Amy Brady, a professional gamer better known as Valkyrie of Ubisoft Entertainment's team Frag Dolls, planned as of the first week of June to play competitively at the World Series of Video Games event in Louisville, Kentucky. As of the second week of June she planned to compete and protest: as part of WSVG festivities would be the selection of a Miss World Series of Video Games. Brady's first recorded reaction was an expletive. That was "all I have to say," she wrote, "what the heck is this crap?" Brady went further, however, castigating the event's organizers after confirming that Miss World Series of Video Games was model search, and declaiming to young women who would be present in Louisville the moral imperative to boycott. Once in Kentucky, Brady took part in a parody, Mister World Series of Video Games, and as the next WSVG event — one to be held in Dallas — approached, it was rumored that models booked for flights to Texas might have to settle for becoming Miss Something Else.

The weakness of Brady's argument was the unfathomable cause for indignation. Brady cited three offenses the WSVG organizers committed by hosting a beauty contest, on premises, the winner of which would receive a title derived from that of the gaming event itself: first, a thematic departure from gaming; second, a damaging association with women in professional and semi-professional gaming; and third, the high valuation of physical beauty. One week after Louisville, it's still unclear what got Brady so animated as to foment a boycott of the pageant. The first two purported crimes proved non-applicable, while the third remains one in which Brady and her fellows are partially complicit, if only to demonstrate that it isn’t much of a crime after all.

Brady wrote that in Louisville "all the other 'festival' activities" were "gaming related." Presumably her difference stemmed mostly from the event's elevation of "the hottest chick." The WSVG Dallas agenda heralds such "extra-gaming" activities as a tug-of-war, a paper-airplane contest, poker and something called Duct Tape Wars. Not yet forthcoming from Brady has been a warning that an unassuming public will mistakenly and indelibly believe the competitive gaming circuit to be riddled with musclemen, delinquents, gambling addicts and adhesive fetishists.

If Miss WSVG had supplanted the gaming competition one might move to call the "world series" a farce. It didn't. As Brady noted, the pageant was indeed marketed to regular women, those involved in an industry older and eminently more respected than gaming — modeling — and if headlines are any indication, Miss WSVG was crowned in Louisville without having been recognized as heir apparent of electronic entertainment. Brady appealed to WSVG organizers to arrange "a real contest for girl gamers based on all things: a complete package that includes gaming skill and knowledge." There was such a contest, titled Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter: Double Elimination.

There were no entrance restrictions for the double-elimination event but that entrants a) register a two-man team and b) come up with fifteen dollars each. Girls could enter, right off the street and, ugly or not, win the Ghost Recon tournament. Now it so happens that three of the teams were pairs of girls, two of them from Brady's Ubisoft-sponsored Frag Dolls team. The Frag Dolls, for anyone who cares to look closely, are as faithful to the concept of the pitchman as Lucille Ball when she was hawking Philip Morris between skits of home-life burlesque with Desi Arnaz: talent sells. Members are contracted by Ubisoft to be equal parts gamer, editorialist and good looker; which is to say none of them is awkward or thoughtless or unattractive.

One of them acknowledged, when asked, that cause for her hire rested partly on her prior triumph in a contest whose superlative was "sexiest," from scoring that weighed beauty over gaming ability. The contest was "superficial," she remarked, but hardly a reflection of her authenticity since her vocation and avocation alike are gaming. Would she have come as far as she did without the contest? No reason why not, though she wouldn't have gained much had she refused to enter. In addition to a Frag Dolls contract she works in the video gaming industry — despite having once sashayed up and down a catwalk to win one of those contests that are, as Brady put it, "based on looks but appear to be based on gaming."

Girls are not boys. They giggle and groom, and like to be pretty. Occasionally, they try, in public, to be prettier than the next. Brady celebrated this immutable law of biology and culture in her first paragraph. She should have stopped there.

Take a celebrated video game tournament champion with lordly self-regard and a game he can't win, and you get "World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things" by Street Fighter virtuoso David Sirlin. World of Warcraft is game developer Blizzard Entertainment's popular Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG, inviting players to lead their own fantasy characters through an expansive online realm on open-ended adventures with thousands of other players simultaneously — a costumed scavenger hunt of a video game whose seductive nature has been compared to that of the casino slot machine.

Sirlin had better revise his article lest too many readers decide that it should in fact be titled "World of Warcraft Not Conducive to David Sirlin's Personal Achievement, and Reasons Therefor." In quoting Justice Potter Stewart and Raph Koster to place "fun" in relative terms, Sirlin would deprive himself of his primary argument insofar as "fun," not "work," is subjective. If it is legal and ethical and not meant to be serious, whose business is anyone's frivolity? Yet that is not what Sirlin does: he tells us that "fun" cannot be had without efficiency or purpose — and not just for him, but everyone.

Sirlin identifies himself as an "introvert." Fine. But by his own description he is in fact one particular kind of introvert, a directive and exclusory introvert who is driven by efficiency, competence and achievement — and susceptible, when theorizing on sociology, to projection.

That lack of perception directs Sirlin's principal criticism of World of Warcraft: Blizzard's apparent value of participation, especially commitment of time, over that of singular accomplishments. Sirlin calls it "absurd," which he can, and claims that it "has no connection to anything [he] does in real life," which is probably true. Now, what about everybody else? What does Sirlin think of volunteer organizations, where time and energy is invested not for the sake of dividend or profile, but philanthropy? Or fraternal orders, or congregations, or parishes; wherein older members, when they pass on, are revealed to have quietly attended for fifty, sixty, seventy years? What does Sirlin make of seniority, tenure, or pension? Meritocracy is good; but it is an ideal, and it must contend with the tangible social values of loyalty and commitment.

Sirlin derogates inefficient use of time through the example of a commercial artist who boasts a fast turnaround. The artist generates "ten times more value than an artist of average skill" no matter how long the lesser artist works, he says; and that is true. But Sirlin implies that skill equals speed, prima facie — and that is baloney. Most crafts require periods of abeyance. Oil paint glazing is applied in successive coats, clay dries, plants mature, meat marinates. While the "grind" process of MMORPG leveling may be onerous Sirlin doesn't acknowledge the absence of meritocratic shortcuts in a five-lap race or a marathon. Nor does he seem to know what often constitutes a day of fishing.

World of Warcraft encourages cooperation between groups of players, institutionalizing it with associative guilds — and Sirlin condemns all this with the kind of weird absolutism of Ayn Rand and her (patently ironic) sycophants. His defense is introversion — but it is not so much that as it is pertinacious individualism. And worse still is his insistence on playing a team sport alone. "This game is marginalizing my entire personality type," he pleads. For Heaven's sake, Sirlin, don't play the game. Ah, but what about the great many "brainwashed"? Sirlin's determinism can't save them — yet if that were realistic, all gamers would always play MMORPGs. And they don't. Sirlin's Little Johnny will stay away from World of Warcraft's crowds if he doesn't care for them.

There are some curious errors in definition and contradictions in logic. Sirlin applies the words "tactics" and "strategy" to explanations interchangeably, further softening his argument. They are not synonyms. Tactics is the use of immediate surroundings through methods that suit the moment to meet short-term objectives; strategy is precise, detailed, sagacious and logically coherent planning to meet a long-term objective. Street Fighter is purely tactical; the essence of strategy is a turn-based game. World of Warcraft is probably somewhere in between, but Sirlin hardly helps us with that. Sirlin decries Blizzard's terms of service which proscribe certain activities and expressions, even though "there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech" — when in fact it is the First Amendment that constitutionally guarantees a private entity like Blizzard to regulate its commercial affairs as it wishes. And, finally, we are reminded that World of Warcraft only contravenes Raph Koster's definition of "fun," at the same time Sirlin promises to personally take action and efface alternate definitions of "fun," at the same time Sirlin evangelizes self-reliance.

There is nothing universally appealing about MMORPGs. I find them boring and consumptive. But I haven't a bone to pick, like Sirlin, who typed up a fustian screed when he should have been extruding his frustration in an off-broadway game of Street Fighter. Mr. Sirlin: smash buttons, not paradigms.

I recently made the fruitful acquaintance of the member of Ubisoft Entertainment's video gaming team Frag Dolls whose sobriquet is Jinx. For about a year, ending in December, I was active on the forums constituting the Frag Dolls' online community. Three weeks ago, a fellow in that community was one of several recipients to whom I sent the latest mix of a song by my old band, the Concord. As was reported to me, he had the song both in possession and in mind when Jinx advertised her need for a musician. He told her about my hobby and work; she asked to hear evidence of it; he gave her the mix. Jinx thought enough of it to commission me, for a plenary submission of thanks and an undisclosed material reward that will arrive by post, to compose a short, thematic musical track and a few sound effects for the podcasting — or online broadcasting — that she has taken up as part of her work with Ubisoft.

The track I composed is here. When the request was first made, I thought of contacting Jonn and Gabe, two friends of mine, members of the Concord and writers of music both (Jonn nearing a master's in composition at the New England Conservatory). They compose more freely, extemporaneously, penning original tunes with ease. My labors in music are, like those in all other creative pursuits, amenable to purpose — profiting from inspiration but born of necessity. Musicmaking has always been intimate and especial to me; I am wary of the incidental melody striking another as frivolous. After regular work with a band ended in early 2003 I limited my efforts at new material to scribbling titles, concepts and descriptions of melodies and sounds on scraps of paper. And then, two weeks ago, a fine offer to compose. Well, OK — propensity won out. I did not wish to score The Frag Dolls Theme (Opening Titles). What I completed was received well, its method of construction worth explaining in this space.

Over ten years I have accumulated hundreds and hundreds of sound samples and effects that resulted from digital editing, the balance from five or more years ago in the salad days of recording — swept up by the exhilaration of actually recording on a higher order than a boombox. In the latter Nineties I eschewed, for a time, most proper musical instruments, instead swinging a homemade mallet at whatever object up to which I could sneak a microphone; separating and splicing, culling hiss or noise or the dullest sounds, then using digital effects to make whatever was left otherworldly. A few of them I inserted apropos for this song or that. Most of them I hoarded, waiting for precisely the correct application, as if a sound would be spent upon its placement in multitrack.

Listening to the two-minute piece, one can hear a single synthesizer progression that, as a motif, predominates. It topped a list I made of sounds that should have been titled "What Have I Got?" Nearly a dozen samples in all, they were selected from the list and assembled as a collage — the resulting style atypical for me. My accustomed writing is discursively chromatic and formally compact (such as this piece). The podcast track is succinct, even, but for the odd meter, simple.

The progression is called "Curesque," redolent of something Briton rocker Robert Smith's band might have played in the late 1980s, which Gabe created during a collaborative project he and I began in 1997. He played a simple melody on a keyboard with what might have been a harmonica module. Then, innocently enough, Gabe reversed the recording — instant ethereality. Then he left it alone, intriguing as it was, in favor of more productive material. Months later I adopted the sample with the rest of Gabe's library, and promptly lavished it with effect after effect. De-tuning chorus? Why not. Tremolo phasing? Can't go without. Reverb? Yes, two helpings, if you please. The summer afternoon "Curesque" assumed the form it would hold for six years I remember well, as my repeated playing back of the sample accompanied the approach and passage of a dark, brooding electrical storm. Infatuated with the transmogrification, I clasped the flush harmonies to the end of a song whose writing credit was Gabe's, where they really didn't belong. Now "Curesque" rests comfortably at the center of its very own opus; even in music production are there such things as reflection, contrition and reconciliation. That is, unless Gabe is outraged at the recasting, in which case I shall plead: Ha ha — too late!

The drum track's fundament is one measure from a session recorded five years ago. Eric, the musician behind the kit, was playing an early variation of a Concord song; an A-Major-in-five-four denunciation of the Irish Republican Army that came about when, two years before, I served coffee to a young man who identified himself as a stateside fundraiser for Sinn Fein. A virtuosic drummer, Eric expounded on the basic rhythm in several takes; one of which provided the key measure and another supplying the drum roll used at the ends of phrases. Cadences were played for subdivisions of five quarter notes; yet while the accents are strongest in that signature a given measure is suitable for, with respective elisions, four or three or two. Here I needed one drum loop, and in toto Eric's performance yielded an entire library.

Added to that loop were several close-miked drum samples. A kick, a snare; another kick and snare, suitably altered, for the piece's middle section; and a heavily distorted fill that is both phased and panned in stereo. A third snare drum strike came from a recording session in Athens, Ohio at the end of August, 2001. A dulcet colleague of a friend of mine attending Ohio University had thrown together a band and the band needed a sample disc for entrance to local venues. Intended for jazz, the kit on site sported a husky snare. I enjoyed the session — a generous offer given my inexperience — and that drummer could wield a stick.

The next sound is, if you can believe it, the classical group Anonymous 4. Rather, it was. Such alchemy would only occur to a recordist, as aforementioned, in this case that four women's voices performing sacred medieval polyphony are splendid when played forwards — so they must be sublime when reversed. Done. But, you see, I needed a rhythm complement to an old track of Gabe playing the electric guitar. Using a tool called an "envelope follower," which molds the dynamics of a signal around those of a second signal — my choice was the drum track — I broke the quartet into staccato sixteenths, then arranged it to play in syncopation.

Nomenclature fails the sound entering with the bass. Wary of mimetics, if I am to call it anything I call it the "Violator sound," an eponym drawn from British synth-pop band Depeche Mode's 1990 album — dotted, as you would expect, with a noise similar to this one. When a sine wave makes a glissando from a frequency near the highest reaches of human hearing (20 kilohertz) to one approaching the lowest (20 hertz) in less than 200 milliseconds, it creates a sound appropriate for electronic music when played singly; ineffably conducive to the appeal of same when played in multiples, like two succeeding 32nd notes.

There was an opportunity for humor in an inhale-exhale sequence of anacrusis and downbeat, and I took it. A college friend, one Sergeant Daniel Kissane of the United States Army as last I heard, volunteered his services when I began to toy around with electronic music in the fall of 1998. Those who know Danny will find the "exhale" downbeat sound's original recording characteristic.

I would say, in the words of a bawdily enterprising proprietor, I do not play but rather operate a guitar. Chords, melodies, and singing while strumming and plucking are techniques of which I am capable — you want finesse? May I please introduce you to someone who is not me. With my acoustic guitar in an open D-tuning, the B-string tuned downward to an A, leaving only tonic and dominant, I added to the music two pairs of phosphor bronze accoutrements: jangly rhythm parts, a capo set at the sixth fret and eleventh fret; and a couple scrapes with a brass slide, one musical and the other, well, expressive.

The terms of contract for this undertaking were loose; it is implicit that the original work is mine but that it may be used indefinitely to introduce Jinx's podcasts. What more to indite between yourself and one whom you esteem in person and profession? Were I to be chided over the impracticality of working for nothing I would refer to what I told Jinx: In the spirit of generosity (pro bono work is edifying) and self-interest (I now have for myself an infectious tune made of odds and ends that once lay useless) I composed the music and sounds happily expecting appreciation in return. That and satisfaction, each of which I now have in munificence.

ON APPRECIATING APPRECIATION: Thank you, Jinx.

Britain's Independent is a devotee of the European left and makes no bones about it, so the snide characterization of President Bush's visits and allotment of aid to hurricane-stricken localities that Craig Brett found is what one expects — and if a subscriber, looks forward to — in the paper's pages. The Telegraph is the Conservative Party's paper; the Mirror is Labour's rag. This morning, Jay Nordlinger happened to praise the candor — if not the wisdom — of the press overseas:

This is how it's done in Europe, largely: There's the Socialist newspaper, the Christian Democratic newspaper, the Communist newspaper. Everyone's all nice 'n' labeled, or nice 'n' known. I would prefer that the New York Times, L.A. Times, etc., be objective, disinterested organs, but if they're not going to be, let's be open about it. That is so much better than the pretending so many have engaged in, for so long.

Objectivity in American reporting is a 20th-Century phenomenon, the currency in which anchor-led, corporate news organizations have conducted business in nearly all of living memory. Newspapers of the 1800s were party advocates, sharply partisan and sought after for that reason; the most striking example of this (and the palliative effect of time on politics) would be the Union's widely varying editorial reactions to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Pick up the wrong paper and one found an armful of contrary views.

Yesterday, Michelle Malkin spoke about the blogosphere as a guest on Fox News' the Big Story with John Gibson. Gibson, otherwise firmly on the right, is an old media Tory, soft on Dan Rather and CBS News' travesty; happy to note the network's half-admission of wrongdoing without adding that ten days of evasion came before it. He was derisive of bloggers and tried to bat Malkin around with a straw man about blogging's niche in public discourse, subtly introducing the idea that blogging would replace professional journalism — whereas bloggers actually pride themselves as hobbyist media commentators, making use of deliveries from the milkmen of information like Julia Child. Gibson's insistence of no standards among the internet — a dismissal that sounded very reminiscent of talk radio's critics in the early 1990s — was a direct defense of the American public's decades-long appeal to authority, not veracity, and the slowly fading ideal of fact through trust.

Fact, of course, can only be established by proof. Bloggers defend the legitimacy and integrity of their work primarily by demonstrating the ability and operational inclination to correct oneself immediately and conspicuously. By definition, an agency that performs once a day will correct itself once a day — maybe. But there's more to the example of bloggers, and that is the social inclination to scrupulously maintain a good reputation, precisely because bloggers are "nobodies" who might just post an entry in their pajamas. Online, there is no value in brand name: the dial can turn to any number of places, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of addresses. True, there is some politics, fashion and plain luck in blogging. But like all mediums empowering the individual, where a completely unknown website can be reached just as easily as the internet's most popular page, meritocracy governs bloggers. Respect depends upon accuracy and honesty; as the fall of "the Agonist" blog for plagiarism in early 2003 demonstrated, bloggers who linked to a popular website were just as quick to shame and abandon it when the author violated traditional intellectual principles.

Yet Gibson and his sympathetic guest, foil to Malkin, grinned, aren't there countless nutty sites on the internet? Of course — but how many of these are, partisan differences aside, leading the blogosphere? In the world of "objective," professional journalism, the audience is expected to be satisfied with a by-line: that's how brand-name journalism works. You buy it on their promise for product quality. There's no brand name in the blogosphere. You like it, you link it; if the blog jumps off the deep end or is consistently unreliable, you back away. As James Lileks noted, a blogger links to the original statement he refutes: readers are invited to decide for themselves. Old media all-too-often puts it in their own words. Powerline and Little Green Footballs would not have won the attention they did in discrediting CBS's documents if they weren't right on the money. CBS News tried to ply the American public with claim of entitlement for ten days because that brand name had long since subsumed fact by proof. America should have believed in the forged memos, we were told, just because Dan Rather said so.

Should the American media organizations admit their biases and craft them into mission statements? Maybe; the greatest sin of a partisan press office is omission. I'll argue any day that while Fox News is staffed by many anchors on the right, it daily invites guests on the left to present their case and, most importantly, reports everything. Its competitors, the broadcast networks and CNN, could easily make a separate 24-hour channel out of all the events and information they refuse to cover. The media could take enormous strides forward simply by reporting the news.

But we can all agree old media is kidding itself by seeing the blogosphere as anything but an audience that has now become active, knowledgable and nationally capable in its own right. Gibson's sympathetic guest yesterday went one step too far in the segment, chortling at the excessive "ranting and raving" found regularly on political websites. Excuse me, sir, have you ever watched 24-hour cable news?

Cassini-Huygen's got some more pictures of the never-before-beheld. Give them a look-see.

The internet and click-to-buy is here to stay — which is just as well, since small businesses aren't looking back.

...Or moon. It's a beautiful day in south Titan, and the discovery of cumulus-like methane clouds on Saturn's moon is shaking up the scientific community.

I'm about halfway through a hefty short essay on the party ties that bind, Schwarzenegger Republicans and Andrew Sullivan's goofy warning that the GOP sky is falling. Come back in about an hour. In the meantime, feast your eyes on Cassini-Huygens' latest.

NASA space probe Cassini-Huygens is less than half an hour away from a reverse firing to plunk itself into Saturnine orbit:

During its orbit entry, the probe will fly closer to Saturn than it will at any other moment of its four-year mission to come, giving it the chance to study the planet from about 20,000km away.

"In a sense, Cassini and the Huygens probe are like time machines that will take us back to examine a world we've never seen before, a world that may resemble what our own world was like 4.5 billion years ago," said Jean-Pierre Lebreton, the European Space Agency mission manager and project scientist for the Huygens probe.

By comparison, our own moon is 384,000 kilometers away and quite a bit smaller than the second-largest planet in the solar system. Cassini will be up close — very close. Let's hope he remembers to pull out the camera. (Streaming webcasts are here.)

FROM JPL MISSION CONTROL: "Godspeed Cassini-Huygens, and may we see you in orbit."

Two weeks ago, space probe Cassini-Huygens took this image of Saturn moon Phoebe from 20,000 miles. Funnily enough, it probably reminds most of us of an ordinary science fiction shot. But this is real. More Cassini exploits here, complete with snap gallery.