(continued from previous page) ...in over 12 years. If you could pick one game to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Seebs: That's really hard. I'd say it'd either be one of the roguelikes, or World of Warcraft. I have spent whole years playing pretty much nothing but Angband. I wrote patches for it, which were accepted by the maintainer, and then replaced in an overhaul six months later.

Dave Wales: I've never heard of Angband, what's the premise of that?

Seebs: Angband is in the genre called "roguelike". Are you at all familiar with those?

Dave Wales: No, and I'm sure a lot of the younger guys such as myself, probably won't be either. Care to elaborate?

Seebs: Okay, so, back in the day, computers were these HUGE boxes, back in a room, and you didn't actually work AT the computer, you worked on a terminal, which was connected to it; there might be ten or twenty terminals, or more, on a single computer. And they were generally just text interfaces.

When the first "cursor addressable" terminals came out, that let the cursor move back up the screen, one of the first uses was, of course, video games. The most famous was a game called rogue. You were an @, and there was a screen full of rooms (...'s surrounded by - and |) and corridors (#). Letters were monsters. You moved, and they moved. If you tried to move into a monster, you were attacking it. You could find armor, weapons, and food, and your goal was to search a dungeon to find the Amulet of Yendor, and then carry it back out of the dungeon. Movement keys were hjkl for left, down, up, and right, and yubn for the diagonals. (It's really easy once you're used to it.)

Anyway, there are DOZENS of games based on that basic principle, and one of the famous early ones was called Moria, or "Mines of Moria" for long, and you were supposed to go into Moria and kill the Balrog -- shameless Tolkein rip off there. Angband is a hugely expanded version of Moria, which has pretty much every single historical or named figure from the books, and tons of named weapons (you can find Sting!) and items (if you see a Plain Gold Ring, life has just gotten interesting...). It's an infinitely replayable game, with a lot of depth, and you can play it on just about anything with a keyboard.

Dave Wales: With today's youth having the attention span of a cardboard box, I think a lot of us would be in trouble with a game like that. You’ve been a member of PSU.com for a long while now, is there anything you’d like to see implemented?

Seebs: All I ever use is the forums. I didn't even realize for a long time that there was any connection to anything beyond the forums!

Dave Wales: Have you started utilizing the front page at all since that discovery?

Seebs: Not really. I'm a creature of habit; I have a bookmark for the forums, and I never really go exploring. Maybe when I'm less busy!

Dave Wales: The forums are an excellent source of news as well. We have a lot of great members such as yourself always popping up with something new to bring to the scene. You've almost filled a book here with me tonight thus far in terms of personal gaming experience; however, do you have anything you could possibly add to this that people on the forums wouldn't know about you?

Seebs: I think most of the forum people know I'm a programmer and a writer; I've been doing technical writing about Cell since late 2005, thus my original interest. I have spent a lot of time on the internet discussing D&D, and I also do a fair amount of religious discussion and debate; I think I have somewhere over 60k posts out there on various topics. I used to have a lot more free time ... (continued on next page)