Literary War Games

A while ago I got to wondering what happened to an old computer game I used to play in college, "Worms." It was a little game where you command an army of worm soldiers and try to defeat another player with bazookas, shotguns, dynamite, and the like. Lots of explosions, good fun. I never had the actual game on my computer, but played it on my roommate's.

After a bit of searching, I finally found and downloaded the game exactly as I remembered it. (There's something a little frightening about downloading a file called "Worms" to your computer.) I played it for a while as both teams, since there is no computer opponent option, and then remembered that you can change the name of each individual soldier. So, to make things interesting, I decided I would make a team of famous British authors face off against famous American authors.

At the end of the tournament, the screen displays a summary of achievements. The soldier of the match, of course, was Mark Twain. The most useless soldier was Ernest Hemingway. (I'm not surprised. I picture him mostly drunk.) The most violent soldier was James Joyce (who seemed to get in a lot of fights with John Steinbeck, I noticed.) I thought the results were amusing, considering that I wasn't trying for them.

The best coincidence? For each of the three matches, whether because of a poorly thrown grenade or a missile blown back by the wind, Virginia Woolf couldn't stop killing herself.

Ah, I'm such a nerd.

3 comments:

SWP said...

That's hiLARious!

Hemingway is a useless git.

Monster Librarian said...

That's classic. Everything was so fitting. I love that Virgina Woolf kept dying. I love Hemingway, though he proved himself useless. :)

I told my friend at work and we both had a good laugh.

Kt said...

Yes, and Joseph Conrad was the captain of the British team, and I believe I had D.H. Lawrence in there too, whose writing I loathe, so I didn't mind it much when he got blown to bits.