Williams, Patricia J., "Jeu de Vivre" (magazine article)

Williams, Patricia J. "Jeu de Vivre," Diary of a Mad Law Professor, The Nation 282.15 (17 April 2006): 9.

On the way to more explicitly political matters, PJW starts off with an anecdote of her experience with her 13-year old son reading together the April 2006 issue of MAD Magazine, specifically the article "35 Reasons Why School Sucks," with #34 "military recruiters who try to entice you into enlisting in 'the one place worse than high school.' The picture shows a recruiter coaxing a hapless young man with this line: 'It'll be like living in a video game—but cooler.'" PJW's son doesn't want to be in a video game run by the Army, but "He thinks it would indeed be cool to live inside a video game […]." PJW finds "the attraction to a fantasy of perfect control […] completely incomprehensible. It's a generational thing, I suppose, but I worry that the real world is more and more like a computer game"—a significant observation precisely because it is on the real world and games, with no immediate reference to science fiction.