All together now: If you learn to share / You'll have more friends / And together you'll

All together, now: "If you learn to share / You'll have more friends / And together you'll sing / Sharing is a good thing."TOTWARE 101The entry-level title in the Fisher-Price Ready For Learning series, Play Family (Davidson, Windows, 18 months to 3 years, around pounds 23.50), presents animated versions of Fisher-Price toys; big, shiny and rounded, just how toddlers like them. Number One was a vision of Hell; Number Two prophesied the Second World War; Number Three has been the subject of intense speculation, and accusations of a Vatican cover-up. The Fatima Network: Our Lady of Fatima Online claims to reveal the final secret, in a sequence of prevaricating texts that ought to carry a warning similar to the "may involve a long call" small print for phone chatlines.Boiled down to bullet point length, the Third Secret concerns a crisis of faith within the Catholic Church. To help avoid this, and to further the BV's aims, which appear to revolve around the consecration of Russia to Herself, visitors are invited to click on a Perpetual Rosary.

It requires faith and a Java-capable browser.KEY STAGE ZEROThe people behind the Jump Ahead children's series know how to tweak parental Achievement Angst. The subsequent moves are inevitable; to Nazi science, and thence to the Jewish cemeteries."HTML MARYSince 1917, Fatima has established itself as one of the world's premier BVMs, or apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Other characters in the pageant are Hamlet and the gravedigger, Faust and Mephisto, Abraham and God.The cycle moves on to 19th- century propositions about what lay inside skulls, from phrenology, to physical anthropology, based upon racial hierarchy, to Cesare Lombroso's epiphanic identification of criminals as primitive throwbacks: "At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal ... He defines the aim of the Game as "meditative insight through the juxtaposition of ideas". Charles Cameron also stresses the meditative aspect of Hesse's Game, comparing it to rosary devotions.MacNamee has the rare gift of enabling sentences to do their work in tranquillity.

Anything can be associated with anything; a word with an image, a cat with a fiddle, a symphony with a law of physics. Charles Cameron, whose site contains probably the greatest concentration of Glass Bead Game theory and practice on the Web, gives the example of a link between Eliot's verse "The dove descending", from "Little Gidding" in Four Quartets, and Vaughan Williams' composition The Lark Ascending. The Web, where every form of information is turned into digits and joined by links, seems a natural habitat for such an activity. It's a tolerant pastime, in that it can stretch from bandying trivia to the contemplation of the transcendent The Game is what the players make of it. Illustrating what can be done with a simple "move" such as "a pail of water", Charles Cameron devises a tale about how the bucket was one of a group from a railway station, representing the four elements: another contained sand, representing earth, another was empty, and therefore contained air; on the outside of each was written the word "fire".Perhaps the subtlest digital Glasperlenspielmeister is Terence MacNamee, whose interest in medieval liturgical drama has inspired him to make "solemn" games in the spirit of Hesse's Ludus Sollemnis, which is performed as a type of liturgy. MacNamee's Web work is distinguished by its composure, its scholarship and its lack of embellishment.

He has a monk's cell of a home page; devoid of graphics and with a background in default grey, but presented in English, French, German, Irish and Latin ("pagina domestica"). Is it really ethical to ask such scientists to try it out? I am glad that I am not faced with such a moral dilemma.. In Hermann Hesse's novel Magister Ludi, or The Glass Bead Game, the players belonged to a monastic order, 400 years hence, in the post- apocalyptic realm of Castalia. Even a generation ago, when Hesse was nearly as big as Dylan, the concept proved too high for most of the novelist's admirers. Now that so many different flavours of Romanticism are on offer, the public gets its Central European Catholic spirituality from the composer Grecki rather than Hesse. He has found a niche in the Net, however, thanks to a band of enthusiasts who are intrigued by the possibility of realising the Glass Bead Game in hypermedia. According to one of these pioneers, Gail Sullivan, "the essence of a Glass Bead Game would include a system that showed interrela- tionships between artifacts across various disciplines for the purpose of showing universality." In short, it is a game of associations.