Apasati pe Control pentru a impusca

Every Friday evening for the past month, I've time-travelled back to 9th grade. Back then, my friends and I would meet at my house, where my dad had installed a 16-port 10/100 Base-T ethernet hub and had wired nearly every room in the house with network ports. We would set ourselves up in different rooms and play Quake, Quake II and Myth: The Fallen Lords for hours and hours. The hallways were filled with the sounds of shotgun blasts, grenade explosions and shouts of, "How ya like dem apples!?"

Now, I'm reliving those online playing days in my school's computer lab. In February, several students asked me to open the computer room for games in the evening. It sounded like something I would enjoy doing and something that could easily raise money for improving the school's computer equipment in a few basic ways. After getting approval from the school principal, I began running game nights every Friday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Every week since then, over a dozen boys have come to play games on these aging but still fun computers. They pay two lei per hour, and with eight computers available, we are able to raise 32 lei (about $2.50) per week. When I started in February, I only had Doom II, Sim City, Civilization II, Quake II and Monster Truck Madness on the computers. We also had no network on which to play the games, because the power adaptor for the ethernet hub had been either lost or stolen.

Two weeks ago, two major things happened; we raised enough money to buy a power adaptor for the hub, and I received a shipment from my dad full of memory chips and some of the best games from the mid- and late-90s, including Warcraft II, Quake and Starcraft. I installed the memory, upgrading each computer from 16 or 32 MB of RAM to 192, their maximum capacity. A memory upgrade like this would have cost thousands of dollars when the computers were new in 1997, but it cost a total of about $40 for all eight computers when my dad bought the chips on eBay earlier this year. I then installed the new games, plugged in the ethernet hub, and let the games begin.

My first test drive of network gaming (the nerds who read this can get nostalgic; it was over an IPX network) was playing Quake with three 8th-grade girls who had been typing up their English papers after class and another 6th-grade girl who didn't have anything to do after school. My old instincts came back, and I soundly defeated a handful of newbie girls. It was not the most challenging match-up I've ever had. I also ran some tests with Starcraft and Monster Truck Madness before the big Friday night showdown.

By Friday night, word had spread that we had a functioning network in the lab. Turnout was higher than usual, and all the boys wanted to play on the network. I watched them scramble around for two hours, and then announced that I would keep the lab open for extra time only if I got to play Quake with them.

I joined their game, the rules of which said that the first player to 10 kills was the winner. I beat three of my 7th-grade students in four straight games, although I was nearly beaten once by Ion, a boy who had very good mastery of the controls for a first-time player. After an extra half-hour of games, I closed the room and sent the boys home.

This is the kind of small project that works in Moldova, for two reasons:

First, it's not dependent on creating new capital. The computers were already there, and with less than $100 of financial help from myself and my father (I also bought CD-ROM drives and new batteries for each computer in December), we have greatly added to the value of the school's computer lab without needing to write big grants. Now that some basic items have been installed, game nights at the lab can generate over $2 a week, which can pay for the school's internet fees or other technology-related expenses, such as filling up the printer cartridge.

Second, the idea of a game night was proposed by Moldovans, and I can pass it on to Moldovans very easily so that they can run it when I'm gone. It's these small successes, the successes that are sustainable, that I think I'm going to be happiest about when I leave in five months. That, and I'll be happier after the virtual therapy of shooting my students with a rocket launcher.