The offer doesn't seem like much. A couple of gaming manuals and a T-shirt, none of it worth much in actual dollars.

In exchange, a Vista man known on the Internet as Stan! (yes, with the exclamation point) hopes to someday get a robotic dog worth more than $2,000.

"I don't have a real dog," Stan! said about his motive. "I've had cats. My family wasn't really a dog family. After college, I developed allergies to a lot of standard pets. It stopped really being a viable option to own one."

Still, even Stan! (real name Steven Brown) isn't ready to shell out two grand on a dog that's more likely to attract geeks than a girlfriend. But Stan! does have an idea: If he can trade something he has for something greater, he can trade that item for something worth even more, and eventually he'll find someone with a robotic dog to trade. But if he doesn't find someone to make the trade, maybe he'll eventually have something so valuable he can sell it for enough to buy a robotic dog directly.

If the idea sounds familiar, you probably have heard of Kyle MacDonald, a Canadian who offered a red paperclip for trade with anything of greater value.

"I'm going to make a continuous chain of 'up trades' until I get a house. Or an island. Or a house on an island. You get the idea," MacDonald wrote on his Web site, http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com, last July.

The paperclip was traded for a pen, which was traded for an original ceramic doorknob, which was traded for a Coleman stove. The trade cycle continued with a generator, a beer keg and Budweiser sign, a snowmobile, a three-day stay in Yahk, British Columbia, and finally a cube van (medium-size truck).

If MacDonald can get a truck for a paperclip in less than a year, Stan! has high hopes that he will get his robotic dog.

"We'd been following the One Red Paperclip site and how brilliant that was, and I thought, why not?" Stan! said. "This could work. It's not a house. It should be easier than getting a house."

If the quirky name and the trading plan haven't clued you in yet, Stan! is an imaginative guy. He's a writer, cartoonist and a game-designer who earns his living as the creative content manager at Upper Deck Entertainment. It should go without saying, but he's also a self-described, card-carrying geek.

"OK, I don't actually have a 'Geek Card,' but I do carry my RPGA card in my wallet, which is pretty much the same thing," Stan! wrote on his Web site.

RPGA is the company that makes Dungeons and Dragons, the ultimate geek game. Stan! used to work for the game's creator, TSR Inc., and Wizards of the Coast, which bought TSR in 1997.

While his is far from a household name, a humble Stan! admits his work has brought him some recognition and even a slight celebrity status among fans of the game the Dragonlance Saga, which was created by a team that included Stan!

At 41, Stan!'s varied career also includes five years teaching English in Japan. He moved from Seattle to Vista last year to work for Upper Deck.

Despite his geeky interests, Stan! never collected gadgets and never even knew there was such a thing as a robotic dog until he read last month that Sony was discontinuing production of its Aibo robotic dog.

"I always thought it was like a concept car, where they trot it out and say how cool this dog is," he said.

When he read that the Aibo had in fact been for sale since 1999, Stan! immediately began thinking of buying one.

Programmed to mimic moods and even develop certain "likes" and "dislikes," the Aibo is a sophisticated robot that mimics traits of a real dog. It can learn to recognize its name, its eyes glow red when angry and green when happy, and it can recognize its owner's face.

"And it's cute, too," Stan! said.

About 150,000 Aibos were sold before Sony announced it was discontinuing them.

With production discontinued, Aibos likely will become scarce. But even before Sony announced it was discontinuing the robot, Stan! thought the $2,000 price tag was prohibitively expensive.

When Stan! remembered MacDonald and his red paperclip, he began thinking the trading concept could work for him, although he didn't want to just copy somebody else.

"I thought, I want to take his idea and make it my own," Stan! said.

MacDonald took something with almost no value, a single paperclip, and traded up to something extremely valuable. Stan! plans to trade something that also has little monetary value, but is of great personal worth to the person who gets it.

Most people won't even recognize what Stan! is offering for trade: two souvenir cups from Gen Con 2000, a black TSR polo shirt, a TSR cloisonne pin and a copy of the "Dungeons and Dragons Conversion Manual" by Skip Williams.

"Gen Con is the biggest game-industry convention," he said, giving some insight to their value. "The cups are from 2000, the year of major revisions to Dungeons and Dragons."

The TSR pin and shirt are from when Stan! worked at the company, and the conversion manual was used to help existing players understand the revisions to Dungeons and Dragons.

Stan! said each item was very meaningful to him at one time, but lately he has just been keeping them in storage boxes. Somewhere out there, he hopes to find a fellow gamer who will appreciate their unique value.

So far, Stan! has received just a few trade offers, all from people who want to swap his items for other game-related merchandise.

To follow Stan!'s progress to get an Aibo, visit his Web site, http://www.OneRobotDog.com.

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.

Related links:

Stan!'s Web site: http://www.OneRobotDog.com.

Kyle MacDonald's Web site: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com.

To learn more about the Aibo, visit http://www.aibo.com.