My younger cousin sent me an email, inviting me to “meet her online” in Spicy Town. Spicy Town is a fictitious town in an online video game produced by the company that sells Slim Jim spicy snacks. So I went to the online game site to meet my cousin there. I had to create an avatar to use to play the game. It was kind of fun, creating the avatar. The avatar was called my “spicy side.” Setting up my “spicy side” was quick, easy, and amusing. I had to take a picture of myself and upload it to their site, then their program helped center my facial features around their pre-drawn outline of facial features, then they make a funny little creature with horns and funky hair, and then they turned me loose into the video game.

During the game I was supposed to go around collecting Slim Jims that I found lying around on the ground. I only found three, but I only played for a few minutes, trying to find my cousin. There were other people’s avatars in the game walking around too. Some seemed to be fighting with each other (I don’t know why, maybe one insulted the other, those spicy sides are unpredictable and uncontrollable!) some were just walking around ranting and raving. The game has chat functions and buddy lists and chat functions, but I didn’t stay on it long enough to check those out; the baby started fussing and I had to get off the computer and take care of lunch time!

If you want to play the game yourself, go to www.spicyside.com!

(This post brought to you by the architects of Spicy Town.)