Jason D. Damron

Strike! I just can’t seem to figure how to tie my body to a bowling ball in protest, and at this frame in the game a major strike by students seems to be the only thing that will stop the Office of Information Technologies and the Smith Center Advisory Board from pursuing their ‘renovation’ of the bowling alley and gaming room into, in their words, “clustered environments” with state of the art technology.

This renovation process has, thus far, been championed by the Office of Information Technologies, Smith Center Operations and the Smith Center Advisory Board-but not by students. You would not know this, however, by listening to the information that these organizations are trying to officially pin to their plans.

Foremost, and the fodder for recent postings on the Vanguard’s web site www.dailyvanguard.com, has been the “survey” the School of Business Marketing supposedly carried out that declared students in favor of the conversion of the gaming areas by 4 to 1.

A source in the School of Business told me on July 23 this was, in fact, not an “official” survey at all and was most likely a survey prepared as a part of marketing class student project. Although I have the highest regard for my peers’ efforts, I do not normally trust statistics, in general. Especially not those prepared as a part of a class project in the crush of students’ other class projects and touted by various administrations as the proof for the necessity of a dramatic change to our campus environment.

Even more conspicuous is the “ten to fifteen people per day” that Mark Gregory touts as the number of students who use the gaming facilities. This cannot possibly be accurate, as one student told me “ten people is the number gathered around that fighting game at any one time.”

I was curious about Gregory’s justification and so began my own unofficial count (I will not attempt to officialize my survey).

On several days last week the number of children, adults and probable students in attendance was as high as 40 on more than five different occasions, and never did I count less than ten students in either the bowling alley, at the pool tables or at the arcade games.

Another reason that has been used to justify the renovation are the significant amount of dividends the computer labs will supposedly generate, therefore making it more economical than repairing the gaming rooms.

I’m sorry? Returns on investment?

Unless you put quarter slots on the sides of the computers there is no way the investment of capital in computer equipment will ever generate more money than a gaming facility that actually costs money to use.

According to Gregory and Alan Brown, director of Smith Center Operation, they are open to other places where the gaming rooms could be relocated (of course, the bowling alley would be put wherever bowling alleys go to die), but putting the onus of relocating a game room (on a campus that is already severely short on space) on student leaders’ shoulders is unfair.

Why is it the responsibility of student leaders to relocate something they, notably Chase LoGreco, Student Fee Committee Member, do not want removed in the first place?

As Chase LoGreco noted, why not enforce a policy that allows students with academic related projects to usurp those who are only using the computers for gaming (hey, they could be directed to the game room!). This would as Gregory notes, “annoy people.”

Unfortunately, someone is going to have to “annoy people” if the goal of bridging the “digital divide” is truly the pursuit, and the only person sitting in the way is in the “myst” of some fantasy game.

Most of all, the gaming room and bowling alley is a great departure from the computing and studying and lecturing of the normal day at PSU.

Importantly, as our college “serves the city,” these recreational facilities are heavily used by children of students and by children enrolled in special summer programs who rely on PSU to have a pool, pool tables and a bowling alley.

Most of all, I want it there and I am a student.

I want to be able to grab my friend, on the verge of an astrobiological breakdown, and shoot some pool and bowl a game and remember there is more to life than staring into the hypnotic computer in some clustered environment.