What Are You Playing This Weekend?

You know the drill, recruits. Drop and give me twenty... or so words on what you're playing this weekend.

You can write more, if you like: this is one of those people's armies. Or maybe that weird hippy outfit from The Men Who Stare At Goats. So long as it's not the outfit from Bill Murray's Stripes. That's really not a film worth revisiting. Sorry, Ramis fans.

I'm excited to be playing a game of actual poker against actual human beings in an actual room this weekend. More actual things I hope will be involved: whiskey, playing cards, chips, victory.

This will be the first time I'll have played poker against human beings. I am 32. Still, better late than never eh? I'm sure my skills have been thoroughly honed by a dozen or so hours playing the Telltale poker games: I can bust out a line you've heard far too many times at the drop of a hat.

I think what I play the next day is going to depend on what happens at this poker game. If I'm filled with angst concerning the cruelty and avarice of my fellow humans, I might play through Gods Will Be Watching. If I'm full of vim and excitement because I have, against all odds, won some money or at least not lost everything, I might have another crack at something odd like Space Channel 5: Part 2. If I'm grossly hungover and dour because I drank my sorrows away, then it's probably time for me to start my fourth or fifth game of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Or if I'm grossly hungover yet somehow chipper, I'll have a crack at Super Time Force Ultra.

So many delicious possibilities. I can feel the manifold ribbons of paths not yet taken unfurling ahead of me, an unguent quantum web of potentiality. How wonderful to imagine that what determines the route I take will be as simple as the combination of choice and poor decisions.

Fancy words for a man who'll probably spend both Saturday evening and Sunday morning sat in his pants, experiencing vague shame and regret.