Mitch Swenson spent some time reporting on the upheaval in Egypt, but found his most meaningful experience playing a videogame in the midst of “Tent City”:

Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolution in Egypt, means “Freedom Square” in Arabic. And since my January deployment in Cairo, just before the self-immolations of seven Egyptian laborers that would later prove the catalyst for the ouster of draconian president Hosni Mubarak, Tahrir has transformed into the ganglion of an ongoing turf war. My foreign correspondence to the Western press has revolved around the dynamism of the Square, so it makes sense that I am there again, amidst the protesters and amidst the proverbial Sledge: I’m using a Telnet iPhone app called pTerm to remotely connect to a text-based, virtual world called HellMOO. Obviously, the cannibalism I experience in HellMOO is nothing like the tumult of the Egyptian liberation; but that doesn’t stop the appearance of eerie congruencies.

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