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This holiday season, the video game industry is looking to reignite sales as two game titans, Sony and Microsoft, launch the next generation of game consoles.

Their target demographic is the group of dedicated players known as hard-core gamers. Dive into the wide world of video game culture on YouTube and you'll hear that term being thrown about.

So what exactly is a hard-core gamer?

"Well, a hard-core video gamer would be somebody that is there at every single midnight release," said Kelly Kelley, known in competitive e-sports circles as MrsViolence. "Playing the game for at least five to six hours, beating it within maybe 48 hours of release. That would be a hard-core gamer right there."

Kelley qualifies. She makes a living as a gaming personality. You can find her online most nights, streaming matches of Call of Duty to her many fans.

That's right, gamers stay up at night and watch other people play video games, the way sports fans watch football. It's about the most hard-core thing a gamer can do.

In fact, more than 32 million people worldwide watched the world championships of the strategy game League of Legends this month, according to the makers of the game.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people playing cellphone games like Words With Friends.

"I have parents," said Kelley, "and they love those games, and they ask me all the time: Does this make me a gamer? Yes. Absolutely it makes them a casual gamer."

The Other Side

Casual gamers. That's the other big group that gets attention from game makers. Inside gaming culture, "hard core" and "casual" are tribal divisions.

For the hard core, gaming is the passion. Casual players enjoy games, yet they don't steep themselves in gamer culture rites like midnight openings. Still, as the gaming population grows, and gets older, exactly where those two tribes begin and end gets a little blurry.

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Saturday is the day the Obama administration promised it would have HealthCare.gov working smoothly for the majority of people who need to sign up for health insurance.

As the Obama administration scrambles to fix the glitch-plagued site, experts are beginning to worry about another problem that may further impair the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

Health insurance companies say they're seeing numerous errors in a form that plays a vital part in the enrollment process. The problems are manageable so far, but many worry about what will happen if enrollment surges in the weeks to come.

The 834

It's safe to say that the vast majority of consumers have never heard of an 834 EDI transmission form, despite its crucial role in the process of signing up for health insurance. It's a kind of digital resume that tells an insurance company's computer everything it needs to know about an applicant, explains Bob Laszewski, a health policy consultant.

"It contains all of the person's enrollment information, all the information that [an] insurance company needs to get this person entered as a policy holder," Laszewski says.

The 834 has been around for a long time. The architects of the Affordable Care Act intended for it to play a central role in the sign-up process, says Tim Jost, a professor of law at Washington and Lee University.

"The 834 information is information the insurers have to have to get people enrolled in coverage, which of course is the point of going through the marketplace," Jost says.

Multiple Mistakes Make Insurers' Jobs Harder

But health insurance companies say the 834s they are receiving from applicants on the federal and state exchanges have sometimes been riddled with errors, Laszewski says.

"Duplicate enrollments, people enrolling and unenrolling, inaccurate data about who's a child and who's a spouse, files just not being readable," he says.

Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of West Virginia has been steadily processing new customers ever since the launch of Obamacare this fall. But Highmark President Fred Earley says mistakes in the 834s are making the job harder.

"We've had some situations where the records don't track, or we've seen duplicates," Earley says. "We've had situations where we'll get a record to show that someone cancelled coverage, when we've never had a record to show they enrolled in the first place."

Earley says his firm has been dealing with the problems by calling up state and federal officials and correcting the mistakes. The exact cause of the problems is unclear. The Obama administration has been slowly making fixes and officials say they're making progress, but Laszewski says the fixes are not fast enough.

"The error rates have been falling," he says. "HealthCare.gov has been making progress, but we're not to the point yet where people can trust that high-volume enrollment can occur and we won't have serious customer service problems."

Laszewski says the test will come over the next few weeks. People who want coverage to begin on Jan. 1 have until just before Christmas to sign up, and there's likely to be a surge of new applicants in the weeks to come.

"What happens if we start getting hundreds of thousands or millions of people signing up by the December 23rd deadline, and the insurance industry is receiving hundreds or thousands of these a day?" he says. "That's what everyone's worried about."

The editors offer endless avenues of interpretation; the typed transcriptions of Dickinson's handwriting are superimposed atop the outlines of their corresponding envelopes, so the multidirectional layout of the text isn't lost. A series of esoteric indexes — by shape of the envelopes, by what direction they are turned, by whether or not they have "penciled divisions," for example — encourage the reader to speculate about the various relationships Dickinson may have conceived between paper and words.

It's a good season to chase after the ever-elusive Emily Dickinson. In addition to this book, there's a corresponding exhibit in Chicago, and all of the poet's online archives were recently organized into one accessible hub. This book is a rare gift for all poetry lovers. We are lucky to have more of Dickinson's ongoing "letter to the World / That never wrote to Me," an endlessly fascinating correspondence, addressed to any of us who find it — so long as we're willing to answer it with concentration and curiosity.