Revenge of the Nerds...Kind Of

Spending a Saturday at Lamont is pretty depressing. Enter the Multiplay Launch Event.

This past Saturday, the Harvard Interactive Media Group (HIMG) hosted a video game throw-down in Lamont that attracted over 100 gamers from Harvard and MIT. The event featured official Halo, Smash Brothers, Starcraft: Brood War, and DoTA tournaments for serious gamers, as well as casual games for the weak.

"There’s a certain unique appeal to playing games in the library," says Allen Cheng ’09, one of the event’s organizers. Interjects Benjamin S. Decker ’08, president of the HIMG and interactive media concentrator, "It’s taking it to the man."

The dim Media Forum Room was packed with disheveled gamers, intently bent over their laptops. "We decided we might be over-capacity," says Decker, "but we didn’t care." Badass.

Over-capacity or not, the event was—unsurprisingly—under-capacity on the estrogen front.

"For girls, it seems intimidating to come to a game tournament, because they expect to see all guys," claims Mark Y. Yetter ’08. "If the tournament was all girls, I’d definitely come."

"I think a lot of girls have a stigma about video games," says Amy P. Galipeau, one of the few females present. Her reason for attending? "My boyfriend."

Not that the gamers aren’t aware of their dorky reputation: "That’s why I play indoors," admits Jon. I. Rafkind, a Northeastern graduate.

In a surprising twist, both Harvard and MIT got their asses kicked: The winner of the tournament—and a Nintendo Wii—was Ben B. Minkoff, a high school student visiting his sister. "I don’t know if I felt like it was really luck...I feel like I might be the best player there," Minkoff says.

Wii or lose, in the end, a Zen mentality prevailed.

"You do it when you don’t want to work," reasons Camille K. Chow, an MIT sophomore. "You end up doing it a lot, you get better, and then one day there’s a tournament."