X JOCKS

"It all started with Nintendo, sophomore Scott Wagoner says, nodding his head. He sits at his desk in the standard position: staring at the 20-inch flat-screen monitor, his right hand on the mouse, his left on his wireless keyboard. To his left, his roommate's desk looks strikingly similar; to his right, a 27-inch HD television and the coveted Xbox 360 rest on a dresser.

The screen glows with an aerial view of a battleground. On the bottom left side, a chat room dialogue scrolls with the thoughts of a handful of the thousands of players logged on to the World of Warcraft online game. Speech bubbles pop up above characters' heads as they run around wielding swords and various other primitive weapons.

Wagoner sometimes ponders how different his time at Duke would be had he not been the last man cut from the varsity lacrosse team, but the 2004 high school Academic All-American says he is happy with the way it worked out-and no, not because it gives him more free time to game. Well, not entirely.

Six hours a day Wagoner embarks upon quests, searches for people to join his virtual guilds and ventures to battlegrounds to fight for prestige within an alternate world.

And that's only weekdays. "Saturdays are shot," he says. "Sometimes I'll look out the window and realize it's like 8:00 p.m. because it's dark out." His record for longest time played? A straight 19-hour run with a break to go to Cook Out. After all, the boy's got to eat, but he's quick to point to the two boxes of Ramen noodles he and his roommate John Kearny keep-just in case the walk from the WEL to the Great Hall involves too much actual (as opposed to virtual) movement.

After about 20 minutes, Kearney can no longer resist the draw of the game: "Well, if you're just going to keep talking about it." And he opens his own game of WoW.

The point of the game is to build and develop a character who then functions as an avatar of the real-life player. The character then traverses through a fancifully crafted fantasy reality, learning skills and interacting (read: fighting) with incarnations of the other 5 million online players.

Kearney has developed his character since the winter break, and it is a few levels higher than his roommate, meaning right now they can't interact in the WoW realm. So, Wagoner's playing a little catch-up. His character, who just reached level 39 of 60, is 10 days in the making. That's four days, 18 hours and six minutes worth of playing time, to be exact.

The emergence of new media and popular culture studies are exploding the traditional confines of academic disciplines. "It's becoming a new model for education," says Casey Alt, administrative director of ISIS at Duke. "It's one of the new ways to reach students and also can help illustrate economic game theories and military simulation. We're looking at this and addressing it as a bigger intellectual shift.. And it's fun and very engaging. It's very social in some ways."

Many of these massive multi-player online role playing games (MMORPGs, as they're known to gaming aficionados) have become full-scale realities for some players. In World of Warcraft, players buy and sell game gold and character tools on eBay, paying actual money for the digital stuff. In the virtual world game Second Life, players design goods and trade them using the game currency, which translates to 4 million in U.S. dollars based on a constantly floating exchange rate.

Part of the academic study of gaming seeks to debunk the notion of the greasy-haired, sun-deprived, coke-bottled, glasses-wearing nerdboy with no real friends.

Wagoner, who has a great sense of humor, good taste in movies and no coke-bottle glasses, still constantly proclaims himself a "huge nerd." But he's almost mocking the gaming stereotype by being completely unapologetic about his habits. He points to his printed ACES schedule and says, "Basically, where it's not red, I'm playing."

Sure, he'd rather play HALO than go out to a bar every weekend, but that's his choice. Some people choose to party; some choose to study; some choose to play a sport. Wagoner games. And he's not alone.

With more and more people logging on and gaming over the Internet, the social aspects of the technology are hard to ignore. "I don't want to say that there's a lot of valuable social skills involved, but you do have to work with other people," Wagoner says rather sarcastically.

But in addition to the virtual relationships are those made in the dorm rooms where people talk about games, share their strategies and, of course, play with-or against-each another.

"It gives you a chance to win and then, you gloat," sophomore Emmett Nicholas says as he watches Wagoner and Kearney at their desks. "You can start backstabbing your allies and tell them you'll only stop attacking if they admit they're a n00b." (An inexperienced player, according to urbandictionary.com.)

Many of the games popular for young people involve that aspect of competition. Every sport, racing, fighting and even role-playing game includes the element of rivalry. There are victors, and there are losers. Even in essentially social games like the Second Life online community or The Sims Online, players compete to have more and better stuff.

But for most college gamers, the notion that some professor somewhere is studying their playtime is a dual reality in itself. Ultimately, they just play because it's fun. But that's not to say that these games don't monopolize life a little bit.

"Do I think about the other, more productive things I could be doing? Yeah, every minute I'm not fighting," Wagoner says apathetically, as his character runs through empty pastures on his screen. So what keeps him coming back for more?

"'Cause I could get this guy to level 60."

And then he'll start again.