DAVE ROSS

Students, grab your joysticks

Sep 15, 2014, 7:02 AM | Updated: 7:11 am

There’s a whole new college marketing angle involving video game play. (AP Photo/file)...

There's a whole new college marketing angle involving video game play. (AP Photo/file)

(AP Photo/file)

Here comes a whole new college marketing angle.

“Hi. I’m Dr. Scott Dalrymple, seventeenth president of Columbia College in Columbia, Missouri. We’ll be doing something that colleges and universities have done for hundreds of years. I’m talking of course about Madden NFL.”

Dr. Dalrymple, president at Columbia College says if you beat him at Madden NFL 25, he’ll buy your textbooks for the year.

This comes a few months after Robert Morris University of Chicago announced athletic scholarships to students who excel at playing “League of Legends.”

But Dave you say: Is this really what a college education has come to? Embracing the wasting of time? To which I say: Don’t be sure it’s a waste of time.

Colleges routinely give scholarships to musicians and athletes, most of whom will never make a living in their chosen field. But this year, the gaming industry will bring in twice as much as the movie industry, and ten times as much as the NFL.

Gaming skills are marketable. Listen to these two designers from Turtle Rock studios, speaking at a gaming expo in Seattle.

“Right now, we play an hour a day every day,” they said. “We’ve done that for three years, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays we do an additional two hours. What a drag.”

What a drag. Chained to an X-Box. Where’s the union when you need it!

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Students, grab your joysticks