09.16.2002 - 10:14 a.m.

King�s Quest IV. Rosella�s Quest. This was the very first computer game to which I became seriously addicted. It had amazing graphics (for the time�1990 or so?) it had a girl hero, it had a seven dwarfs cameo, it had a dappled unicorn you could capture and ride. What more could anyone ask? I was obsessed.

King�s Quest, for those who have never played, is a puzzle game. You walk around, pick things up, trade favors for more things, then use the things to get yourself out of sticky situations. You do a lot of saving�you never know when you might get eaten by a cave troll, or fall from an unanticipated height.

Too, you had to do a lot of random checking. The frog prince�s golden ball is hidden under the bridge. The fisherman will give you his fishing rod for either the golden ball or the dwarves� gemstones, but if you use up the ball, you�ll never get the frog�s crown. If you don�t follow the dwarves into the mine, you don�t get the lantern that can help you through the cave, after which you better have Pan�s flute or you won�t be able to steal the apple from the snake. You get the idea. All these little, seemingly unrelated decisions that have to pile up and up before you can even think about winning the game.

And the worst part is, there�s no way to tell beforehand which order of actions will be the successful one. You can get pretty far even if you missed something absolutely crucial in the beginning, only to find that you must play everything over again. It takes forever, and is infinitely more frustrating the second time through.

There is a part in the game where Rosella gets eaten by a whale. You can get her out again by tickling the roof of his mouth, but only if you happened to collect the peacock feather on the beach before swimming out to sea. If you haven�t, then Rosella is doomed to drown in whale saliva.

I think what is hardest about life is not the learning who you are (although sometimes that�s up there), or even deciding what you want. The hardest part is the how of it all--the weighing of options, the creation of opportunities. I want a very specific set of things. How can I know that the courses I set lead towards any of them? What if being late to work today sets of a chain of events that lead me to utter ruin? Or is it being on time that would do that?

I love (most of) my job, I like who I am and I know exactly where I want to end up. It�s the in between that is bothersome�sometimes the alarm pulls me out of a dream, and I stare at the ceiling thinking about old boyfriends or the fact that I still need to take the GREs, and I just get that feeling of treading water, wondering if I should have picked up that pretty-looking feather.

-stonebridge

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