Games Geeks Play

I've long pondered what an Olympiad would look like if left to the inhabitants of the United States' deep south. I have these visions of toilet seat horseshoes, pole vaulting out of the bull ring, and the cannonball high dive. However, as of late my mind has wandered a bit more in the direction of wondering what geek Olympiad would look like.

Now before you go getting all upset with me and accuse me of lobbing nasty words like "geek" around carelessly let me just be on the level and declare proudly that I am a geek. It's OK. I'm comfortable with that. I revel in it sometimes, especially when I have three or four different desktop operating systems running at the same time -- on the same computer.

So why might I have such a sudden interest in envisioning a steady stream of awkward people who can spell their names in binary code from memory participating in such a series of events? Probably because of this last weekend's happenings. See I coach a robotics team at my school and we have just participated in our culminating event of the year. 33 teams from all over the region gathered here in Doha to compete in the Botball Challenge at Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar. Our team went, competed and finished second. We were strongly in the running to win it too, but a couple of unforeseen issues snagged us and we had to settle for second. Still, this is a huge accomplishment for a team of students who will all return next year, save the lone senior who was our most skilled programmer.

Out of this it occurs to me that there are indeed games that geeks play that collectively could be consolidated into an Olympiad of sorts. Aside from the robotics work our kids did we had two other teams compete in a programming competition at CMU-Q, finishing second and fourth respectively. Definitely another geek game there as it's just not something that the rest of society does with great regularity. But the people we teach thrive on these things. Place them in front of a bank of computers, or better yet let them bring in their own laptops, and watch them bask in the glow of a backlit monitor. They draw energy from it. They are like plants in the sunlight, undertaking a form of digital photosynthesis. Oddly enough, after a time you will notice that they even lean toward their monitors as if soaking up radiation from the EMF put off by the devices themselves. It's almost a symbiotic relationship, where the computer draws digital stimulation from the student and the student gets mental nourishment from the computer. Quite a sight to behold, and quite gratifying when you've invested so much time in working with the kids to see them take on the same enthusiasm you have.



So where does this grand spectacle that is geek sport go from here? For us, it takes us to preparation for our next competition. We must defend our national championship in the National Robot Olympiad and hope to be a strong enough team next year to get to Manila to compete at the world level again. We are quite proud of our team this year. They are a great group of kids. They will be missed when they have gone, but we will expect great things from them in the future when they have gone on to compete in mental sports at the professional level.