The Non-Gamer

I work a student job at Towson University that involves:
1. Sitting at a desk
2. Checking student ID's
3. Signing in students' guests
It's a decent job for an English major with too much assigned reading and not enough time to do it in, but during the summer, with no class, barely fifty students living in my building, and my inclination toward gaming, I'm sure you can guess how my shifts go.

Nights, however, are handled by non-students.  These night workers are security guards who, despite usually having another job, don't usually have an extra dollar.  Most mornings I happen upon these adults doing adult things - reading, listening to bad music, staring at the wall bored because they forgot a book or music, and listening to radio broadcasts from churches (on Sundays).  So I was surprised to find last night's security guard on her laptop playing what looked to be a Bejeweled knock-off.  This after just the night before last another security guard knew i was playing Words With Friends just from the sounds of the letters hitting the board.  The one that was playing the Bejeweled-esque game seemed shockingly engaged - finishing a game, checking her score compared to what appeared to be built in high scores (as opposed to actual leader boards) and starting again.  This is gamer behavior.  I saw a gamer partake in said behavior last night.  Except the player in question had just finished possibly the best 'new' old game of the year in 4 days and, upon finishing, immediately set out to be the best player in the room on a re-imagining of another classic.

If competition is the main draw for score-based and multiplayer gaming, the second most important aspect has to be the fact that the competition is against someone that matters.  The appeal of Words With Friends is the exact same one that is exhibited by the Call of Duty series on Xbox 360 - because all of your friends play, you can, in theory, be better than all of your friends at something.

Many of my recent posts have focused on the game as a tool for expression.  I acknowledge the shortcomings of Janet Murray's school of thought, but those shortcomings don't make it any less interesting to read about (even if the ludologists would say it's all a bunch of pretentious crap).  But it's important to view games as simply games sometimes too.  If the story-rich single player experience is the game as art, competitive multiplayer is the game as sport.  If this is true, we start to understand why games like Call of Duty and Words With Friends are mainstream.  They're not just for mainstream gamers, but even the non-gamer.  What a task the industry has - getting that Bejeweled fan to pay for Puzzle Quest 2, or that guy that only has an Xbox for the latest CoD to give Alan Wake a try.  I wish them luck.