Hi,
I'd follow tadman here, that I suspect a USER thing. Do you run the script under different users? Maybe give out some diags at the beginning: what is the actual value of $HOME, du you get it from %ENV?, what is the actual username that run the script (print $ENV{'USER'}) and the like ...

If you got that you could split the $gamedir at the pathseparators (/) and subsequently chdir to them to find out whether there are some permission in the way. Something like

foreach (split/\//,$gamedir) {
  next if ($_ eq "");
  print "Changing to $_\n";
  chdir($_) or die "error in $_";
}
[download]

Regards...

Stefan