Once handhelds moved past the days of the 16-bit consoles they started to lose their way.

While everybody else I know has been playing Halfbrick's Jetpack Joyride (cool game, but murder on my eyes) I've been absorbed by Jeff Minter's GoatUp. It's a simple platformer with a goofy conceit. You're a goat named Patience hopping from level to level mowing through grass and hooking up with amorous billies. It's the best iOS platformer on the subject of animal husbandry. 

That's because nowadays we equate fetishism with perversity, but the roots of the word are about perceiving power in objects or things. A religious idol is a fetish object. In the days when more and more parts of our lives are digital it is easy to fetishize the physical. Gamers, I think, have a bit of a head start. Because the videogames we play have long been about making our imaginations phyiscal -- by embodying and creating the ideals and fantasies we carry around with us. I mean just look at the characters in a Final Fantasy game and tell me that gamers aren't serious fetishists. 

Being a good husband I was worried for my wife and found myself thoughtlessly stumbling through the brush to intercept her and wish her well as she came running around a bend. That's when my friend Tyler yelled, "rattlesnake!" I turned to look and found him pointing in my direction. That's not cool. By then the deadly fucker, a good four or five feet long with tail a-twitch, was headed for the rocks. Of course I didn't come anywhere near dying. But that's about as close as I care to get. 

That's how I roll. I try to steer clear of deadly serpents. We're all going to die someday. And when that last electron in our brains dissipates that will be it. We'll be gone forever. Some people skydive, mud run or Fight Club to help remind themselves that they're alive. That's one way to deal with mortality. A lot of us chill on the Internet, listen to music, play videogames and smoke weed to help us forget that we're going to die. Whatever works, right?

 Its okay that game plots are derivative of movies, because games let you be a space marine and a ring-bearer. Games trump originality with immersion. That's not to say that games aren't fertile ground for adaptation for TV and movies. It's just that Hollywood has been looking in the wrong place all this time. They've been going for the big names -- the properties that everybody knows like Halo and Super Mario Brothers. But those kind of big-budget undertakings are always doomed to disappoint. Instead Hollywood should put a dozen script monkeys in front of the obscure genre of role-playing games called roguelikes (think Minecraft, Nethack and Dwarf Fortress) and let the games write the plots for them.

I think they're boring. I hate how they're so ubiquitous. And I can't help but think less of people who are into them. When I find out that someone I like or admire is into sports I'm immediately disappointed. They may not know it, but once that cat is out of the bag they have to put in extra work to rise in my estimation. 

Disliking sports is like being The Grinch Who Hated Weekdays -- you're in the minority and there's always some big Super Bowl match on television to annoy you. Of course I think that video games are vastly superior to sports. In a perfect world people who like sports would be relegated to their parent's basements and gamers would drink, eat and watch StarCraft II matches in every neighborhood pub. Video games are better than sports. And here's why.

But that was only the first victory in an ongoing battle. Recently Blizzard had the audacity to host all Diablo III gameplay on servers, forcing solo gamers plug those pesky cables back in. That says nothing for gamers who had hoped to play Diablo III on airplanes. Sadly, Blizzard doesn't look like it is going to change its mind when it comes to the draconian DRM they've concocted for their latest game. And speaking of "draconian" you're really going to flip when you hear the insane, new DRM scheme Electronic Arts is rumored to be cooking up for Dragon Age 3. 

So to try to quash any goodwill I've earned with the more sensible gamers among us I'd like to offer an antidote to that column -- a step-by-step guide for going absolutely ape-shit over a bit of video game news. Lets say you're a Diablo fan and you're really ticked off about the zillion things they're doing wrong with that game. I'm going to lay out some tips to help make sure that you're flipping your lid to the best of your abilities. 

That's pretty much how we all behave when we're playing games. We rifle through strangers' houses in search of loot, we kill innocent chickens and we wreck cars just for kicks. Most everything we do in videogames is for our own betterment, with litter concern for the feelings of others. We may be saving the world, but why do we have to be such jerks about it?

We're not raiders. Until this month more than a few of us had never run a dungeon on the "Heroic' difficulty. Most serious World of Warcraft players would call us casual players. And yet we've all logged hundreds of hours playing. It's a bummer that we've got to spend so much time planning to play, but that's the reality of modern gaming. So many of us don't have all the time in the world to play. And when we do carve out our precious time to go online we don't want to do it with strangers. I'm not sure what Blizzard has in mind for their new MMO, but I hope their new ground-up online role-playing game isn't such a hassle to play with friends.