So yesterday morning I moderated this panel. The folks on the panel were a distinguished bunch: Bill Fawcett, who dropped anecdotes about when Gary would use NPC thieves to rob his party blind — yes, he meant gary Gygax; Justin Lloyd, who started developing games sometime in the Pleistocene; Mike Stemmle, who’s a lead on Star Trek online nowadays, but of course is best known for his work on LucasArts adventure games; and Scott Campbell, who among other things was lead design ona little RPG called Fallout.

The audience was, as expected, a lot of WoW players. But more than that, it was also a group that had been playing MMOs for a while, and a variety of them, it seemed. The ostensible topic was “why are these games popular, and why is WoW king,” but the issues raised were what i thought merited blogging about. Semi-coherently, at any rate, since I was at a suite party until 2:15am last night.

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So I finish dinner, then I wander about the hotel lobby here at Worldcon, and see a sign saying “Gaming Registration This Way.” So of course I follow it. At the end of a series of posters I find a room where there’s some kids playing something loud, a few scattered tables with Carcasonne and german board games, and one very eager guy waving me over.

What he thrusts into my hands when I get there is a card game called Palabra.

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Today Microsoft is giving away Texas Hold ‘Em as a free download on Live (they will charge for it tomorrow). So I grabbed it.

Elena has never played poker. We walked through the help screens, then I started a single-player game with $150. I lost a few, I won a few, and I was at $120, as she kibbitzed on the side. Then she said she was bored. So I handed her the controller.

She then proceeded to take 15 consecutive hands. She’s up to well over $360 right now, and has only lost two hands since she took the controller from me. I may have created a monster. Kristen says she’s never playing penny poker with her ever. It’s frightening to watch — the AIs just quail in front of her bluffs and crumble. She pulls out full houses from nowhere.

I’m depressed again. She’s even unlocked three achievements in the space of ten minutes. I suppose I should be happy she’s playing on my login, so they count towards me. 😛

I mentioned she’s nine, right?
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