My kids played it online, and I had been recovering from a very serious back injury which left me in traction for eight months, unable to move anything except my arms. I could use the computer, and was able to get online, and even to run, jump, and play with my kids, although physically I was trapped inside a world of hurt. Again, I see online gaming as part of various rehabilitation programs, some physical, some emotional, and some spiritual. One could produce a run-through --a rehearsal, as it were-- of virtually anything one could imagine, given a powerful rendering engine with lots and lots of options for effects, which is exactly what the G.O.D.D. (tm) engine is. It is in fact so potent and sophisticated in AI functions that it is presently being used by another game development group to create 3-D action games for the blind.

3. What's been the reaction to the GoreBag Project?

It's really been very spooky. Imagine being online in a Team Fortress game . . . you've got the flag, your team mates are escorting you back to base, your snipers covering your escape and your engineers protecting your back and your flag . . .suddenly, three or four players start typing (yes, there's team talk and common talk, because in these online games, there's a chat function, so in Quake, at least, it's a kind of chatroom with guns).

"I'm a newbie . . . ."

"Okay, so there's a buncha newbies in here, big deal," you think to yourself, or at least I did . . .

But then the next line comes over, "Please don't shoot me, I'm a newbie."

Now I get it. They're spewing my lyrics back out at me.

Then I put two and two together, and get four: Sassy and Bastard at Planet Quake just had a "BeatDown", a LAN (computers physically connected together with cables in one single location, like a large convention hall) party, in which they played In Your Face and gave away copies of the CD to the winners of the competition, along with bigger prizes such as game development computers and such (some gamers win Ferraris and trips around the world).

In addition to fellow gamers singing my lyrics at me online, the whole project has been going very well; we've tried to stay small, because our ISP is new at this and is afraid of all this gaming eating up his bandwidth . . . but in spite of our efforts to stay small, our gaming clan, LOL (Legion of the Lost, although we are also called variously "Laughing Out Loud", "Little Old Ladies" and far worse, previously unprintable names, too . . .has grown and grown and grown, and Clan [LOL] now numbers over 300.

It still gives me the shivers to call it a "clan", but the term is far older than the hate groups which smeared its repute and most of the games are built along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons, or were, in the beginning, thus spawning the term, I guess. Recently, however, there has been a notable swerve toward high-tech 3-D gaming environments. Our newest online shard-adventure 3-D offering, the name of which has not yet been officially determined, is a return to these early Medieval environs.

4. Any future projects in the musical pipeline?

During the past several months, Jimmy, Bob and I have produced a jazz album, Harlem Daze; a double country album, Country Gold/Accardi; Medieval Dances; A Tribute to Gold/Accardi (we're music writers, not performers, and we figured that, since we're no longer actually in the business, nobody would ever do a tribute to us, so we did it ourselves in the styles of various celebrity musicians, and made a half dozen copies for us and a few friends) and most recently started recording the second Tribute Album, this time including those hits we missed the first time around, such as Low Stool Volume and My Quaking Baby. Sure, we record all the time. Why not? Tape is cheap. And singing is good for the breath. Or so I'm told.

5. Would you regard Bardo work and cyberspace as analogous?