Dreamhack
It’s nice to watch the kids having fun and they sure do at Dreamhack, in so many good ways that adults complaining over the game culture should make pilgrim travels to Jönköping where the event is taking place. By the way the town is often called The Jerusalem of Sweden. And to the hard-core players gaming is a sort of religion, no doubt of that. The best thing about this event, which attracts more than 10 000 people, most of which are under twenty-five, is that you never see any drunks. Outside you can smell hash, but it is rare and here are quite a few undercover cops to spot those things. So the young players are playing, talking, listen to music, dancing in front of the big scene when hard rock bands are performing. Rock stars are not the real stars here. You can watch afterwards when they are leaving the stage. No one is waiting, when the performance is over the gaming continues. The big stars here are the best gamers. That is obvious when the big tournament is running.
Dreamhack is for fun. Ok the fun can for some of the players later on become a job in the gaming industry. That is the case for a bunch of students from Skövde who developed the PvP arena game Bloodline Champions, which is now promoting together with the Norwegian game company Funcom.
That’s nice and you can turn around in Dreamhack and find other examples you can give a nod and say nice to. I dream of more. I dream of a future where the passion and intensity here can be transformed to schools. When that happened students are going to learn in a way the world has ever experienced.
