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.