I’ve spent three years at the U and every one of them has been wasted. Sure, I enjoyed the drinking, experimentation and sleeping in classes. Those were all fine and dandy. In fact, if I couldn’t sleep and check Facebook in class, I probably wouldn’t ever go.
Perhaps because I enjoyed my extracurricular activities so much, I’m not so hung up on pounding three years worth of tuition down a rat hole.
You must be asking yourself, “Why in the world would he say such things? College educates our youth and betters our nation!” Wrong.
A friend of mine recently introduced me to a relatively new medium8212;video games. They seem to be gaining popularity and I can see why. Indeed, I’ve spent the last two months skipping class to educate myself on this form of entertainment and I now can honestly profess its superiority to college. Not only are video games more colorful and shiny than our dull classrooms, but they allow one a more comfortable seat. No one has ever complained about staying up until three in the morning playing video games, and with rare exceptions, you can never be marked “absent” from a video game. An Xbox will never fail you, and if it does, you can simply change the difficulty setting.
College really can’t compete with video games except in one aspect8212;education. Colleges claim a monopoly on “education” and “higher learning,” but they are quickly losing that edge to video games.
My last few months of playing video games have taught me things that are light-years ahead of what I’ve learned here at the U. In one of the first games I played, I learned that after WWII, a brilliant business magnate built a city under the Atlantic Ocean à la Ayn Rand. Later, in another game, I learned that WWII never actually happened, but that the 1940s were spent fighting aliens from Russia. I’m a history major and I didn’t know any of this!
Japan is infested with 150 (arguably 151) different types of monsters. The Utes won the national championship this season, and I played quarterback. I learned that if you kill someone in New York, all of their money floats in a convenient pile next to their corpse. The military has recently developed a machine gun with a chainsaw bayonet. Italian plumbers hate turtles but love mushrooms.
I spent three years supposedly gaining a higher understanding of the world, but I didn’t learn a single one of these things at the U. For the cost of one semester of college, you could buy every gaming console ever made and a library of games for each one and learn all of these facts professors have been holding out on you.
Editor’s note8212;This story is not real. Happy April Fools’ Day!
Jonathan Deesing