My Scorched Earth Policy

When I was in college and the world was young, my brother loaded a computer game onto our parents' computer called Scorched Earth. This game was very basic: you were a tank, and your goal was to blow up all the other tanks. The more tanks you blew up, the more money you got, and the more stuff you could buy. Now you could buy practical things like shields, so the other tanks could not shoot you as effectively, or parachutes, so if they blew up the ground beneath you, instead of falling to your death, you would gently sail down to the newly created landscape below you. Or you could just buy bigger, better weapons. Scorched Earth did not have elaborate graphics, and the background was green or brown earth in various configurations that kept changing as the war went on. You could also adjust the windiness of Scorched Earth and make the edges rubber, so the missiles would bounce off, or wraparound, so they would come back out the other side.

What the tanks were fighting about was never mentioned, but you got to choose the colors, designs, number, and even names of your foes. This meant, of course, that I chose the most effeminate-looking colors and designs and then named the tanks after ex-boyfriends. My favorite strategy was to buy the biggest nuclear weapon and incinerate them all: "Die, The Wall! Die, The Weasel! Die, die, DIE, Hoodoo Head!" I usually took myself out as well with this tactic, but so what? It was extremely satisfying, and I still had two more lives left afterwards. Of course, it was always humiliating to have The Wall or The Weasel incinerate me, but all's fair in love and war. If I really wanted, I could have a really personal, down and dirty war with just one ex.

I have long since outgrown incinerating small cartoon tank avatars of ex-boyfriends, but after a bad day at work or an infuriating band practice, I feel a little nostalgic for Scorched Earth. And the best part? You were all enemies, so your boss, your archenemy, and that keyboard player you always want to kill might take each other out and leave you the last tank standing. Then again, sometimes in real life this happens too. Now that I am older and wiser, I find it is better to buy those metaphorical shields and parachutes and let everyone else fling weapons of mass destruction at one another rather than spending money on the Super Giga Nuclear Warhead.

Famous Hat