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Cars of late 1930s make drove slowly around him.  Some beeped their horns, drivers staring as they drove by.  One car stopped at a shoulder.  A man in a gray coat got out to direct the traffic around him.  Richard intervened, taking over the headset, the gloves and the ball.  He expertly brought the character to a standing position, “Excuse me.”  He had the character smile.  “It must be the heat.” The man in the gray coat smiled back and waved as he walked back to his car.  The usually soft-spoken Marcus was very impressed, amazedly looking back and forth between Hayes and his avatar on the screen.  His mouth was wide open.
    Hayes transferred the interactive devices back to Marcus and taught him the basics, raising his arms and positioning the ball for him until he was able to maintain some control over the character.  In twenty minutes, Marcus was directing traffic passably well.
     
    Knowing what he now knew, Hayes actively sought ways to incorporate the game into his social studies units, ways he could implement gradually, perhaps piloting his ideas in May.  With only twelve computers, he would have to rotate students through the stations while perhaps teaching the others regarding the historical background needed to make the best decisions in the game.  Planning anything, however, was difficult--there was always the Game.  The distraction ate up his spare hours like minutes.  It fed on his days. 
    Of course, there were many justifications for including the game into his curriculum.  Not the least of which was the linguistic slant it gave to his history lessons.  Perry, his team-teacher of English across the hall, with whose chronological structure he generally paralleled his own history course, would love that.  Certainly by May Perry would be covering 20th century literature, which would work well within the context of the game.  Over the last months, Hayes had learned the essentials of the German language very quickly.  There was no reason why students couldn’t also be immersed into a second language this way.  Perhaps in the years to follow, the game could be introduced early in the school year, about the time when Perry had the seniors studying the Old English epic poem Beowulf , for instance.  The German language encountered in the game would provide an excellent Anglo-Saxon linguistic tie-in to the work while Hayes would give them history lessons regarding relevant Saxon and British migrations.  There were plenty of English words—originally Old German or Saxon--that survived the later French-Norman invasion of England in 1066.  The most frequently used words, in fact, like fish, hand, arm, nose, hair, water, cow, grass, stool, boat, and gold, had their identical or near-identical German equivalents.  As far as learning nouns was concerned, German was the easiest language for any English speaker to master.
    Literature (they would have to read newspapers in the game, after all), geography, cultural awareness, even science for some students, all would be worked into the history lessons—through the Game.  Of course, there was also political science, discussions they would have involving the social, economic, and governmental causes for historical events overshadowing those of the game. 
    Hayes had realized since the first hours of playing, that causes and effects were inextricably linked.  One’s choices inevitably and irrevocably affected his or her avatar’s outcomes.  Of course there was the difficulty of mastering the mouse ball and gloves for movement, which took Hayes himself a full two weeks to maneuver smoothly and naturally.  He knew, however, that it would take most of his teens much less time to overcome the difficulties of the interface.
     
     
    Spring 2022
     
    By early May, Richard Hayes had introduced the game to his students.  Student buy-in was slow, however, due to the insufficiently powerful processors running in most of the 12 computers.  Lag made the