teh n00bish quest of a lvl1 reporter!!!111one

After reading the new Harry Potter book in about 24 hours (and I even slept properly, ate pizza and watched a great documentary about dinosaurs! The protagonist was a Velociraptor – or, as I call them, Punkosaurus, for the male had blue spikes on his head.) I could hardly find my way back into the normal world. Then however I read this article about the computer game Global Conflicts: Palestine in which you play a reporter – Palestinian or Israeli, you can choose – and have to write articles about the situation in the area. No, it’s not as dramatic as “Special Operation 85″ (which, by the way, has a story that embarrassed me when I read it even though I’ve no connection to the creators of the game – it’s just so incredibly trite!), it’s an educational game (as is SO85, but in a different way, ha!) and you can download a demo on the homepage.
I did that and installed it… the game takes a very long time to load but my computer is from ‘02, which is a million years in computer development time. The demo allows you to cover one story – you have to write about a checkpoint, how it affects people’s lives, research the background, why is it there.
So I did what I always do with games – everything but what I’m supposed to do. First I ran in the middle of the road, causing cars to stop and honk (The had golden Sprinters! You could tell it’s a Fatah-governed area.), then drove around in a taxi and ran around the B’t Selem woman, then, yes, I did interview people at the checkpoint until everyone from the Israeli soldiers to the pregnant Muslim woman trusted me and I brought the Imam his notes but then I suddenly realised I had only 3 quotes in my notebook, having deleted the rest.I wanted, nay, needed, 5. So I tried to talk to everyone again but they only said “I don’t have time for you right now” or “Come back later”. So I added these sentences as quotes and they became my article.
Blazing headline: A report from the checkpoint! Then, underneath it, the text began: “Leah said: Come back later, I don’t have any news for you.” The reader, dumbstruck, continues reading: “Roi told me he couldn’t talk to me right now as he was busy.” And then, the text ends with the memorable phrase: “M. (can’t remember the name) said he didn’t have anything left to tell me.” Makes me seem like a great reporter. What an article! For some reason the newspaper didn’t really like it. But at least the Imam had his notes.
Ah well, I had also thought it was funny in Thief: Deadly Shadows to throw cheese at people, empty Garrett’s flat and repeatedly close the door in their faces when I was supposed to be a cynical master thief.
And now I’ll write an article as an Israeli in a Palestinian paper, a really bad one, and throw all my colonialist arrogance into their faces!