One-up! Gamer Guild hosts inaugural session

Gamer Guild members slew orcs and threw for touchdowns in their inaugural session Saturday, Oct. 17, in the college union on OCCC’s campus. There were 18 people in attendance that heard about it through campus promotion.

Gamer Guild sponsor Karolyn Chowning, director of TRiO grant programs, said the purpose of the group is to get together to play and discuss games, all kinds of games, including video, board, card, pen-and-paper games. An important element is gathering in a group setting.

“The Gamer Guild is an organization for game education,” Chowning said. “We know you’ve got your own friends you play your own kind of games with, but you want to be a part of the Gamer Guild to learn about new, different kinds of games.”

Besides computer video games and console video games, Chowning said the guild also includes card games like traditional bridge.

She said even though bridge is a more traditional game in today’s cyber era, you can’t appreciate the present without experiencing the past. “The classics (like bridge) can be even more fun than today’s games,” Chowning said.

The Gamer Guild also had a variety of card games including UGO, Magic: [The Gathering], and RPG tabletops, Chowning said.

Gamer Guild’s Guild Master Mathew Caldwell chimed in with the different games being played during the meeting.

“Today’s meeting we have a PlayStation 3 set up with two different fighting games,” Caldwell said. “We have NCAA for Xbox 360 and a Dungeons & Dragons type game. We have also played other games like our [The Gamer Guild] constitution itself modeled after Nomic [based on Peter Suber’s 1982 book The Paradox of Self-Amendment].”

“Nomic is a game of collective rule making,” Chowning said. “We like the idea of playing our constitution to change it.”

Corbin Massengale, 22, film and video major, was playing Madden ’12 on one of the screen projectors set up for video games. Madden ’12 is a pro football video game that allows you to play as one of 32 NFL teams in head to head or online play. Massengale said he would recommend the group to friends.

“Being a Madden fan, it’s not what you typically think of whenever you think of a gamer,” Massengale said. “Obviously, there’s a place for Madden, a place for card games, a place for board games, a place for Xbox 360.”

For more information about the Gamer Guild or other upcoming Game Guild events, visit their group page at occc.campusgroups.com/tgo/.

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