With my birthday coming up in a few days, it's funny how blasŽ I am about it. I don't expect it to be a special day any more, and I don't want people to get me gifts or anything. When you're young you look forward to the presents and the party. During and after college it becomes more of a party thing, I time to spend with your friends. Not so much about gifts. But now, at least for me, it's not the gifts as I buy whatever I really want. It's not the friends as much, as I see them every weekend.

And maybe it's because I'm tired from working this week, but I don't feel up for anything. I'll be 29, which I guess it's not that old once you step back and look. But I feel old. Old and tired. There are times when you look back on your life and think "is this all there is to it?" It's not so much that I haven't done what I always wanted to do. I haven't wanted to *do* anything, so there are no big regrets.

Conversely, it also means that I've never really done anything that I care to remember. My life is one unending flat plain, much like Sacramento. Nice, but not exciting. So I guess I should do something dramatic and cool, like climb Mt Everest or sail across the Atlantic Ocean. OK, those things don't interest me. I'm thinking more in the lines of touring attending a baseball game in every ballpark during a season.

Let me think. Where would I want to go? Just in general. I give up, there's no one place that I'd really want to go. But maybe drive around the country on some epic road trip. Hit every state in the US and every territory in Canada, excepting Hawaii. Probably take three or four months, visiting the sights, whatever suits my whim at the time. I'd need a good cell phone so I can get on the Internet whereever I was.

In terms of doing something. What would that be? Build my house, fly a plane, skydive, write a novel... I think writing a game, a real commercial quality game. The kind of stuff that I thought about doing when I was a kid, although back then I was thinking more of a boardgame or role-playing game, but a video] game of some kind would also be acceptable. Something better than the Desktop Publishing games that people put out nowadays, or a lot of the shareware games on the computer.

So what would that be? Maybe a computer RPG game, something along the quality of what Ambrosia Software would put out. Doesn't have to be the next Baldur's Gate, but something with playability and something that I would be interesting in making. An RPG game creation kit, although that's hard to do right. World Builder for the Mac was an ok text-based game creator. Go a bit back and you have Adventure Construction Set, one of the great games for the Commodore 64.

Two dimensional overhead view. You can create creatures with different stats, icons, behavior; items of different weights and special abilities; locations spanning some pretty large areas. I remember it being a fun game, as it included a pre-made adventure in Arabia. But even for the time it was definitely less advanced than The Bard's Tale, for example.

Big concept today is Internet playability. Add that to some sort of adventure construction engine and you get a MUD. Hmm, maybe that wasn't such a great idea. One of the things that I tried to write as a kid was an RPG that was like a MUD, although I didn't know the term at the time. You have a character and you live in a world -- a space station in my vision. In different rooms you could different things: take classes, play games, go on "real" adventures. Very much like a MUD.

But you look at Internet games today. Mostly in the mode of three-d shooters like Unreal Tournament or EverQuest. Another category is basically a MUD, like Ultima Online, Clan Lords, or EverQuest again. Then there's the standard board games that you can play online, like chess or backgammon or checkers. What I haven't seen are any conquer the world games. Something like Warlords over the Internet. But more complex, not real time, more like a Play-By-Mail game like Alamaze.

Some relatively big server hosting these games that would take a year to play at a turn each week or two. One where you and a dozen other people control empires, allocate resources, fight wars, engage in diplomacy. Not quite an RPG, something more than a simple board game. But you'd have to add to it to make it something more than just an online PBM. Better graphics, real-time combat, better communication tools. Just a thought...