My perfect game includes no evil overlords or villainous thugs; it takes place in no dungeons or decaying urban landscapes. To defeat an evil overlord was the adolescent fantasy of a generation ago; to be a villainous thug appears to be the adolescent fantasy of today. I am not an adolescent and my needs for fantasy have changed.

My perfect game contains no snarling semi-naked vixens dressed in skintight leather, wielding breasts and weapons of improbable dimensions. My perfect game contains instead fully naked dryads who peep at me shyly from behind the trees that are their homes, and, when I have successfully lured them out, come to sit with me upon the grass and read me verses from Shelley in voices that resound gently like silver bells.

My perfect game is a ramble through the woods in autumn, a wander over hilltops lit by bars of sunlight piercing through a gathering sky of storm. Ruinous stone circles rise from the earth and whisper ancient magic to me, and men in cloaks and sandals with eyes the color of the sea tell me tales of hunting the walrus on the shores of Ultima Thule. We play games of kubb and hnefatafl on the beach in the light of the driftwood fires, and drink the aqua vita made by the monks of Lindisfarne.

Then the stars grow brighter and I unfurl my wings and soar aloft, swooping and diving, dancing in the canyons of the clouds, rejoicing in the chill night air and passing above the twinkling lights of the cities of men. South I glide to descend and play senet with young Tutankhamun and mancala with Shaka Zulu. I drop in on Solomon and debate philosophy with him for a laugh, but in my perfect game I am wiser than he and he gives me spices and cloth-of-gold. I load them all upon my robo-camel, fire up the steam engine, and together we trek with a clank and a clatter across the Euphrates and into Persia. And there I wager all the spices and cloth-of-gold on a single game of shatranj with the court magician of Darius the Great (I have to teach him the rules, for shatranj will not be invented for another six hundred years). But in my perfect game I win, and so to pay his bet the magician must turn my robo-camel into a real camel and set her free.

And so laughing I steal a horse from Darius's royal stables, and we ride like the wind to Samarkand, where we learn to play polo together and I trade Solomon's spices for a palace with a thousand fountains and a personal spacecraft that requires no fuel. From time to time I invite Kubla Khan around for coffee and petits-fours and a game of go. We have a good laugh at the expense of that junkie Coleridge, but later on I realize that I owe it all to him, that Romantic junkie poet—all of it, the walruses and the spices and the spacecraft too, for Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented the willing suspension of disbelief.

My perfect game is a garden of earthly delights, not a dungeon of brutality and pain. My perfect game is filled with mystery and wonder, not blood and suffering. My perfect game is easy. My perfect game is beautiful. My perfect game is joyous.

—Originally published in a slightly different form on the GameSetWatch website