So I'm about 30 hours into playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and have really enjoyed every second of it. I've played a ton of video games in my life, and know a good one when I see it. What I'm interested in, though, is how can I claim to be a generally upstanding, moral person, yet claim to enjoy a game with allows the player to have his character decapitate policemen with shotguns, murder innocent bystanders with baseball bats, or hire a prostitute and have sex with her and then run over to kill her and get his money back? When it's put it like that, I must sound like an absolute psycho to non-gamers.

It definitely should be noted that I'm not the only one who enjoys this game. It's gotten rave reviews and "Game of the Year" type awards from many mainstream, reputeable industry magazines, as well as being THE top seller for all console games in 2004. So are we ALL sociopaths? Obviously not. So what's going on here?

I wrote a very long essay trying to answer those questions and reconcile the apparent contradictions, but I deleted it. I figured that gamers already intrinsically know what I'm talking about, and at some level, non-gamers will never really understand (unless, of course, they became gamers themselves...? Maybe that understanding is part of the definition of what makes a "gamer"?)

I think it's fair to say that judging the game based on what I said above is like judging a novel by reading a page, or a movie by a single clip. Such a limited view not only removes all context, but also implies that the rest of the game is equally gory and reprehensible, which simply isn't true.

For those who have played the game, I just completed flight school and did each task until I got 100%'s on everything. Doing that unlocks a helicopter that can do Vigilante missions (called "Brown Thunder"). Pretty cool. Flying rocks.

In other news, I watched a movie called "Game Over", which is a (biased) documentary regarding Kasparovs contraversial 1997 match against IBM's "Deep Blue" computer. The main thrust of the movie is Kasparov whining about losing to Deep Blue, strongly insinuating that some sort of cheating went on (without presenting any sort of real evidence), and generally coming off like a whiny little girl. There were also interviews with the Deep Blue team, so we got at least a little bit of their side of the story, but it's hardly balanced. Basically Kasparov easily won in Game 1, and then got his ass handed to him in Game 2 (where the computer made some remakably "human" move, which shocked him psychologically), and he couldn't get over it, insisting that the only possible explanation is that a human intervened mid-game. So, pretty interesting to someone who's into both computers and chess, but I don't think I'd recommend it to the general public.

In yet other news, Diana's awareness of her sleepiness astounds me. Last night, we were laying in bed talking. She was quiet for a few seconds, and then said "here it comes..." and literally a few seconds later, she was asleep. It's almost like her body just shuts down, sometimes in spite of her brain. Really fascinating.