I don't really like or play Guitar Hero. But those criticizing it should remember that it's not significantly different than any other game. Does playing Risk make you a great war strategist? Or chess? How about the card game, War? That one's pretty simple, yet I recall spending countless hours playing that game with my friends in elementary school. Or even football or basketball, which are all expressions of the physical violence and competition that no longer dominates our lives as it used to? Go Fish is pretty basic and doesn't teach you anything about the meaning of life, or about fishing. Even these days, I can get addicted to Solitaire or Spider Solitaire on my laptop if I have nothing better to do, and those don't do much for any of my basic life skills.

Guitar Hero does not make you a good guitar player, and no one playing it says it does. Playing Halo does not make you a genetically enhanced supersoldier. Playing Zelda does not make you a sword-swinging fairy boy. Playing Assassin's Creed does not make you a 12th century Palestinean killer. Playing Mario does not make you a shroom-popping Italian plumber.

Personally, I prefer to play games that are plot- and character-driven, or games so open-ended that I can make up the plot in my head. But someone who gets addicted to Guitar Hero because it is sort of mindlessly fun and challenging is no more mockable than someone who gets addicted to any of the thousands of other "games" humans have been playing since cards and dice and kickable balls were invented.

Is that why The Sims is so popular? I guess it must be our innate need to fight the Great Evil Enemy that compels us to... make our characters use the bathroom and go to work every day. Yuh. I know I am waiting for Nintendogs: Dog Fighting edition, to make my life complete.

In other news, I think the need to believe that you are fighting an evil enemy is much more important when you are actually doing the fighting. When you've got blood on your hands, and sometimes the blood of innocents, it makes it easier to sleep at night to think that you are doing it for good. Here in America, it is considered heretical to criticize our troops, even though they exist for the sole purpose of killing other people. What a strange paradox that in a society that supposedly loves peace, we are universally expected to unquestioningly support those of us whose duty it is to make war. I suppose, then, that the people sitting here in America, rooting for the war without getting any dirt (or blood) on their hands, may be supporting the notion that the enemy is evil because they feel as much latent guilt as the people fighting on the ground.

Uh, sensitive? Don't give Opus too much credit. My feelings are not hurt by some cartoonist who thinks Guitar Hero, a game which I do not play, is silly or a waste of time.

Like any rational person, I was merely commenting that poking fun at Guitar Hero is not particularly funny or insightful, at least not in the way Berkeley has done it here. That's my $.02 not only as a gamer but as a person capable of telling the difference between clever humor and tired humor.

Sad to say, I worked for Wal-Mart for a summer (they paid better than anyone and were in desperate need of workers). Some of the few things I liked about the company as I read its own self-reported news network thing were its $5 generic prescriptions and its drop-in clinics. Sometimes even big mean corporations have good ideas that help people. Who knew?

Gaming may be moving towards photorealism, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily better. Even the most realistic-looking virtual face requires the willing suspension of disbelief to look real. The face requires a believable personality. The methods of storytelling have always gone from crude to more complex in our society, but the more crude variations are no less compelling. I giggle a little when I go back and revisit my old games, but it doesn't take much time before I get sucked into them again. When I see a fight-scene in a play, part of me may roll my eyes and wish I was watching a highly realistic, blood-infused fight scene from a summer blockbuster, but in the end my belief in the validity of the fight rests not so much in which set of images and motions looks more "real" as which set of circumstances compels me to set aside my knowledge that what's happening is artificial.

Someday, game developers may create characters that appear to be real. But the person playing the game still knows that it's fake. An artist cannot trick his audience into believing that the artificial is, in fact, natural. The true art lies in convincing the audience that its artificiality is not what's important to begin with.

The best advice I've ever heard on the subject came from one of the BBC What Not to Wear people. Think of your small breasts as a filter for all the singe-minded jerks out there who are only interested in women for their breasts.

There are plenty of great guys (myself included) who prefer women with smaller breasts. Besides, you shouldn't let other people's taste dictate your medical decisions. You are the one who will have to live with the consequences of breast enhancement surgery for decades to come.

We already know that regardless of whether or not Hillary's words were a magic bullet, Walter Shapiro sure won't think so and he will spare no effort telling you about it.