PrintAsking people if they play video games is kind of like asking people if they watch pornography. At first, there’s a significant hesitation to admit participation. Reassure your interlocutor that their answer won’t lead to a judgment on your part, and they talk freely about what they consider to be a serious hobby. At Columbia, video games, like marijuana, and frats, are a staple of college life: a symbol of experimentation mixed with extreme procrastination. Like other vices, video games are a confusing subject. Many students aren’t even sure what would characterize a “gamer.” And it’s hard to determine the number of people playing on campus, most likely due to the stigma the activity suffers at the hands of intellectual college students. Nevertheless, video games continue to work as inherently social tools.
Even outside of Columbia, there is significant uncertainty about the categorization of the people and games within the culture. What constitutes a gamer? What games count as video games? It’s not as clear as it once was, when your options were limited to Sega, SNES, or Doom on your PC. Within the community, there are further categorizations: gamers can be “hardcore” or “casual.”
Generally speaking, hardcore gamers tend to favor tournament games, like Counter-Strike, Halo, Call of Duty 4 or those designed for experienced individuals like the Metal Gear Solid series or the Silent Hill series. The term “casual gamer” is used in reference to those who play more universally-owned games—think any one of the Pokémon games, which are played by children and teens alike, the various games of the Mario Bros franchise, or more recently, Rock Band and its numerous offshoots.
Ask a number of students what it means to be a video gamer, and if they would consider themselves gamers, and you’ll be met with hesitation and often shifting or unclear responses. Cindy Chen, a sophomore in CC, says, “I play Tetris on Facebook. I rock that.” She adds with some hesitation, “That means I’m a video-gamer, right?”
Amir Mazaheripour, a junior in SEAS and the president of the Varsity Super Smash Brothers Melee team, a very dedicated gamer by most definitions, says that though he plays a lot, he doesn’t consider himself a hardcore gamer, at least anymore. Mazaheripour says “This semester, it’s been a frenzy with internships and research and I’ve had to scale back.” More generally, he says that the definition isn’t something set in stone: “It depends on how much of your life you dedicate to games. Not just your time, you know?” Even as dedicated a gamer as the president of a video game “team” denies that he is “hardcore.” Mazaheripour even describes the stereotypes applied individuals who tend to receive the appellation. “A hardcore gamer has very poor fashion sense, very awkward social tendencies, and plays at least every day. He thinks about the game when he’s not playing and has long-term aspirations that involve him and the game,” says Mazaheripour.
But his claim that he simply doesn’t have time anymore is pretty universal among students, especially at a school like Columbia. A recent study done by MSNBC says that close to 70 percent of college students play video games at least “once in a while.” However, Columbia students have differing opinions on what percentage of the student body plays video games.
The trend seems to be that the more dedicated gamers assume that few other people play games. This is, perhaps, because they consider themselves “the norm” and they tend to disregard people like Chen, who play less than they do, and play not as “serious” games.
Dylan Liu, a first-year in SEAS, describes his gaming habits as fairly low-key. Liu thinks that 75 percent of men play video games while 25 percent of women play video games. Alex Tsado, a sophomore in SEAS, says “I have a widespread variety of friends and from that I feel comfortable to assume that about 50 percent of guys play video games. Guys are naturally into video games, FIFA, Call of Duty, Halo etc.” Mikhail Horne, another sophomore in SEAS, known on his floor as a pretty intense gamer, thinks that about 10-15 percent of men play video games and about 2 percent of women play video games, a view echoed by many others. He says, “I base it on the people who played in my floor last year and this year and different areas of campus I’ve visited.” Gender disparity aside, all students who were asked about the gaming community guessed a lower number than the study suggested.
Logic suggests that because we are a competitive school, our students are more involved and therefore have less time to dedicate to gaming. But Columbia appears to fall below the average at other top schools as well.
Earlier this year, Amir Mazaheripour responded to a challenge posted by Princeton for a Super Smash Brothers tournament and posted flyers all around campus to organize a team. He was surprised at the amount of responses, but found most students simply wanted to play for fun, rather than compete.
“When we went to Princeton, we saw other schools and they were much better and had more,” says Mazaheripour. “Rutgers, for example, had a team and they were all better than our team.”
Perhaps then, it is not only our school’s competitive nature, but our location that effects game-play at Columbia. Why stay shut up in your room when the greatest city in the world is just outside the gates? Tsado says that Columbia students “play much less than average, spare time is taken up with either off-campus activities or the heavy workload Columbia gives their students.”
There is, however, a case to be made that more students would play video games here than students acknowledge. Liu suggests that Columbia students, on average, play as much as any other university since “it’s something that college students do, regardless of environment, how much time they have or don’t have.” Chen says, affectionately, that as a “nerdy and dweebish” student body, we play more video games. “Less people play sports here,” she explains “so more people play video games.”
And as far as the most-played game on campus, there is little competition. Every student interviewed admitted to playing Super Smash Brothers Melee, the game Mazaheripour’s group is formed around. “Smash,” as it’s more commonly known, is a two-dimensional fighting game released for Nintendo GameCube in 2001, which features many Nintendo characters. Almost 10 years after its release, it’s still a staple in colleges. On Feb. 24, Furnald RAs even hosted a Super Smash Brothers tournament, inviting people of all skills and backgrounds.
The popularity of Smash can be attributed to its casual and social nature: it’s quite easy to pick up, easy to follow and it’s entertaining to watch talented players. A quick game with Furnald Three’s best is rather humbling: the players always react faster than newcomers, and they mock a lack of skill. “I consider it a skill. You can play violin as a hobby, like video games, but like a skill, you can definitely become better,” Mikhail says.
Despite “gaming” being somewhat of a dirty word on campus, video games are used as an incentive for socializing. The African Students Association and Columbia Community Outreach recently hosted events featuring group-play video games as the main attraction. Tsado, a board member of ASA, says that their fundraiser was a success and that the number of people who showed up exceeded expectations.
Gender is also an issue in the video game culture. “Definitely the large, large majority of hardcore gamers are guys,” explains Mazaheripour, “That’s just because girls don’t play that many video games and the best female players aren’t really known or don’t really get that far.” Holly Dykstra, a sophomore in CC, says, “I would consider myself as much of a gamer as girls are gamers.” It means I go in spurts of playing a lot and then stop. It never becomes something I do all the time; in the summer I play video games nonstop and during the school year I’d be obsessed with a game and play.” Mikhail Horne says that his friend Holly is “actually the only active female gamer I know” with a laugh, and Tasado explains, “Girls did show up at the [FIFA] tournament, but mostly to cheer on the guys.” Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist from Rutgers University, says that men bond by “doing” things, and that bonding comes from pre-historic hunting practices. Hunting—difficult, to say the least, in modern-day New York City— has been transposed onto video games, where guys bond over hunting a different sort of prey.
Though video games are more widely accepted now than they were at their inception, gamers view themselves a bit differently than the average student. Upon being asked if he would talk about gaming with a girl, Mazaheripour replied, “Only after we have sex several times, would that come out. If she asked me about it, I wouldn’t lie about it, but still.”