Bell, Matt. "Ken Sent Me: Lost in the Land of Lounge Lizards." Hobart Fall 2008: 1-12.

One of the first computer games I ever remember playing that didn't involve reading text, responding to that text, and then waiting to see where such a response would get me was Sierra On-Line's perennial favorite, Leisure Suit Larry. It belonged to one of my cousins, and three times a year or so when the family would gather together at his house I'd ... no! Sorry, the very first time I played it was on the computer owned by my oldest sister's 25-year-old boyfriend Rob, who had a kind of Dennis Quaid thing going on in the jaw and eyes. I hung out with my sister relentlessly in the days of my pre-adolescence, and I guess I'd follow her over to Rob's house in Fairfax, where I'd sit and play LSL for hours while the two of them did lord knows what in the basement.

At any rate, I just recently received the new issue of Hobart, which is one of the more exciting journals to appear in recent years. This issue's the games issue, and it opens with a great essay by Matt Bell that brought back all those old memories. Of especial interest was this: "I am perhaps a member of the first modern generation to learn about sex from a video game instead of from a movie or a book" (9). LSL taught him about sex at an age where his folks weren't ready to do it and in an era before the Internet would have all the answers.

Were I to write an essay about LSL I'd let the thing wallow in your standard It Was Troubling As A Closeted Teen To See These Images And Wonder: What About Me? So thanks to Matt for handling it much better.

Another thing that makes Hobart great is the regular "DVD Extras" to each issue that editor Aaron Burch posts online. Go see. Be on the lookout for a brief little companion piece by what I've been told is a promising young writer to whom we should all pay more attention.