Via Glenn Reynolds, I see that Christine Rosen (whose anti-Reynolds hatchet job I earned the logical right not to read) also has major, um, issues where it comes to videogames.

My advice is to skip Ms. Rosen's tendentious and pretentious essay, and instead read the Infocult review:

"Playgrounds of the Self" is an odd essay, a sort of swirling, congealing swarm of complaints that skitter across the surface of evidence it can't be bothered to understand. It grumps and whines instead of assembling a coherent argument. Christine Rosen, author and one of the Atlantean senior editors, touches on an ambitious suite of historical and reflective sources, none of which actually connect with gaming, and all of which distract us from her total failure to complete a line of thought.

I wish I could recommend it to the curious and concerned as a useful example of some types of gaming criticism. But the article isn't typical of anything. For instance, Rosen has actually looked at some games and even ventured into a gaming store, which some critics avoid doing. She has also heard of more than one game (although didn't identify playing any one, as far as I can make out).

But because I believe in being fair, I will say that the video game piece is better than Ms. Reynolds's hatchet job against Glenn Reynolds. For starters, you don't have to log in and share personal information to read the lengthy judgment of videogames. Why, she even implicitly criticizes the invasiveness of such online strategms:

We all, in some sense, have two forms of identity—one external, one internal. External identity is the way others see us, and internal identity is the way we see ourselves. External identity is also how the world categorizes us, and includes markers such as our credit report, Social Security number, health insurance, political affiliation, and even the history of our consumer purchases. It is this external identity—routinized, bureaucratized, entered into databases, largely unalterable and largely out of our control—that we talk about when we talk about identity theft, of which 9.3 million U.S. adults were the victims last year, according to a 2005 Better Business Bureau survey. Already we can avail ourselves of clean-up services that remove the traces of ourselves left on our technical devices. Unlike an old toaster, an old computer contains personal information, which means you cannot simply throw it away without also tossing out clues to who you are.

The fact that we have to go to such lengths to defend and protect our identity suggests deeper questions about the meaning of identity itself. Identity, in our world, is both a commodity and a self-conception, something capable of being sold, misused, and misconstrued by strangers at the click of a mouse, and something we can alter ourselves through reinvention.

At least she warned us last year.

MORE: My thanks to Glenn for linking the Kass ice cream post. Glenn says:

Good thing I didn't have a chapter on eating ice cream cones in public!

I can't speak for Dr. Kass or Ms. Rosen, but I would have been very forgiving . . .