Gratitude

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Trigger-warning: This is a gaming post. No anti-nerds allowed.

Finally beat Civ V on King. I used Alexander to clear mofos out of Eurasia, and basically claimed the whole continent as my own. First I broke off the Incas. Then I stomped a mud-hole in Songhai and thus gave new, and epic, meaning to the term "Black on Black crime." After that I bribed a bunch of city states and ran Germany and France off the continent. I was actually going for a science victory, but I went ahead and built the UN and had the votes. The diplomacy system feels like it's way OP. As is the Great Wall.

Anyway, I did all this a few days ago, and then today I saw this:

A Virginia Department of Transportation employee spent nearly 30 hours of department time over two weeks playing "Civilization IV," a computer role-playing game, according to a state audit. In response to a complaint that Matthew Bolick, a Culpeper District land use engineer, was spending about six hours a day on personal use of the Internet on his computer, the state began monitoring his activity in February.

While reading, I kept thinking about how I don't know where my life ends and where my job begins. When I play Civ, I generally boot up an Audiobook from McPherson or Foner. Hell, my job is my hobby. And I have no idea how that happened. Willie had it right.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/05/gratitude/239083/