Online Games

Yevgenia Arlenok does a lot of things and knows a lot of people. The 26-year-old Ardmore resident, who starts classes at community college in the fall, works at day-care centers and schools and volunteers with charities ranging from Habitat for Humanity to Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern Pennsylvania. But when she thinks about the people with whom she's closest - the ones she tends to seek out when something's troubling her - she does not turn to the folks she knows from her multiple activities.

Establish a successful collectible-card-game brand, and it's like a license to print money. "We say it all the time: Card games are essentially cardboard crack," says Ken Baumhauer, the operations manager for The Roundtable Games & Stuff store in Conshohocken. "Once you play them, you can't get enough. [Players] come in and buy pack after pack, card after card. " The hard part is getting a toehold in this highly competitive field, which is dominated by the games Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!

As Pennsylvania introduces its first slots casinos, the issue of problem gambling may come to the forefront. In the first of two commentaries on this subject, we learn who is abusing gambling, why, and what can be done to help. More than 80 percent of Americans engage in some form of gambling: buying lottery tickets, betting on horse races, playing bingo, or visiting casinos. Most have no problems. They set limits for their time and money - and stick to them. Then there are the problem gamblers, people with difficulties ranging from mild to very severe.

Annette Jeffrey clicks the orange button on the lower right of the computer screen, shuffling the tiles in her vowel-plagued rack. Her sister, Beth, who lives in Seattle, is beating her 77-38, but Jeffrey has just noticed an opportunity for a three-word score that could put her back in the game. Jeffrey is playing Scrabulous, an Internet version of Scrabble that has been burning up the social-networking site Facebook. There, according to numbers visible online, the game draws more than 610,000 players a day; an affiliated Scrabulous Web site (www.

Finnish police are sifting through Web sites for links between the teenager who plotted a Columbine-style assault in Montgomery County and the youth who murdered eight people at a school outside Helsinki last week. The teenagers had communicated by e-mail, apparently out of a common interest in the Columbine school shootings and violent video games. The disclosure underlines how the horrific violence in Colorado still resonates among disaffected youths around the world. Plymouth Meeting resident Dillon Cossey, 14, had been trading e-mails with the Finn and "recognized the screen name and recalled having contact," said J. David Farrell, who represents Cossey.

From baroque to the big screen, the Lenape Chamber Ensemble and the Curtis Institute of Music have designed unusual presentations to introduce children ages 4 to 12 to the mechanics and magic of classical music this weekend. The elaborate melodies of Vivaldi, Handel, Pachelbel and other composers will fill the Delaware Valley College Student Center in Doylestown as the Lenape Chamber Ensemble performs classics from the baroque era. The ensemble members selected excerpts from their adult concert repertoire they thought children could recognize, and adapted their format to in-the-round to add intimacy between audience members and performers.

CSTV Networks and the Atlantic Ten Conference kick off their live video online coverage this weekend and through March 10 will feature 18 men's and five women's basketball games. CSTV is making games available as part of CSTV.com's XXL broadband package, for $14.95 per month, and will give access to Atlantic Ten games as well as sports from more than 90 other schools. In September, CSTV will begin carrying Atlantic Ten sports on television and broadband from all 14 schools.

After three years at the drawing board, Adrianne Lewis has this observation to make about starting a company: "You almost have to be . . . half insane to be an entrepreneur, because you have to put everything on the line for something that has no assurance. It's all or nothing. There's not that many people cut out for that. " However, Lewis, 42, of Langhorne, thinks that she is cut out for it. Her start-up company, adTraction, is scrambling for a foothold in online games - electronic versions of bingo, dominoes and the like - that are designed as blatant advertisements and called Game-Ads.

If searching for hidden treasure conjures images of a one-legged pirate and a mysterious island map marked with an "X," your imagination may be ready for an upgrade. Go to www.Geocaching.com, plug in your zip code, and select a treasure that sounds intriguing - say, "Alien Transport Portal #2. " Now enter the coordinates into your handheld GPS and head outdoors, where you'll use satellite navigation to find it. With a little luck, you will. Then you'll take something out of "cache," put something in for the next guy, hike home, and log back on to the Web to share your experience with a virtual community worldwide.

With the popularity of video games growing like a grade-schooler's Pokemon collection, it was only a matter of time before gamers got their own cable channel. Comcast Corp. announced yesterday that it would launch G4, a cable network devoted entirely to video games, along with an accompanying Web site, G4TV.com, in April. The channel initially will be available to seven million Comcast and Insight Communications cable-TV subscribers. Philadelphia-based Comcast, the principal investor in the project, said it could get the venture off the ground for less than $200 million if it could make the channel available to 20 million to 30 million cable subscribers.