You answer the knock at your door to see a short man with wavy hair and lively light blue eyes smiling at you in the morning sunlight. You say hello, trying to parse out what this stranger is doing on your doorstep and hoping this won't be too much of a hassle. You have a lot to get done today.

He beams. "Hi, I'm Todd Howard, T-O-D-D-H-O-W-A-R-D, of Bethesda Softworks, a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft!"

"That's… nice. This is a bit of a bad time for me, but I can spare a second if this is important. What are you here for?"

Todd tilts his head to the side, his smile somehow growing even larger, "Oh, I'll only take up a moment of your time, I promise. I was just passing through the neighborhood-"

"Passing through?" You live in a fairly out of the way part of suburbia. It takes deliberate effort to miss the throughway and end up here, grinning like a goblin.

"That's right, Bethesda has me going door to door telling everyone about our amazing line of games. They feature a fully dynamic engine with NPCs that are not scripted, and thousands of lines of recorded dialogue, as well as-"

"I'm not really a gamer," you say as politely as possible, wondering how you're going to get out of this conversation.

"Our games are for everyone, they're super easy to get into. You can be whatever you want, do what you want, go where you want. You set the pace, do the main quest or ignore the story altogether. The quests, have I mentioned it has infinite quests? And all of this just works, it just works." Todd gives an obviously practiced smile again, his teeth glinting like diamonds. He looks so genuine and earnest, but it's hard to trust a man with such shiny, perfect teeth. He keeps going, on and on, until he's red in the face from talking about Skyrim®, Fallout®, and the graphical features and technology he assures you has been poured lovingly into the games. All of which goes into one of your ears and out the other. You couldn't care less.

Eventually you manage to convince him to leave, but the next morning, bright and early there he is,