After a long night of filling out job applications, Engineering senior Jonathan Lehr sat down at 1 a.m. yesterday morning to play some good, old-fashioned video games with his three roommates.
"Who's player one? 'Cause I just [expletive] you up," Lehr yelled at his roommates as all of them played the first-person-shooter game Perfect Dark.
The scenario is familiar: college guys hanging out, shooting a few people on a screen.
But the average "video gamer" is changing. Hundreds of games are on the market; Americans spend millions on them every year.
And college students increasingly see the pastime as a social activity, one that is acceptable past graduation and into the working world.
"The whole reason we play is the social aspect," Lehr said. "It's definitely a lot of fun to play against other people."
According to a 2005 Pew Internet and American Life survey, 65 percent of college students see video games as a "regular or occasional" part of their lives.
Lehr expects to continue gaming into adulthood.
"Now everyone just plays video games," he said. "Whenever you watch [MTV] Cribs, you see a guy playing an Xbox."
But to some, gaming still carries with it the stigma of antisocial behavior and wasted hours.
Lehr said he and his friends lost a Halo tournament his freshman year to "four people who played, on average, six hours a day each."
Danny Panzer, an Engineering and Wharton senior, said he had a friend hooked on a realistic army game.
"Imagine a gaunt, six-foot ... Engineering senior alone in his room in the dark wearing a hoodie and a headset hunched over his laptop shaking from his addiction to the computer game America's Army," Palzer said.
Games for every interest are now available, and the industry is booming.
"Our industry is growing at leaps and bounds," said Henk Van Niekerk, a spokesman from Gamespot.com, which previews and reviews video-game software. "The next generation of hardware and online services is pushing gaming out of being merely a niche and into having a much broader appeal."
And with a larger audience comes systems are more and more advanced. Xbox 360 is the newest gaming console on the market, and it would put that ancient Super Nintendo to shame.
And sales for the games themselves are skyrocketing. Electronic Arts' Madden NFL 07, the latest installment in the hugely successful football video-game series, raked in $100 million in sales during its first week on the market earlier this month.
"The gaming industry [is] a cultural phenomenon at the forefront of what entertainment looks like in the 21st century," Van Niekerk said.
And at Penn, this phenomenon is played out in dorms, apartments and fraternity houses.
Kovalcik and College senior Andrew Herndon played each other in FIFA World Cup Germany 2006 Tuesday night.
"This is a pure case of the amateur against the video-game nerd," Herndon said, attempting to account for his loss to Kovalcik, an offensive lineman on the football team.
Kovalcik was quick to offer instructions for the rookie gamer.
"How do you aim this?" Herndon asked, his finger searching for the right button on the wireless controller.
Kovalcik responded with a phrase familiar to the console gamer: "Just hold down B!"
