Adam Young played his share of bleak, post-Apocalyptic video games when he was kid — but not for the reasons you might think.
He wasn’t zoning out on the pixilated tales of zombies running amok in decimated towns and cities.
Nor was he dwelling on dystopian storylines, as a whole.
But he was concentrating on the characters depicted, while the game’s algorithms unspooled.
To his imagination, those avatars he and his buddies were controlling really were fighting for their personal survival and for the survival of a society.
Through and through, Young was a 21st century kid with a historic inclination toward Colonial America.
In the 18th century, right before and right after the Revolutionary War, the Republic was pushed to the edge of the abyss more than once.
“We were on the edge of primitive,” Young said Wednesday afternoon at
St. Francis Central Catholic School.
Young, 29, is the assistant director of Camp Flintlock.
The rolling collection of historical reenactors and interpreters is headquartered in North Carolina.
From its base in rural Four Oaks (about an hour south of Raleigh), Camp Flintlock makes about 200 trips a year, mainly up and down America’s east coast.
The enterprise made its first call to West Virginia and Morgantown for a “Colonial Days” exercise at the school on Guthrie Lane.
Jennifer Badzek, a fifth-grade teacher who helped come up with the lesson plan, said the idea was get students — even the really young ones — to start looking in history’s rearview mirror.
“It’s one thing to stand up in front of a classroom,” she said. “But this way, they get to form a sense of what it really must have been like.”
As Young and the other interpreters said, forging a Republic — then holding on to it — took a lot of work.
So did maximizing the limitations of life in colonies so far from everything they ever knew, he said.
The lesson wasn’t lost on Reynolds Wilson, a St. Francis fifth-grader who wants to be a physician when he grows up.
“They had to make everything by hand,” he marveled. “Everything.”
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