notable games, and a sobering look at some of the burgeoning problems in the world of computer gaming.

The trends

I think we're firmly in the age of the blockbuster now, and I don't know how I feel about that. Most of the biggest games of the year were "events" that cost a crazy amount of money to develop and took many, many years to polish and get right. That's a bit of a scary trend, because I don't see where it stops --projects will get bigger, teams will grow, tech will continue to become more important, and all the rising costs will inevitably lead to fewer risks in design. I'm a sucker for unusual and innovative games, so this worries me.

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"Battlefield Vietnam," the new multiplayer tactical shooter from Electronic Arts (and a spinoff of the mammothly popular "Battlefield 1942," re-creates a dozen-plus decisive battles from the Southeast Asian conflict, from pitched, close-quarter combat in Hue, to fierce infantry skirmishes beneath the chopper- and fighter-infested skies of Khe San. Other shooters set in Nam will soon arrive, and maybe this is, as some have suggested, a sign that the game industry has matured, now that it is finally willing to depict divisive historical topics.

But none of the other Nam games will come with the promotion or the built-in audience of E.A.'s franchise title. So none of them will have any chance at all of potentially influencing an American presidential election.

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On Dec. 10, 2003, pro-democracy, anti-terrorist demonstrators peacefully flooded the streets of Baghdad. A coalition of Iraqis of many political parties and religious affiliations, tribes and ethnicities, young and old (including many students), demanded an end to attacks on civilians. They also demanded that Arab media stop depicting the Baathist and foreign jihadi culprits as members of some kind of just "resistance." Even the Al Jazeera network estimated them at over 10,000 strong.

I know all this, not from reading any significant coverage of the event by the mainstream Western press (There was little to none). Rather I know it because an Iraqi who's been a computer user since childhood went out and reported on it himself. Zeyad's entry was linked to throughout the Web. But the so-called "paper of record," the New York Times, gave the event scarce coverage, and that enraged many leading lights of the blogosphere, especially those on the conservative or liberal hawkish end of the spectrum.

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"It was really strange," Zeyad tells me now by e-mail. "But it was better than having to listen to the bombings." So he played it with the volume blasting. In his hands, Bandicoot died and was reborn, then died again. Meanwhile, outside, airstrikes kept ripping the sky. And so, as he recently wrote of "Crash Bandicoot" on his blog Healing Iraq, "I experience dèjá vu whenever I play it now."

While millions of gamers have their own associations with the game, Zeyad is surely among the first to couple "Crash" to a massive military campaign. But he's likely not the only one -- during the invasion of Iraq, reporters observed American soldiers hunched in the steel wombs of Bradleys and M1s, engrossed in their own portable game consoles, as they rumbled by night toward Zeyad's hometown.

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Julia Roberts: "Halo"

-- Entertainment Weekly, "100 Greatest Videogames," May 9 issue

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"We received your interview request for Julia Roberts. Unfortunately, she is not available. Thank you."

-- Julia Roberts' publicist

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Julia Roberts' weapon of choice is the M19 SSM rocket launcher. Not the zippiest firearm in the toolkit, sure, and does diddly in close-up melee action. But it's got a double-barrel rocket payload, and pound for pound, it punches like a mofo. Julia Roberts' favorite trick during multiplayer capture-the-flag matches is to camp near the team banner from a high vantage point and wait until the other side's closing in. And at the last possible second, when they're right about to nab it, pop out in the open with that hand cannon and...

"Dance, ya little bitches, dance!" Julia Roberts hoots, as the blast impact flings three opponent squaddies airborne. Her whole wiry body explodes off the Eames couch in the Emperor's Suite at the Peninsula Hotel, and she jabs her middle finger at the 64-inch plasma flatscreen, as their crispy corpses hit the ground like rag dolls.

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That is not, of course, the story David Kushner is trying to tell us in "Masters of Doom," his biography of John Carmack and John Romero, founders of the game studio id Software, and co-creators of its renowned shoot-em-up games, "Doom" and "Quake." His through-line is pretty much the archetypal, digital age morality tale: one more history of two dropouts who turned their obsession with computers into software that netted them millions, only to let their outsized personality conflicts tear up their partnership and crater their dreams -- until the smoke finally cleared, and they were able to gain something like wisdom.

When it sticks to that arc, "Masters" is excellent, ripe with vivid, you-are-there details tracking the rise of id Software, and the games that fueled its ascent. It begins in a flood-prone lake house in Shreveport, La., where Carmack and Romero start their company with PCs "borrowed" from their day job employer. From there, Kushner takes us with them to a shitty, crime-ridden neighborhood in Madison, Wis., where they create Wolfenstein 3-D, their first substantial hit, and then over to Mesquite, Texas, where id relocates after the runaway success of their early shareware games.

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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the new video game for the PlayStation 2 from British studio Rockstar Games, is set in a vividly rendered South Florida metropolis in 1986 -- it's basically Michael Mann's Miami -- and somehow, the time and place make all the felonious mayhem seem much less shocking than was true for the game's predecessor. (Last year's Grand Theft Auto 3 was set, more or less, in present-day New York.)

You're still playing a freelance thug for the criminal underworld, jacking cars, executing drive-bys, plowing over pedestrians, and so on. But none of this feels so horrible when it's happening in the black heart of the Reagan '80s, and the clothes are just so, so ugly. Vice City practically eggs you on to play like a murderous Mister Blackwell, barreling down bystanders on a bad fashion jihad. ("You call that a necktie?" WHACK! "Suspenders are for farmers, sweetheart, not arbitrageurs!" SQUISH! "So many zippers, so little time." THWUMP!)

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The game has become so popular with U.S. troops and Pentagon brass, says Lt. Colonel Wardynski, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis and the man who initially conceived it, that there's even talk of shipping computers to Afghanistan, so soldiers can play it from there.

"I had high hopes that it would be something pretty hot," says Capt. Jason Amerine, an Army officer who recently served in Afghanistan. A longtime gamer who counts Command & Conquer and Rainbow Six among his favorites, Amerine was not disappointed. America's Army was so realistic that for the first time, he says, "I was actually looking at it more as a soldier than even a gamer -- but it happened to be good in both ways."

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That's the dilemma facing dozens of companies and hundreds of developers this year, as they gamble tens of millions of dollars in the volatile realm of online games.

To be more precise, they're wagering on the growth of MMORPGs and MMOGs -- the unwieldy acronyms for "massively multiplayer online role-playing game." It's a genre with enormous commercial potential, as demonstrated by the success of fantasy titles like Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot, each with paying subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. (Everquest is the ranking colossus, with around 400,000 players.)

Many industry analysts anticipate that those numbers will grow in the coming years, and grow mightily. "I expect there will be 2 to 3 million more people in the U.S. that come on board in the next two years," says David Cole, president of the multimedia research firm DFC Intelligence. "Humans are a social species," says game designer Brad McQuaid, formerly the prime creative force behind Everquest, "which is what makes me believe MMOGs will rival the movie industry in the next five to 10 years."

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-- U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr.

Saving democracy sometimes means having to wade toward the shore, while fascists unload hell on you from the beachhead. Which means you usually get killed. But you make that run, again and again, because the goal is worth all those lives you lose in the churning sea.

I could have learned this truth about D-Day from a film like "Saving Private Ryan" or a book like "Citizen Soldier." But I'm now grasping it just as vividly from "Medal of Honor: Allied Assault," a computer game.

While the game's Omaha Beach level is derived from the opening of "Ryan," it's a fully interactive re-creation. The object here is to get across the Normandy beach, or die. You die a lot. You're forced to repeat the process -- strafed every step of the way, men screaming all around you -- over and over (and over) again, until you're finally able to reach the bunkers. It's a common conceit in games: play, die, reload, and ride the karmic wheel of kick-ass, until you get it right. But what "Allied Assault's" developers have done is use this feature to express an explicit point about World War II, and what it took to win it.

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That announcement was made, if you listened closely enough, at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Jose, when Valve Software founder Gabe Newell unveiled Steam, a broadband distribution network that would offer instant updates to recent Valve games and new titles from Valve and other companies. Listed among the new titles was "Day of Defeat," a multiplayer add-on to Valve's best-selling first-person shooter (FPS), "Half-Life."

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Seattle during the WTO? Rage against the G8 in Genoa?

Your Playstation 2, actually, in State of Emergency, a new urban mayhem-fight title developed by Scotland's Rockstar Games and VIS Entertainment.

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"America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?" the Rev. Amos Brown, a left-wing preacher and former San Francisco supervisor, brayed from the podium. "In Central America, in Africa where bombs are still blasting ... in the global warming conference ... at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn't show up?"

To my shame, I was part of the ovation that followed. Even worse, as it turned out, Brown's tirade deeply offended one of the service's honored guests: Paul Holm, the former partner of Mark Bingham, one of the heroic resisters aboard Flight 93.

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If it's momentarily difficult to separate Lord British, the computer game character who's been around pretty much since the medium existed, from Richard Garriott, the Austin-based game designer who created him, that's because Garriott himself has helped to blur the distinction. Lord British, typically residing on his throne in a jewel-encrusted castle, has been a ubiquitous presence throughout Garriott's line of Ultima fantasy role-playing games, as well as in Ultima Online, the groundbreaking, massively multiplayer role-playing game (or MMRPG) that still enjoys an active membership in the hundreds of thousands.

Lord British was a pseudonym Garriott chose for his own role-playing persona, way back in high school Dungeons & Dragons sessions (shortly before he began creating computer games in his parents' garage), as a nod to his English birth. The pseudonym became a persona he was even willing to play in real life, as his Ultima games grew in popularity.

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"WHOOO! Give it up for me!" What follows was almost too horrific to contemplate. (Though that didn't keep the "Dance Monkeyboy" video clip from becoming last summer's viral hit.) Microsoft CEO Ballmer barrels onstage to Gloria Estefan, cantering and screeching while the Microsoft employees gathered beneath him applaud. "WHO SAID SIT DOWN?" he roars, when their dutiful enthusiasm begins to flag.

At the time, some analysts argued (and I'd agree) that this wasn't some bizarre unleashing of Ballmer's personal demons but a rare view straight into Microsoft's soul. Soaked armpits and all, Monkeyboy was emblematic of the company's invincibility and sheer force of will.

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This is the aptly titled Max Payne, a new third-person shooter from Finnish studio Remedy and U.S. publisher GodGames. The story of one wronged cop's revenge on the New York underworld, it's been a hit since the moment it went on sale in early August. The PC game already has a movie adaptation in development, and near-universal acclaim from gamers.

In the last few years of its development cycle (it was in production as far back as 1996), it's sort of been the evil twin to "Black & White," Peter Molyneux's long-promoted, oft-delayed game, which promised all kinds of innovation that would totally reinvent the standard of future games.

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Welcome to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the annual showcase for the latest in computer and video gaming. And if you're wondering what a stripper's sticky business on a steel pole has to do with video games, well, then you haven't been paying attention to just how big -- and sleazy -- a boy-toy party the computer gaming industry has become.

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For many gamers, that realization may come as a relief. The game arrives after more than three years of development and missed publication dates. At the Game Developers Conference in March, where Molyneux was scheduled to give a talk but unexpectedly canceled just the day before, the prospect of Black & White's imminent arrival was on everyone's mind.

Would Black & White really be the summation of all the acclaimed games Molyneux had designed before, an impossibly ambitious melding of the real-time strategy "god game" genre (which he invented), insanely complex artificial intelligence (AI) and a wreath of unproven technical innovations? If Peter Molyneux is the Stanley Kubrick of computer game design, then, after all the delays, it started to seem like Black & White might not, after all, be the "2001" we were hoping for, but rather would finally stagger to the shelves looking more like a vaporware version of "Eyes Wide Shut."

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If Prop. L fails, I can already see myself joining a high-tech diaspora from this city, displaced with my colleagues to cities where the new economy is just as vital, but where the rent is cheaper and the quality of life more comfortable. Some of these places may even have a worthwhile live music and arts scene. (I seem to remember moving to San Francisco for those very things, when those still existed -- but that seems like a long time ago.)

Meanwhile, developer lobbyists and city officials (with Mayor Willie Brown at the vanguard) have marshaled over two million dollars to defeat Proposition L next week.

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