GAMES AND OTHER GAMES (C)1994 Alan M. Schwartz In the beginning there was Pong and it was good because it made a fortune while putting Atari on the map, allowing CRT junkies planetwide to ride smoking adrenals while they maneuvered a blip of light and their lives slipped away. Flight Simulator proved to everyone's amazement that game addicts would pay as much for a simulated aircraft console interface as they paid for their computer. Soon there were the 80486DX/50, Diamond Viper video accelerator, SoundBlaster card and DOOM. Aficionados could blow a whole day loosing rivers of alien blood in a virtual universe of sight and sound more real than their own rooms - on merely the shareware version of one third of DOOM. Thus did United States' primary and secondary students succumb to emotional dependencies and mental reconfigurations wrought of interactive audiovisual hyperstimulation. I did two months of research at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Victoria in mid-1994. Said provincial seat of higher learning held the Undergraduate Computer Lab, itself host to dozens of trademarked IBM PS/2 monochrome horrors that scored a Norton Index of 3. (Were you to construct a DOS clone from Korean swap meet gleanings and maybe some hardware stolen from a laundromat you would grab a Norton Index of 10 or more.) I had diagnostic software that would not run on these PS/2 hogsnorters. There was even one box running CP/M. I was impressed. Given the broad international undergraduate and graduate student population in British Columbia, I had gleefully anticipated cutting edge virtual reality, pornographic, ultra-violent and otherwise glorious and forbidden games from across the globe to be infesting the local equipment. What a haul was to be mine! A weekend late night visit to the locked computer lab did indeed reveal a tight knot of graduate students barking at each other as electronic farts heralded each lost game. It was a Japanese ripoff of Breakout, and it was the only game in the place. TETRIS was well beyond their feeble imaginations. I had walked through a security door and landed twenty years in the past. While these budding geniuses were absorbed by a pursuit now assigned as homework to First World eight year olds learning Visual Basic, albeit in color and with music in the latter case, I thought of another campus happening. Operation Trackshoes had gathered more than 500 cripples, Mongoloid idiots and other developmental and hereditary culls; their otherwise unemployable parasites - parents, keepers, nurses, and counselors; medical equipment, transportation, spin doctors and flacks; custom clothing, logos, temporary sports infrastructure and emergency medical stations; and the Press for four nights and two days of "challenged olympics." Perhaps a quarter million (admittedly Canadian) dollars had been blown to dust so that people too stupid or inept to own a dog could play with their genetic garbage in public and receive public and official accolades for siphoning off the stolen productivity of taxpayers in the names of compassion and National Health Insurance. I can buy 1440K floppies for $(US)0.60 each in lots of fifty by walking into any hometown computer store. A box of ten mystery manufacturer 1440K floppies in Canada is about $13-14(Cdn) plus another 14% for sales tax - local cumshaw plus the national Goods and Services Tax. A well-configured Canadian DOS clone runs $5000+ plus 14% more, pricing it beyond the reach of everybody short of corporate middle management and higher who use the things as high status desk ornaments. The $250,000 squandered on a feel-good media event could have purchased 50 hot microcomputers and evolved a continuing harvest of undergraduates possessing education useful in landing local employment, or graduate positions in more advanced cultures. Educate the intelligent and you have taxpayers who can be sheared for 40 years. Skin the universities in the name of official charity and you obtain a weekend's room, board and circuses. Operation Trackshoes disappeared into newspaper recycling bins Monday evening, there to swell the public treasury for a national average of $0.17 net receipts for every $1.00 gross billables of recycling costs. A few soiled, discarded adult diapers in the bushes remained to mark the passing of this "important social and cultural milestone, evidence of our commitment to challenged citizens throughout the great nation of Canada." US students may receive "scholarships" for any of a number of reasons. Such boons accrue for race, creed, color, religion, handicap, disease, athletic ability, parents' political connections... The only minor and fast vanishing qualification is demonstrable scholarship. We are traveling in the express commuter lane of a road already paved by Canadians, and more's the pity.