The rise of the internet is, I think, what rang the death knell for role-playing games like D&D.  It's easier now to just jump online and play.  More visual, too.  And it appeals to the same kinds of folks who like role-playing games.  Even I haven't played a role-playing game in years, and I was an inveterate gamer.  But I play many online games.

I will say that many sessions of Dungeons and Dragons were very pedestrian--simple hack-and-slash sessions without much else going on.  This sort of session was easily replaced, even improved upon, by online computer gaming.  But if you had a good Dungeon Master leading a great story with solid gamers, it became a great interactive story told by everyone, and completely engrossing.  I have never seen a computer game yet that even came close.  It had much more in common with improvisational theater than "Doom 3."  But unlike improv theater, which tends towards skits and simple physical humor, you ended up with a complete story in a richly detailed world.

Some to watch for especially:

The ad hominem attack.  "Ad hominem" means "against the man" and a good way of thinking about it is "attacking the messenger."  A proposal isn't true or false because of the person who brings it.  But this logical fallacy comes up a lot because it feels right.  Kitty Kelly is being attacked for her book about the Bush family--but not on the truth or falsity of her book!  They're simply calling her things like "this discredited writer" and so forth.  This is an ad hominem attack--and see why it works?  Because people tend to look at the source to decide whether something is true.  To a degree, this helps--when the source is a constant liar, like Rush Limbaugh or Bush or Cheney, you can gain valuable insight as to whether you should believe something.  But when someone has dug up a lot of dirt on a lot of people, as Kitty Kelly has, it doesn't make her a liar.  But they want you to think so.  Anyway, that's an "ad hominem" attack.  Bush and the Republican noise machine make use of this all the time.

The straw man fallacy.  This is when you set up your opponent unfairly by mischaracterizing his position.  For example, "Kerry voted for the Iraq funding bill before he voted against it, therefore he's a flip-flopper" is an example of the straw man fallacy.  There were two Iraq funding bills; they were different in that the first removed part of the tax breaks for the rich to pay for it; the second, which the Republicans wanted, simply tacked it on to the national debt.  Many Senators voted for one but not the other.  Kerry has also made it clear that if his no vote meant not at long last getting body armor to the soldiers, he would have bit his tongue and voted for the second bill as well.  Bush also said he would have vetoed the bill Kerry voted for--so, essentially, he voted against the funding bill before he voted for it!  By not making any of this clear, and then calling Kerry a flip-flopper, Bush, Cheney, and many other Republicans and conservatives have committed the straw man fallacy.  It's used because not everyone has the insight or the facts in order to see through the rhetoric.

Hey, your bike may be gone, but your bike lock will still be there.

Kryptonite is rushing out a new lock design.  No word yet on whether current owners will receive the new lock for free or some sort of discount.

The really bad part is, the BBC did a report on this problem in 1992, and it was never fixed!  Is the CEO of Kryptonite a member of the Bush Administration or something?