BBC news published an article on a new research project some university-types are undertaking: the mind of a gamer. It made me think of my quasi-gaming days back in high school.

I took Computer Science for my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years as an elective. All we really did was learn Pascal [ref: the man, the language], some C++, and some HTML. But after the teacher finished his lesson for the day and we our programming assignment, we did what any geeky computer student would do in a room full of 30 networked computers: we played games. Huge, 30-person, shoot-em-up games like Quake and Duke Nukem in either team play or free-for-all formats. It was glorious way to spend first period.

He’d get tired of us after a while and threaten to uninstall the games from the system. We scoffed and called his bluff. On Monday morning, the games were gone. But all was not lost.

By Wednesday, we’d have the games reinstalled and he’d shrug and go back to arrays and pointers. This cycle continued throughout my high school experience.

So when the BBC article said:

"It is much like playing football or rugby. If you lose, you feel rubbish but still elated."
…
"They[‘re] not sure what they are doing, but they know they are functioning at their peak."

I don't know about that rubbish business - losing was all part of the deal. But we definietly had no idea what we were doing. And more importantly, perhaps, was that we knew what we weren’t doing: anything useful. And isn’t that what high school’s all about?