Marry her? Going to marry her? Impossible! You mean a part of her: he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but trigamy: the neighborhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her!–it is monstrous. You might people a colony with her, or give an assembly with her, or perhaps take your morning’s walk round her,–always provided there were frequent resting-places, and you were in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way, and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her. In short, you might do anything with her but marry her.

And this, I’ve realised, is how I’ve come to feel about reviewing games. Review a game? You mean a part of it, surely. No-one could review a game all herself. There is just so much going on there, so many thousands of interesting design choices to talk about, so many experiences to share. I’m simply not equal to the task of reviewing a whole game anymore, nor willing to keep deleting the dozens of interesting little points in order to make way for the big, sweeping statements. So instead I’m taking little walks around them, with frequent resting places. Five minutes at a time. The second of the columns was about Minecraft – I’m hoping to reply to some of the very astute comments it generated here later. Next month I suspect I might be finding even five minutes of play too daunting, and talk about some particularly juicy menu screens. I think Rev’d Smith would approve.

To apologise for that, and to make sense of my current obsession with minutes, do please take custody of my first ever Gamasutra column, Five Minutes with Deadline. It’s the start of a series of investigations into what five minutes of play reveal about a larger game – a chance to step back from all encompassing reviews and do some hardcore design drilling into interesting games. It’s a massive treat to get to write professionally for a properly nerdy audience, after a long spell of translating games for a wider BBC/Wired readership, and I’m looking forward to being myopically, self-indulgently fascinated by five-minute segments of all sorts of things in the coming months.

Very happy to take suggestions, too – which five minutes of which games have most fascinated you?

Why @ranarama? For shame. Obviously mostly because every decent permutation of margaret and anything-beginning-with-r have long since gone, but also because I owe Ranarama a lot and it’s easy to type and burned into the brain of a whole generation of 16 bit fans. Here’s my One More Go on it, for anyone who isn’t a veteran.

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If you’ve read your share of romance novels, it’s likely you’ll have encountered this scene: the heroine watches enraptured as the man of her dreams, the man she’s never even spoken to, takes to the stage. He settles in his chair and draws his ‘cello to him, his arms tensed and poised as he prepares to play. As a flood of music sweeps out from the stage, she stares greedily at his fingers, agile and strong, as they move against the strings. She feels herself respond to the gentleness with which he cradles the instrument, with the passionate force with which he makes it give up its music. We may find it clichéd, but we don’t find it ridiculous that someone could long to be on the receiving end of the skilled, passionate focus that a great musician shows to their instrument. Hundreds of films and thousands of books have shown us images of women in high-necked dresses swooning at the sight of a virtuoso pianist, bent over his keyboard with furious abandon.
But what if instead of a piano keyboard it was a computer keyboard? And what if, instead of Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto, he was playing Halo 3? Suddenly the romance vanishes, replaced by ridicule. Who could swoon over an anti-social geek, wasting his life pretending to be a space marine? It may surprise you to discover that across the world, a forest of hands just went up. Gamers are the new virtuosos, and both men and women are falling for their charms.

This isn’t as strange as it may at first sound. The last few years have seen an explosion of online games, most notably World of WarCraft, a virtual world which now has a population three times the size of Paris. These worlds offer a fresh face for the now-familiar process of online dating. The key advantages of online dating – that you can both massively widen your potential pool of partners, while easily filtering out undesirables – holds just as true for games, as does the liberating anonymity that online interaction can bring.

In practice, what this means is that people can fall in love from the inside out. Although there are many scare stories based on people who’ve been wildly misled as to the age, appearance and even gender of their online sweetheart, for many the experience is exactly the opposite. Online games provide an environment where attraction is formed based not on the shallow factors we rely on when sizing someone up in a pub, but on deeper revelations about their personalities, interests and attitudes.

It’s in this respect that games come into their own. All you get from a chat-room or forum is a couple of paragraphs of prose, carefully calculated to show their author in a good light. Games put you under pressure, manufacture crises, and dump you in awkward social and financial situations, all of which can be uniquely revealing. Where else but in games could you find out on a first date if someone’s a good leader, if they deal well with beggars, if they can be patient with children, if they are greedy when they think no-one else is looking? These are deep elements of a person’s character, and games expose them ruthlessly. Never forget: these are worlds where you can right-click on someone you’ve just met and inspect their underwear. This combination of social intimacy and situational pressure produces a romantic crucible just as powerful as the famous Stockholm syndrome. “Much of the relationship formation in online games happens because these environments force players to work together and bond over crises,” says Nick Yee, an academic who has researched hundreds of online gaming romances as part of his Daedalus Project.

But if that all sounds a bit mercenary, than that’s to underestimate the immense romantic potential of games. Playing together takes you right back to all the delicious excitement of a school-days crush. Most games give you the opportunity to send other players private, real-time messages, so while a group of you gather together for a formal discussion about the next big battle or pirate raid, the two of you can keep up a constant stream of invisible flirtation, confident in the knowledge that these love letters will never be intercepted by the teacher and shared with the class. Or, if you’d rather be outrageous than subtle, then most games give you an arsenal of wolf-whistles, sexy dance moves and flamboyantly blown kisses to direct to the object of your affection.

These are fantasy worlds where the kind of gifts you’ve always dreamed of giving to – and getting from – your lover, are merely a weekend’s play away. Megan, a 32 year old from Minnesota, still wears a rare Mooncloth circlet given to her as a courting gift by the partner she met in World of WarCraft. ‘It’s too low level for me now,’ she confesses, ‘but I never want to take it off. Every time I look and see where it says ‘Made by Kurall’ it still makes me tingle.’ Or, if even virtual capitalism is a turn-off for you, then how about saving the life of your beloved – or sacrificing your own – for the ultimate dramatic gesture? And, for those whose romance truly blossoms, most virtual worlds accommodate in-game weddings, which give you the chance to gather together friends from all around the world in the most spectacular location to witness you making your vows, all without the thousand dollar price tags, and the worries about pre-nups. ‘So far I’ve made a tuxedo and shirt,’ says Christophe, a 21-year old Parisian who also met his girl-friend online and is planning to surprise her with an in-game wedding. ‘I just have to sort out the ring, and then I’m going to surprise her on the beach at sunset.’

One of the great, ironic virtues of the gaming world is that it levels the playing field. People who may be self-conscious of their appearance in real-life can glory in being a ten-foot cow, or a miniature gnome with pink hair. Those who never got a chance to score a goal or win a race can lead victorious armies and proudly wear the insignia to prove it. Traditional dating is like traditional exams – it favours the people whose natural abilities are well suited to a peculiar and artificial process. Gaming gives you an arena where you can demonstrate the strengths that would all too often get overlooked in a usual romantic setting. It lets you show yourself in a far more flattering light than the question, ‘Do you come here often?’ gives you a chance to.

But what if online gaming isn’t your bag, any more than online dating is? What if, despite all the reassurances, you need to meet someone face to face – flesh to flesh – before you can tell whether or not you’re interested in them? Games can still come to your rescue. Watching someone play can be just as revealing whether you’re on the other end of an internet connection or the other end of the sofa. And the great thing about offline games is that there’s a much wider range of titles available, which means a much wider range of insights to be gleaned about your prospective partner. Communal online games tend to fall broadly into the adventuring bracket – kings and queens, monsters and dragons, trading empires and space pirates – which can be a great help in judging the intelligence, patience and team-work of a prospective partner, but may leave you with some crucial gaps.

Home console games often rely on quicker reactions and reward ingenuity and skill. Watching someone play can often given you pointers about their more intimate abilities. So even if war games bore you stupid, it can well be worth sitting through an evening of play, as long as your attention is on your intended, not on the screen. How much finesse do they exhibit? How much imagination? How quick are their fingers? Do they rely on the same tactic over and over again? If it doesn’t work, do they alter their approach, or keep using the same technique in the hope brute force or luck will win the day? Do they follow the instructions the game offers them, or are they determined to please themselves? Do they save the game every five seconds so they never have to worry about losing progress, or are they eager to take risks? Watch and learn, and at the end of the evening, see if you feel surer than you did of how good a lover they would be.

Does the theory work in practice? Certainly many thousands of players have tales to tell of relationships that have started in games, and then moved into the real world. It’s common for romances to bloom over a period of years, and for couples to move thousands of miles to start their lives together. Does this ‘inside-out’ approach of getting to know someone mean that these romances prove more durable than those started in more traditional ways? “We just don’t have good numbers on the success or durability of relationships in different spheres of life to really answer that question.” laments Yee, but anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that the bonds people make in-game are strong and deep. As Megan says, ‘Some of my friends were worried when I went to meet him for the first time, but after two years of adventuring together, I’d learned I could trust him with my life.’ So whether you meet online and then move off, or meet in a bar and venture in-game for an unusual first date, the game of love has never been so easy to play.

[I've lost the credits for the cartoons, I'm ashamed to say, so please let me know if you know what they should be, and I'll add them.]

I was expecting a bit of a response, since Werewolf players are often pretty enthusiastic about their game, but I wasn’t expecting to trigger an avalanche. So many people wrote me detailed, fascinating replies – full of history and psychological introspection and swearing and glee – that I genuinely lost count. The stack of print-outs on my desk would have crushed the spirit of anyone who doesn’t actively despise trees. I tried to thank everyone, but I bet I missed a few. Either way, let me thank you again.

Publishing grinds a little slower than blogging (although not much slower than this blog), so the article is now finally outed in this month’s mag. You can read it over at the Wired site or buy a copy and find out a little about Hela cells and Kodak and winning at darts as well. So many quotes ended up getting cut, from so many interesting and generous interviews – apologies if any of them are yours. And do let me know what I’ve missed or got wrong.

Exciting navigatory update! All my columns for Boing Boing‘s marvellous game site Offworld, in which I explore the charms of games I can’t stop going back to, are now available from the sidebar to your right. Or, if you’d rather take them in at a glance, they’re all to be had here.

Spore: what seriously happened.

Stop Wasting My Time And Your Money: why your game doesn’t need a story to be a hit.

 My inevitable decline continues apace on Offworld.

More surprisingly, I didn’t write any of the things I mean to write about it. I got, it’s fair to say, a bit distracted. What I was really planning to bang on about was some very different stuff, namely:

Crosswords are the perfect expression of how games are about the relationship between game-maker and game-player! We don’t talk about this nearly enough in mainstream videogames, but one of the reasons I’ve always loved them is the feeling that I’m playing an experience which has been crafted for me by someone I’ve never met. It’s like the best Valentine’s Day present ever: something that someone has spent years of their life on, designed to do nothing more than make you happy. And the odd bodged clue in NYTC highlights that very effectively – it makes you acutely conscious of the human being at the other end of this experience. It’s why I’ve always been more interested in single-player games than multi-player games; I’ve always been more interested in beating the master of the game than another of its participants. And this seems to be a culture crosswords share. People who regularly play cryptic crosswords have a strong sense of connection with the people who set them – people who they’ve never met, but who have, over decades in some cases, entertained, challenged and educated them. If you think I’m over-stating the case, then keep your eyes peeled for the return of BBC4′s How To Solve A Cryptic Crossword, which has infuriatingly just dropped off iPlayer, but which does a lovely job of summing up how intense the relationship can be between players and makers. Or doers and setters, or whatever the right crossword terminology would be.

Crosswords were initially vilified in almost exactly the same way games are! Namely, for being a waste of time and a passing fad. Wikipedia has most of the best quotes, so I won’t regurgitate them all here, but purely in the services of irony, here’s The New York Times itself railing against them in 1924 (they’re younger than you think, crosswords). Sound familiar?:

 ”[the] sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport… [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.”

Crosswords embed really complex cultural variations within one very simple ruleset! One of the reasons I’ve stuck with NYTC for so long is that, as a UK crossworder, it’s so alien to me. The simple differential between UK and US crossword grids – US ones have fewer black square, so almost every letter of every word has to be in another word – means that US crosswords have to use much more unconventional words and slang phrases. UK crosswords are extremely orthodox by comparison. But then UK cryptic crosswords seem to be far more complex and traditional than their popular US counterparts (although I think some of the more esoteric US cryptics give them more than a run for their money). So, even before you get to the actual cultural context of the clues (and, let me tell you, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit to realise that a ‘Thanksgiving sidedish – 3 letters’ might be ‘yam’), there’s cultural data embedded in the ruleset. I love that you can tell a UK crossword from a US one just by looking at it. I wish we could still do that with videogames.

Final note: I’m not kidding about being stuck on that clue. Any takers?

 46 DOWN (6 letters): In cubbyholes (S blank R blank)

And if, on reading it, you’re having interesting thoughts about using games a crowd-sourcing tools for forming models for complex, behaviour-driven systems,  you might want to check out Jane McGonigal‘s new project Superstruct, a step beyond World Without Oil which endevours to use our imaginations to understand what the impending Apocolypse might actually look like.