Others also noted that video game devotees were more frequently men than women. "I found out junior year that all the guys who played video games knew who my roommate and I were, because we were the only girls ever in the Union gameroom," Tewes says. "I remember we quit playing Ms. PacMan even though we were awesome because it was a 'girl game.' It became a real matter of pride."

Brain Death

Video game fanatics provide different reasons for playing the game. Many say simply that they play because it's fun. "They are totally void things. I don't have to think," says an Adams House resident.

Other students are less tense, but just as determined. "If I do badly, at least on a computer game, I can hit the reset button if I'm doing badly," says Kyle O. Prioleau '89 of Eliot House. However he refuses to face the psychological implications of his actions: "I think I have a power complex--yeah, right."

Others started playing video games when they were quite young and haven't stopped yet. "Across the street from my elementary school was an arcade owned by a drug-dealing high-school dropout who was dedicated to education," says Wice. "She'd give us free games for every A on our report card, so I started playing pinball in the fourth grade. She used to sell a lot of pot, too, but I didn't know what at was at the time."

Some people's attachment is sentimental, not, of course, to imply Freudian. "When I was a freshman in high school in Detroit, I had to have a place that I could tell my parents I was going," says Jeff M. King '88. "So my girlfriend and I would constantly go to the Electric Light Room, a preppy arcade that sold milkshakes, or to the Beehive, a burn-out, sleazy arcade that was seriously across the railroad tracks, and we'd always play Caterpillar. Of course sometimes we'd just go to the park and make out. But now whenever I play Caterpillar I remember her."