My wife and I have very different approaches to gaming in general. I favor tactics, strategy, and cunning: if I can defeat you before you know you've lost, that's a good victory; if I can defeat you before you know we're fighting that's a great one. One of my proudest adventures in Skyrim was clearing a cave full of bandits: not because I fought hard or against valiant foes, but because you could raise every bandit from the dead and there would still be no witnesses to the deed.

Beth, on the other hand, favors raw power and force. If there is nothing left of her opponent, that's a good victory; if there's nothing left of the battlefield that's a great one. She punishes you for daring to face her in the most extreme manner possible; she never maims when she can kill and she never kills when she can obliterate.

I had played through Dragon Age Origins with my usual assassin-type build, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but was wondering how the game experience is different between classes. Beth came to a plot quest that I had been curious about since my own play-through, because I talked my way past it and I wondered what I had skipped.

Beth, upon meeting the fellow with whom I had dealt in treachery and deceit, immediately pissed him off then caved his head in to illustrate her point. When she was finished playing whack-a-mole with his minions, she went to the valley beyond, where a big dragon flew overhead, perched on a cliff, and roared like hell.

I hadn't anticipated a dragon actually showing up, and was super curious to see how the game would handle this - was this meant to be a fight, or was talking my way out of it just one of several ways to walk past this thing? I started looking for options, a way out, but Beth had already charted her course.

You see, she had found a gong.

She rang the dragon's goddamn dinner bell, pulled out her sledgehammer, and yelled "GET YOUR ASS DOWN OFF THAT CLIFF AND BRING IT, BITCH."

She lost that fight. And the next one. And the one after that. Realizing that Operation Dinnertime was probably the only tactic I'd get to see here, and since it seemed unlikely that the dragon would choke on the dwarf trying to swallow it whole, I went to my office to futz around. About an hour later, Beth came bopping in and proudly announced that she'd beaten the dragon. "Oh, wow!" I said. "How did you do it?"

She looked at me like I was nuts, and said "I hit it with my hammer until it died."