9:26 PM
When I was in seventh grade, I was one of the Good Kids. You know, the ones who got good grades and behaved themselves. As such, teachers occasionally asked me to help them out with this and that.

One afternoon, a teacher grabbed me before an assembly and asked for a favor. A guy was coming to speak to the whole school, and he needed somebody to run the slide projector. Could I do it? Sure, I said.

Flash forward an hour to the school gymnasim. One of the long sides is lined with bleachers, packed with the school population. Out in the half-court circle, a portable screen is set up. On the half-court line, about halfway between the screen and the bleachers, is a small wooden table with a slide projector sitting on it. In a chair, next to the table, is me.

The program begins, and it turns out, our speaker is an ex-convict, here to do a Scared Straight kind of program. He tells us a bit of his personal history, the robbery he committed that got him sent to prison...and then he begins telling us about prison.

Now the kids up in the bleachers, they could fidget all they liked. Solong as they didn't get caught, they could whisper among themselves, do what they wanted. Not me. I had to be listening for the occasional "Next slide, please." And I was all by myself. All I could do was look at that screen and listen as he described prisoners' assaults on each other with homemade weapons, the....unpleasant....social networks that form, the foreign materials that disgruntled prisoner kitchen-workers drop into the food (metal shavings off cans, parts of rats...), sadistic guards...

Years later I would see A Clockwork Orange for the first time. When Alex is strapped into the chair and forcibly "reeducated", my friends snickered. Not me. I remembered that day in seventh grade, as I listened to an ex-con descibe the horrific details of his experiences. I remebered getting sick to my stomach, so sick that it was hard to breathe. I wanted to run, to leave, but all I could do was stay and hope that the next slide would be the last.

I don't know about any of my classmates, but I was certainly scared straight that day.

On Friday night, I saw Black Hawk Down. It's an interesting time for the movie to come out; in a time when the public would seem to respond more readily to fluffy jingoistic flag-waving films like Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down is the story of an American military operation gone horribly wrong in a place it's not clear we should have been in the first place. (Or if we should have, should we have been more decisive? Or less? Even the book, which goes into much greater detail and which I highly reccommend, doesn't so much answer these questions as give you more cud to chew on.)

Halfway through the movie I again thought back to that day in seventh grade, when I was forced to endure something that I'd rather not be watching--not because it was of bad quality, but because it was a heavy dose of the unpleasant, uncomfortable truth. People die in combat--suddenly, unexpectedly, and with a terrible finality. It doesn't matter if they're better trained, better armed, and have a better plan. All it takes in a combination of a few monkeywrenches in the gears and an unending stream of enemies and it's even odds every second whether you'll live or die. Black Hawk Down depicts all of it unflinchingly, and in doing so evoked that same sick-to-the-stomach feeling I remembered from junior high.

Go see it. Then I dare anyone to try and argue why 'realism' is more important than 'fun' in games.

I think I'll go play MAME for a while. But I don't think I'll forget the movie--or the truth behind it--for a long time.