Hello folks. 

I am the proud co-parent of a fine, double-headed baby, and will probably contribute some ducats to a horrifying creature that will speak of the end times.  Not everyone's cut out for the role of micro-producer, and as with being a producer in any field, it's a bit of a gamble. Here are my thoughts on all of of this. Feel free to tell your own tales of faith in companies below, if you like.
 
My first Kickstarter contribution was to a little card game that could, before either of the above had even been heard of, and it showed me the power that this venue has for getting solid concepts and strong companies better attention for their niche designs. It's basically a way to help focus all this enthusiasm people have at a single target, and it's done in a smart way.
 
Any cynicism I have about this format, giving money to people before a thing is even made, is tempered by my own faith in my ability to choose companies and people with a decent track record. There are plenty of projects out there that I think deserve funding ( this looks awesome) and those who will get funded because their design or presentation is just that great, but I think Kickstarter winds up benefiting those who Brian Fargo himself called the developer in the middle, the people with projects that need more than a few folks in a tiny office to make happen. 
 
Having seen how a BIG game company needs to worry about advertising budgets and supplying massive teams, it's easy for me to see why this venue makes more sense for stuff that's not going to make the biggest splash in the marketplace, though I don't think any big company needs to look at these niche products as an all-or-nothing affair. That's a discussion for another time, I guess.
 
All that said; because you're giving money to people who need to deliver (assuming they get enough. If they don't manage to meet their goal, then pfft, no loss for you), it's up to the contributors, and Kickstarter itself, to make sure these people adequately deliver on their promises. With that pressure to do well, it won't mean you'll get the perfect product you were hoping for, but you might get a pretty good approximation of what you reasonably expected. And that's probably more likely to be true if the funding level and the team match the goals of the project. So you have folks with a decent history like Brian Fargo and Tim Schafer pushing for games many of us have wanted, but egoists have declared that No One Likes (because they don't like them), finally getting a chance, not because there weren't other ways to do it, but because they're using a popular site that's easy enough to find and use.
 
Faith is already a huge component of this industry. We often rely on brand names to get us through when lack of full disclosure has us wondering what the end product will be (I'm still wondering how I'll feel when I reach the end of DAO), we do pre-orders as a game nears release, we get swept up in the five star reviews only to find that even journalists get swept up in the initial enthusiasm for the next blockbuster because, yeah, they're mostly gamers themselves. It's kinda scary, and pretty messed up, when faith gets put on the line, especially when it's betrayed. But at the same time, the upswing, when our faith is kept, it's pretty fucking sweet.
 
I'm a bit conservative for backing what look to be solid designers, but then again, I don't pretend I'm a venture capitalist, here. I'm just a micro-producer with eclectic tastes who wants to see a few cool games get made.

I went to level 54, I think, before I started dragons and yelling. The first shout I spent a soul on was the one that MAKES LIGHTNING FALL FROM THE SKY AND SHOCK MY ENEMIES *TO DEATH!!*

I fast travel now. Not all the time, but still, I am ashamed... Actually it's a bit more complicated than that, really. All Elder Scrolls games had fast travel. Getting anywhere in Arena was literally impossible without it (since you just wandered through random areas forever until you actually decided to click on another city on the map), Daggerfall was so ridiculously huge and largely uneventful that it was an exercise in stupidity/brave reader!/whatever to actually walk from one end of the map to the other, Morrowind encouraged it, but only allowed it through in-game channels, but every once in a while it WAS damned annoying when all you wanted to do was go back home to sell the tons of silver longswords you'd looted. I kept with the Morrowind standard for a while, using the cart a bit but otherwise walking or horsing (riding, really) everywhere, but I think there was one quest that told me to go all the way back and I just said... screw it, I'm too tired for this, and beamed there instantly. I can't say I don't regret it a bit, but I think I reached a point where I wanted to reduce the amount of unchecked boxes, and they were legion.

Food feels... you know, if there was one thing from my little difficulty list I made that I'd still absolutely want here, it would be to make food matter more. I want my dudette or dude to be hungry, and I want to, you know, feel like they enjoyed their baked potato. The cold weather stuff... meh, the alchemy's actually decent enough (although I level like a slug that doesn't know how to mix potions), if I had to worry about warm weather gear I'd actually want to have clothing like in Daggerfall, which is a whole can of worms with these modern graphical model requirements... but food, man. Food. Please.

One of the first things I did was trek across one of the most treacherous reaches in the whole of Skyrim in search of a way to heal myself of vampirism. I still treasure that, actually, even though I died way too often as I tried to negotiate my way past tigers that guarded several tiers of waterfalls. There really was no in-game hint (until after I'd found a temple) that just praying at a shrine heals any afflictions. I had to rely on the old RPG cliche to see me through, but that worked out all right. Gave me a nice vignette to tell.

I started on the top level of difficulty, but got sick of dying all the time and pushed down one notch. Whosoever said the game was too easy either didn't know about the difficulty setting or are way into metagaming/min-maxing. My sneaky-warrior-conjurer does all right now, especially with the coolest weapon ever Dawnbreaker as an undead carver, but there are times, especially with spellcasters, that I can still get thumped pretty handily. I can't imagine how much top difficulty would have soured my enjoyment if I'd stubbornly kept with it all this time.

I play with the crosshairs off. I also play with the compass off. I don't regret it one bit. If I need to know my direction, I look at the map. I even use the map to help me figure out some quests (and really, some of these quests are rather impossible without some sort of gamey hint, sadly), but I keep that to the map, and ignore it unless I need it. Not having the compass just lets me enjoy the scenery (and occasionally get lost, but well, that's how you find new places).

My character's a Redguard, a lady, wears orc armor everywhere, with maxed out smithing and enchanting. I spend perks too readily, but I've focused in weapons and heavy armor and things have worked out quite well (once I forced myself, through my mate's constant insistence, to get unencumbered... which meant I had to buy a house to dump my endless potions and books into).

There was another rule I started with that I eventually had to drop, and that was that I only got money through trade. I actually started out that I only used money I got in trade locally, but that became a bit hard to justify when I'd get quest rewards. But that damned house... there were a bunch of dead Legion guys lying around with tons of money in their pockets, and I'm sitting there wondering how long it will be until I get to dump all my damned books, and I'm like "fuck this action" and start looting all the corpses. Slippery slope. Never stopped after that, pretty much. Even pick up the pocket change in urns now, like a damn miser.

I sometimes wonder how I would have taken this game if I had played Oblivion. I've barely even watched people play it. The changes from Morrowind to this game are big, and sometimes very satisfying, but there's one thing I feel that I miss. I miss being able to run into people who I didn't recognize who didn't want to instantly kill me. There's a very high body count in Skyrim, which is initially fun to help increase, but it's hard to feel much escapism when I'm clearing out yet another hovel filled with mindless bandits. I start asking myself why I'm killing them, what's the point of this, and I KNOW that Morrowind had bandit caves and cultist camps and all of that, but it feels like the murder meter has slid just a bit further to the red zone in this game, such that I feel a bit more first-person shootery than I used to with this sort of game. Surprise me, Skyrim, have some friendlies with some quests you'd normally reserve for towns. OK? No? Fine. *kill stuff*

The wonder I get from seeing places like Blackreach or High Hrothgar remind me why I'm still a fan of the Elder Scrolls game franchise, though, so whatever quibbles I might have are usually forgotten when... and bears! Why do bears have to be so damned aggressive!? Seriously, fuck off and eat some honey, goddamn it!

Where was I? I don't even remember. I think I'm going to play some more and try to earn myself another shout. Peace!

It's been a long time since I've contributed a significant wiki article to this site. I can't really remember the last time, although I guess during the run up to Skyrim I did several little fact dumps to see what was true and what was just rumor. 
 
When this place was founded, I wrote an article about Star Raiders that I like to repeatedly mention was added to a list by GB's Jeff; I guess he and I had a similar passion for the game when growing up and he was happy to see someone else with a scary level of knowledge on that old game. I wrote it out of a similar passion, and this was when just about anything worked on the site as long as it wasn't destructive or hateful. I gave the same level of energy on several other articles, often with the expert knowledge of people who knew better than I did what things were about. Gave me a spread of articles I was proud of, almost like I'd infused a bit of myself into the world at large.
 
I realize that eventually, though, a site has to settle on a certain style, and many of my articles are apparently not quite up to standards. 
 
To be honest, I'm not sure why I wrote all of these articles. I guess I was happy that there was a website that seemed to have enough personality to distance itself from a bland wikia, and I liked the idea that fellow gamers could see and comment on what I'd written. Gave me a bit of pride that what I wrote might matter to someone else, and that I could distinguish myself by writing them, both in points and in general recognition. But I knew from the beginning that what I was doing was adding to a database that wasn't really mine, and (was it years ago?) I noticed that there were tipping points about where the site was headed, things that might eventually affect the tone and scope of what was written.
 
It's been a few months since I was really active on this site, and that's because I've been working formally in what is imprecisely called "the gaming industry", and all my efforts have been concentrated there. When I get home, I just pull up Skyrim or Heroes of Might and Magic, just zone out for a few hours, and go to bed. I just finished a 12 day work-week, with plenty of overtime to round it out, and I've come to realize that even an office job can wear you down if you don't get enough of a breather.
 
When I logged in here after that absence, I got a note that a bunch of my articles are causing problems for the editors here. It's a bit demoralizing to see that stuff you enjoyed writing and enjoyed sharing are apparently causing people grief now, especially since the grief has spread back to me in a way. I guess this is something that comes with an age I'm not fully a part of, as others are quick to remind me: you can write something a long time ago and it's preserved, possibly until the heat death of the universe when the last of the human arks carrying The Archives of All Knowledge and Porn Sites grows cold. You are responsible for everything, ever, that you have ever done, and as long as someone bothers to keep a record, it's attached to you and seems as new as the day your wrote it, even if it was written years and years ago.
 
In the section of the industry in which I'm currently working, people working on the game do not get in-game credit for their work. There is no list of credits that you can click on, and many of the contributors are only visible if they make themselves visible. I can't tell you how many times I've ignored credit scrolls in games unless I'd beaten the game, and I would often watch them just to see if they put little zingers at the end, or check to see if I'd properly guessed on a voice actor. It's different when you're actually doing one of those jobs, or many of those jobs at once, and you know that you won't be able to point at it and prove that you were part of it. You know you were, your colleagues know, and people who trust you will believe you did what you did, but there's something satisfying about having your name on a project that can't quite be measured in dollars.
 
Yet as part of the nature of a collaborative medium, whether it's a wiki page, a mass-market game, or a film, you know that it's rare to be able to say something and not have it be changed by the time it's shown to others. Just about the only way to do this is to write your own stuff, make your own stuff, and publish it on your own. When contributing to anything collaborative, there are waves of changes that can dilute, but also sharpen, what you're trying to say, and sometimes the changes are so huge that you don't recognize what comes out the other side. It's best not to be too invested in it, but it's hard not to be, even if it's more an emotional attachment to the effort you put into it than anything concrete having to do with HOW you wrote it, or what you wrote about.
 
When I was younger I was adrift, and found myself hanging out with film students. Their interest in films mirrored mine (I never even knew you could take a degree in filmmaking, as worthless as that degree might seem to some of you, and I was a bit jealous that they'd figured out how), and I actually several of them in various ways during their assignments. At one point, though, I felt the director was making a huge mistake with one of his decisions, I voiced that opinion, and the director happened to hear it. Naturally, the next day I was told that my help wasn't needed anymore.
 
It's been a long time since I wrote most of the articles for this website, and I remember telling myself that while I was injecting a bit of personality into what I was writing, that I shouldn't get too attached, otherwise I'd be setting myself up for disappointment should the site suddenly close, the database get destroyed, that sort of thing. In effect I was avoiding the same mistake I'd made with those budding filmmakers years before. What I wasn't expecting was that side-effect of digital sharing that I mentioned earlier, that what I wrote then was also written now, right now, and it's fresh in the minds of any readers that happen to see it on any given day.
 
So I guess the analogy to films doesn't really fit; even with most video games there's some point where you give up and move on. Wikis however, are constantly being updated and changed. It's like an eternal rough draft, always up for revisions, never complete, and you're never allowed to say "that was me, then.  I probably wouldn't have done that now," because it's still there, masquerading as a current work, ready to be read, even if it now comes across as anachronistic, out of sync with the tone the collective site is apparently trying to convey.

Once I achieved a certain point level I decided I'd reached the limit of my contributions, and might put in a bit of energy here and there but it wasn't really necessary anymore. I'd made my mark, and like some people spend hours figuring out what profile picture they're going to show to the world, I felt like I'd made a statement about myself through what games I chose to talk about, and I learned about my own tastes by looking back on what I had focused on.  I've continued to contribute blogs, because I like talking about games, and some seem to appreciate my weird angle on things. 
 
But because I chose to write wiki articles, I am permanently connected to them as long as I have an account here. I take full responsibility for what I wrote, of course, although I can't really say I remember most of it anymore, nor do I remember there being readily-accessible, detailed style rules back when I wrote most of it, though my being unable to keep up with the constantly changing forums may have something to do with that. I do remember checking with individuals as I wrote, asking if what I was writing was appropriate. Those that responded seemed to enjoy what I wrote; no one told me to stop back when they were actually published despite getting general feedback and occasional recognition. I do have to remind myself though that like with writing in a wiki, editing a wiki is a collaborative process, and the taste and rules-sense of a few people may not match up with those of others, or with the group as a whole.
 
I do hope, though, that people will take into account the fact that I've not really written anything substantial for the wiki in quite a while: it's disturbing to receive a formally written letter about something that was contributed a while ago causing problems as if I'd written it yesterday, especially since I've done my level best not to feel personally attached to what I wrote. It was a gift to this site and to the community here, really-- as lumpy and unseemly as this gift might seem.

The disconnect between now and then is nearly palpable to me, but as many of you know, I've become a bit of a fossil. I wonder if I'll ever get used to the idea of having a permanent, digital paper trail that never blurs with age.

So, in the intervening period a lot has happened. I don't need to go into details, but pertinent to one of the themes of this particular blog, I now have a PC capable of playing the games people have been talking about for the past half decade. You might think that someone who has at least been paying attention to all the news of new games would remaind relatively jaded when actually playing them, but no. I spent my first few hours of Skyrim thoroughly overwhelmed by the jump in graphics quality; it's one thing to watch a video of someone else playing a game, it's another thing to be forced to interpret what you see, and if you fail at that the consequences come fast enough. No movie this.
 
And yeah, that's mainly what I've been playing. I've been given an opportunity to try out The Old Republic and I'll likely do that, but right now Skyrim takes up most of that machine's time, and that's divided amongst two people with an equal desire to play.  I'll probably talk about my impressions of that game when I have a while. It is awesome, but like most Elder Scrolls games it's easy to see where things can be improved even more.  I haven't yet reached the point where things repeat too much, but so far I'm digging the combat spells (it's the first time I've ever seen destruction spells as an interesting path to take), the weapon-handed system has a great balancing feature that means no tactic is optimal, but some fit situations better than others, and, well, there's a strong reference to Arena, the very first Elder Scrolls game, that pleases me quite a bit. I do find that I'm collecting books more than reading them; I think I start reading later, like I did in Morrowind, once I get a feel for the world. I also don't fast travel, because I think running into stuff is pretty much what makes the game fun for me; my eyes bug out a bit when I see all the contextless minor quests that are spilling down the journal page, but I've never been one for completing quests if there's no explicit reason to do so (new features are fine, but monetary rewards leave me cold).  I guess quest management could probably be improved just a bit, like an area-based to-do list that reminds you when you're in the right area to check off a few boxes, but then we get into the surreal "medieval times with a personal data assistant" clashes.
 
For those who say this game refers to Morrowind, I can't put my finger on it, having never played Oblivion, but I still know what you mean somehow. I don't think it's just the cart travel system, although I'm really happy to see that, it may just be the combination of things, the idea that this is off the beaten path, things are a bit rougher and more uncertain.
 
Speaking of uncertain, I'm not sure if the character I'm building is going to wind up being useless, but there's some adventure in that. I tend to use two-handed weapons, something I learned to appreciate when fighting spiders of the non-poisonous, fall-apart variety, along with spells and the satisfying bow and arrow for distance shots. I originall favored mace-and-shield, but found I was never quite sure how useful the shield was, and subequently never really put any energy into building up Block. Dual wielding still doesn't appeal to me, it never really has in any game, but I like how their damage output is tops, at the cost of blocking. So, since I'm on master difficulty, and haven't bothered to pull the dragon switch, I'm having a tough time of it, but it helps justify all the potions I make, justify the stealth I use, and justify every enemy exploit where I wait until I can shoot them in the back.
 
I'm entertaining the idea of playing a parallel game some day where the whole point is to never load after my character dies, but I'm not sure what difficulty would be appropriate-- Master is fine if you know you can load, but I'm not sure I'd get very far on one life.
 
I'm late the party, I guess, but only by a few months this time. It won't be like before, where Cake Is a Lie made no sense to me for years, although I'll probably still be laughing at Arrow in the Knee long after everyone else has stopped.

Some of gaming fandom takes a bit of effort. You try to support developers you like, you get in debates about the merits of certain game features, you try your best to play a game you may not like a whole lot right this moment in the hope that it'll get better. When I game as part of a community, I'll try stuff I'd otherwise not, and when I'm taking someone else's recommendation it sometimes takes some work to accept something outside of my comfort zone.
 
What do you play when you can't be arsed?
 
I find that trying a round of Spelunky is a fun way to waste some time, even though the only goals we have left in that game are goals we make ourselves. I also spent a long time playing Tales of Maj'Eyal, although when I realized that I would lose my saved games when I updated to a new version (and my life suddenly changed rather dramatically) I sort of left it behind (though another roguelike, the space exploration game Prospector, I recently tried out again). The Wager is fun, but still needs bugs worked out; Solium Infernum is great but takes a while (the demos of Armageddon Empires or Sixgun Saga are a lot more pick-up-and-play for me).  For an uninvolved but fun diversion, I'll play that pinball game Space Cadet (still one of my favorite video pinball games ever) or ROM Check Fail.
 
I'm willing to bet as I discover new games, or finally upgrade my machine, that I'll find a new retinue. Given that GOG's doing its usual holiday promotional deals odds are I may buy something from them. But right now, these games seem to be in repeat-gaming my comfort zone. You?

We all use the term B Movie, but it has different meanings depending on how its used. Some people mean it derisively, to imply that because it's not the grandest that cinema can offer it's not worth paying attention to. The rest, I think, use it with affection. They know that even the weakest production values can hide a strong heart. The same I believe is true in games.

Independent productions have a lot stacked against them. They tend to be done by a handful of people (sometimes just one person), who get to spin as many plates as they can to please as many people as they can, with the more tasks they take on increasing the time it takes to make it way past the point where it could be a viable income source for all but the most dedicated and/or LUCKY. They don't get the advantage of being connected to a marketing juggernaut that convinces us that we must have it because of bullet pointed features, and live-action films that have nothing to do with the game. I'm sure you can think of other examples, depending upon how you define "independent," but one advantage independent creators have is flexibility. Their tasks are in direct proportion to their ambition, and if they have a strong central creator, they can accomplish a lot, and take risks that those with a lot more investment in them can't take. 
 
Still, even major studios upset this trend, having genre defining or genre enhancing experiences that are (hopefully) seen by many people and help push the games conversation forward (or sideways).
 
Despite heavily polished games looking so much richer than their skin-and-bones counterparts, I will never be able to join in deriding some pixel-art garage game; it's just not possible for me. Games used to be ONLY that, with a few exceptions, and that was when no one had any expectations because it was all new. Without a lot of market data or huge departments who'll have to adjust to changes, you're just a bit more willing to try something new, something a coder has been itching to try, without the risk of wrecking the huge game-creation machine when you try to turn a sudden corner.
 
I can't say, though, that I could ever disregard the bigger companies, either. When they do things right, they do them really right, and the level of polish can be almost blinding.  But I don't really see this as an either/or question:
 
Truth is, wherever they come from, I like good games. I like to get something for my money and time, almost like I'm talking with the developers and exploring the virtual space they've created. I don't care if it's on a phone, made of cardboard, or needs a thousand-dollar machine to run; quality, while somewhat subjective, does feel nearly palpable when you run across something great. And I would hate for any type of company out there to completely drown out the other types.
 
I still remember a conversation I had with a kid on the bus headed home from school. We were talking about game systems, and I said I had a Sega. He told me that Sega sucked, and I asked him why, had he played anything on there? No, he hadn't. It was about belonging to a brand; I'm assuming his flag's colors were red and white with a mushroom in the middle. I knew through friends who had the NES that the Sega wasn't good at everything, though I had trouble finding anything that quite compared to Phantasy Star. In this case it was a lateral comparison between software giants, but we do tend to settle into comfort zones when it comes to who is producing our games, too. We focus on realistic cheekbones or flopping bodies and forget that a game can be pretty much anything. Clearly, the Atari 2600 game Adventure's sprites are low res, but I can play Adventure for a few minutes and have a fun little story to tell when I'm done. That game is OLD, but in the grand scheme it still WORKS as a game.
 
A lot of games now struggling to be noticed are like Adventure; a single screenshot will say a lot about what you're in for, but it won't say enough. I'm willing to bet you'll find something cool if you let your guard down and try a few games outside your comfort zone. God knows that's happened to me a bunch of times over the course of my life, and while it's a struggle sometimes to break open an "ugly" package, I've seen enough hidden gems to know they're out there, and worth all the time spent searching for them.

I like Good Old Games. I like their DRM free philosophy, their dedication to hunting down old stuff and making it runnable on current systems, their usually reasonable prices, their refusal to use Geo-IP identification. I find though that the way they promote their games brings about a weird behavior in me that I probably wouldn't have if things were priced statically.
 
As frequent users know, GOG regularly promotes older releases through sales every weekend, often from a single publisher or part of a theme. The discounts vary, sometimes decreasing on a sliding scale based on how many you buy. Considering the games are already individually priced from 10 dollars on down, the extra discounts are often symbolic; they're gunning for a volume of sales.
 
When a game I like is featured, part of me goes "when I'm more willing to play the thing, I should definitely get on that, but right now I'd just be throwing the money away." So I wait, because I know that games will likely go on sale again, even though it may be months or even years before that might happen. It sets up part of a sort of gambling mentality, where I try to balance what I'd do with the little wad of cash I'd be spending while I wait for my interest to reach its peak.
 
Yet when my interest HAS reached its peak, like it has with Darklands or a few other games they have featured, if the current sale doesn't include the games I'm interested in, or if the discount drops if I try to exclude the ones I'm not interested in, I hesitate. If the game isn't included in the sale, no matter how much I might want it, part of me wonders if I could save a few bucks by waiting. It's almost more from pride than a monetary decision; I feel like I'm one of the dupes if I buy too early.
 
I don't have this twisted thinking when buying games straight from the market. I know that you pay a lot to start, and as time goes by you may get discounts (and whatever you may think of used games or renting games, those are priced even lower after other people had paid to play the same game at a premium). Because there's an understanding that the demand will only increase past the initial release if the price is dropped, you have a certainty in this relationship that lets you plan your next move and buy things when they reach a comfortable level.
 
The comparison isn't exact because GOG tends to release games that have been out for quite a while, but many of the widgets they sell are games I haven't seen in such a long time that they might as well be new to me. If big-time new releases were treated the way the majority of GOG games were treated, I wonder if people might buy less of them knowing that some day in the future there would likely be a sale. 
 
So, I find that for an individual game, like Darklands or Starflight (1 and 2), the choice is not so hard. I look at the price, 6 bucks each in this case, and convince myself it's not so bad. When you don't feel too strongly about the game, though, there's this doubt that creeps up. "What if I wait a bit? Will they put it on sale?" I wonder if all these promotions, then, wind up causing a bit of lag in sales. In the case of games I love, like Starflight and Darklands, I wonder if they will be part of a bigger sale at some point. So, because the games I want are associated with other games I might never want to buy or play that might be part of some future sale, the gambler in me chooses to bide its time.
 
Still, if they had a static pricing drop I don't think it work quite as well as it does for most high-budget releases, since a lot of these games bank on nostalgia, a value that's not likely to change a whole lot over time, rather than the urge to be on the cutting edge of the games conversation (like I have with Skyrim, or used to have with Grand Theft Auto). Maybe if I focus on getting the few games I absolutely want, the ones that keep coming up in my mind, I might actually be LESS susceptible to sales later on because I won't feel like I'm holding back just for them.
 
Not sure any of you out there go through this. I'm willing to bet some of you buy things you like and don't worry so much about potential price drops, although I imagine some of these folks wind up with a bunch of games they have yet to play. I do have some of that going on, but not to the extent I've seen some people go, according to some of the lists I've seen here. Does Steam foster a similar behavior, or are their sales more all-encompassing than GOG's?

I'm sure there are still English speakers on this planet who, when you say "dungeon", immediately think something like the Man in the Iron Mask up in chains, and would never imagine big treasure chests, monsters, or a bunch of people going IN to one on purpose, instead of trying to escape. For a lot of us though, one of the earliest meanings, really crappy prison is all but buried underneath probably one of the most generic and multi-faceted terms in gaming.
 
Of course video games can't really take credit for this corruption of the term. To find the culprit you'd probably have to go back to the 1970's, when Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax and others were creating the first pen and paper role playing games. Perhaps the first dungeon was really a dungeon, but the term quickly became shorthand for any place, usually indoors and filled with monsters and treasure, that player characters would likely delve. The dungeons of Dungeons and Dragons could be just about anything, although there still tended to be a maze-like, oppressive quality to most of them. You'll rarely find someone describing Any Place at All in an RPG as a dungeon, but the old, very specific castle pointers are all but erased, such that a natural cave could easily take the place of a term meant to describe something artificial.
 
Video games, eager to shoulder some of the complexity of their analog bretheren, managed to make the more castle-ish mazes into "dungeons," but the adaptation of dungeon into its RPG equivalent took quite a while. You had MUDs back in the text chat days, Multi-User Dungeons, which preserved the maze-like quality but despite being called dungeons, they could pretty much be anything that text could describe. In a few years, then, video games ran past pen and paper RPGs and made "dungeon" mean pretty much any environment. It wasn't until visual presentations got more sophisticated that video games calmed down and started paying tribute to the pen and paper games that had inspired them.
 
If you're not a gamer of any stripe, you would probably still treat dungeon as a specialty word reserved for ren fair jokes or the playful variety of whips and chains, and you might even mispronounce the word a few times. But I'm willing to bet there are quite a few people who are only cursorily familiar with games who would still know what you were talking about if you used the term more generically, though I imagine many of them might first imagine torches in sconces, chains hanging from the wall, and slimy stonework. Hell, I do too.

In order to give myself some practice reviewing games, I was wondering if I should just make a list of games I have that I haven't played, and people can ask me to play one of them. If you're curious about how an old game plays compared to more recent stuff, or just want to see me suffer, you could recommend I play a game on that list in a PM and I'd do my best to play it and communicate my experience. That does mean that games I can't reasonably play yet due to hardware will have to be on the back burner until I get a better machine, but most stuff that I'd have to run through DOSBox is fine. Some of the stuff would even be potentially purchasable by you, like GOG games, so you'd still be learning what a game was about from someone who gave a damn about an accurate depiction and wasn't suffering from buyer's defensiveness.
 
Just throwing the idea out there. It will take me a while to catalog what I have available; ArbitraryWater already recommended I play Might and Magic 6 a while ago, so unless you want to change your vote AW, I already got you down. 
 
Here's a link to the currently incomplete list of available games. Comments below (if any) should be questions about format or whatever; PM me if you want to know about my actual collection or want to vote on a game you want to see me review. I'm doing it that way so no one will absolutely know about user interest (if any) except for me! :)
 
I'll not be posting this to the forums, so I realize I'll be cutting down potential participants, but I can deal with that.

Time to go all meta on you.
 
When we first moved in to our new apartment, our landlord asked apropos of nothing if I was into "gaming." This was a 60+ year old fellow asking me this, so I was sort of amused and bemused at the same time. Could he mean, like, bejeweled or something? He didn't seem to be a hard-core RPG player, although looks as always can be deceiving, but I was guessing there might be something in common between him and me, which would make things a bit smoother should we subsequently set the place on fire when I'm conducting one of my cooking experiments.
 
"Yes, by gum," I said [I'm paraphrasing here], "I like games!  What kind of games do you mean?"
 
"Well, you know, slots. Poker. "
 
Argh.
 
I've been a gambler of sorts ever since I was old enough to put a coin in a slot: you played arcade games with the chance for glory, putting your initials into the high score list, and maybe even seeing an ending, although those weren't invented for most arcade games until much later. They're often games of skill, and they take an investment in time to get right. Even single-purchase games (remember those?) were a gamble when you didn't know how good the game was from the tiny picture in your Sears catalog, and now we get tons of compatibility errors, patches, and DRM shenanigans. There's an element of gambling in all of them, but not the kind of gambling that you think of when you just say that word out of the blue.
 
Gambling. Gambling was what he meant by gaming. They even have gaming commissions in the States that regulate gambling. They couldn't call them "gambling commissions" because there's something seedy about the term for some people. Gambling suggests recklessness, but gaming is good clean fun, even if a particular game or its participants wind up being pretty reckless. And this sort of gaming exists in a gray zone of legality, sometimes falling on either side, often because people have shown their ability to wreck themselves and their families utterly through irresponsible behavior.
 
That's not to say that "gaming" couldn't be used by random folks to mean board games, card games, whatever. It's certainly used that way by many species of gamers, of which I'm several at once. But I don't tend to gamble, probably because I know the odds are against me. I know that whatever gamble I take on a video game, I've already lost my money and am trying to earn it back through learning about the game and enjoying what it has to offer. The pressure is just as much on the people making the game to give me a good product, as it is my job to appreciate what's going on. Those kind of odds sound a lot better to me.
 
I don't doubt there are people who gamble AND play video games and board games (or sports, for that matter), it just feels like the gambler and non-gambler core groups live on separate islands, both of them exiled from the non-gaming mainland. I'm not sure what the people do on the mainland...  It's been a very long time since I tried to live in a world without games.