It's called the Game Pit, a classroom equipped with a few consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation and 15 high-end PCs running World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike to battle downward enrollment in northern Virginia by creating an "exciting" IT-centric hangout on campus.
Devised by John Min, Northern Virginia Community College's Dean of Business Technologies, it looks like your average LAN party with players hunched side-by-side staring fixedly at fast-panning screens rapping keys with their left hand or wiggling mice with their right.
"It's like a home away from home," says one of the players, an officer in the newly formed 110-member gaming club.
How do you justify a school-subsidized permanent LAN party? Min, who doesn't game as much himself, says it was "Out of sheer desperation, because our IT enrollment has been falling steadily since 1999, 2000, and we need to find ways to get more students to take IT courses."
Click here to see The Chronicle of Higher Education's video report, "For Gamers Only."
[Thanks Bakari Akil II]
