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To Set the Tone for this Video Gaming Column

Basically, I am a college student. I’m also in electrical engineering, and I’m pre-med, and I still have time to play video games way too much.

This summer, to decide whether I should really take the extra time and effort to be pre-med, I am volunteering at the hospital. My first couple of weeks have been particularly surreal. From the initiation, where I talked to a fellow who spoke ill of the hospital we were volunteering for and explained that they stick the volunteers in a closet to file papers, to the next week where I was hiding in the corner of a big white room filled with a few doctors and a whole hell of a lot of nurses praying that I don’t faint at the sight of blood.

To say the least, I wasn’t filing papers. Though, I didn’t see much. I could see a bit of skull sticking out of his head, and contusions on his face. I could definitely hear him screaming expletives as the nurses pulled his mangled body into a recognizable human position. I told myself I could hide behind the curtain if I got too scared and felt like I was going to faint, but I didn’t.

I do believe that it is necessary to look straight into the horrors of life in order to become a better person. Whether or not I want to be a doctor, I keep telling myself, it is a good experience to have.

I was late getting home. I rode home on my bicycle, shaky, but alert, and sat down in my chair to play some World of Warcraft.

The first thing I thought was that it was ironic that I decided to play a video game to escape violence and fear of death, but honestly I couldn’t find anything more fitting. In World of Warcraft, you are in a world which is free of death (at least death is very temporary, and as such not really death), and even pain is a bandage away from perfect health. As many kodos might barrel over my tiny, undead body, I am never smushed or hurt. I never end up in a level 1 trauma center.

Granted, Grand Theft Auto, or (lest I sound old) Carmageddon *might* have been a little more harrowing (yes, said trauma described above was a car accident), but the idea is the same. Video games are not about death and violence, because there isn’t any, really. And while I might be completely not accustomed to pain and death in real life, I am plenty desensitized to video game violence.

I really wonder what the video-game-playing members of the US Armed Forces think about all of this, especially since the horror of medicine is nothing compared to the horror of war.

Testing

Phoenix Guard.

If you’re anything like me, you’re a space obsessed Geek. Also and unrelatedly, you use twitter

If both of these things are true– NASA has a twitter feed you’ll want to check out

I love living now. I really do.

Let’s get this party started!

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