Friday — 4:34 p.m.
Two men are standing behind the counter of Gamers' Inn, unloading boxes and stocking shelves as a jangle of bells alerts them to customers opening the door. The front room of the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week gaming shop, bathed in fluorescent lighting, is filled with long, high tables. On top of them are miniature figurines and medieval fortresses, reaching up to shoulder-height of some visitors rolling dice through the imitation battlefields.
In dark hallways gutted out of two sides of the shop, the light from the front is almost immediately snuffed out as one enters; there's hardly a color gradient between the two sections, just off-yellow then black. Single-file rows of computer screens are tended to by doting customers, paying a dollar an hour to sit and play through a library of pre-installed video games. Most of the customers are silent; the mouse clicks and keyboard clacks of practiced fingers are the loudest audible sounds. If the front section is the war room, this is the combat zone.
The two men, Cole Olson, the store's manager, and Cody Eastlick, an employee and secondary education student at Arizona State University, would seem like opposites if not for their shared fervor of the goings-on around them. Both make a joke in nearly every sentence, but while Olson is straight-faced when speaking about the geek mecca near Southern Avenue and Stapley Drive in Mesa, Eastlick smiles constantly. Right now, Eastlick explains, is the "lull of the day." There are about 20 customers inside, most of them glued to screens in the hallways. But at night on a weekend, the number of visitors can cross into the hundreds. Olson describes the atmosphere of nights like that in one word: "loud."
"You're dealing with a lot of high-personality individuals," he says. "All with opinions, and they'd like to express them."
The privately-owned shop has been open for more than seven years at two locations, and is the only one of its kind in Arizona, possibly the only one in the southwest United States. It’s doing well too — the building has just been renovated to add space, giving more room to serious gamers who come to the Inn to meet and mingle with others who share similar interests. Their customer base is 80 percent regulars — usually young men. Female visitors are outnumbered about 15 to 1. But sometimes fathers who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons in the ‘70s will take their kids along to "whip their ass," Eastlick says. It's the gamer equivalent of a jock dad beating his son at one-on-one basketball.
Is there a stereotype associated with customers at a shop like this?
"Ab-so-fragin-lutely," Olson says, annunciating.
In one of the hallways, two teenagers, Shane Olson (no relation to Cole Olson) and Beckah Conner, are taking a break from their fantasy game. They need to sometimes — they spend a few days here weekly and can log up to 10 hours in the hallway each time. Conner is lending some encouragement to a nearby gamer playing a war-shooter, a military-style action game.
"Shank him! You got this!" she says.
He doesn't got this, and makes an exaggerated death noise like a sputtering car as his virtual doppelganger hits the ground.
"Some people think this is intense," Olson says. "You can see why."
Saturday — 11:42 p.m.
There are some people milling around the front section of the store, but the hallways are overflowing — a waiting list has been made for one of the 40 gaming seats. Flashing blue light is reflected on everyone, and those with white clothing have a radioactive glow around them.
Sitting in the spot nearest to the entrance is Ryan Duranczyk, a student in his early 20s, waiting to start up a fantasy game with a few friends. Duranczyk doesn't get to spend as much time here as he'd like — he works at a nearby hotel 40-plus hours per week and takes a full course load at Chandler-Gilbert Community College. His gaming time is mostly confined to weekends, often staying up until the wee hours of the morning with friends at the Inn. Suddenly, things get loud.
Duranczyk and one of his friends begin arguing and the two get out of their chairs. The disagreement turns into a shoving match, and Duranczyk ends up pinning his friend against the wall. No punches are thrown, and they both head back to their corners after the brief scuffle.
"Well, that escalated quickly," Duranczyk says without a shred of anger in his voice. The two will be playing online together by the end of the night.
Taylor Sterkel, meanwhile, is finished gaming and gets out of his chair to leave. Sterkel, the animated, sputtering car from the night before has been playing the same war-shooter for a few hours now.
In a subdued tone, he explains why he comes to the Inn.
"It's a stress relief for me," he says.
Sterkel might not be able to visit as much as he'd like either — Army training takes up a lot of his time. Sunday — 10:49 a.m.
Things are quiet now. Only about eight people are at the Inn — a few at the computers and a few at the tables. The spell of last night's frenzy has largely worn off, and regulars take up most of the space. In the hallways, even the click-clack of keyboards is drowned out by a choir of low hums coming from the computer towers. Mornings like this one are the shop’s slowest times.
Daniel Brugman is setting up a game with Eastlick at one of the tables. Brugman is here frequently — just about every day, in fact, for up to nine hours at a time. He jokes to Eastlick about putting in nine-hour days and not getting paid.
To Brugman, the store is a transplant. The basement where gamers might congregate without Gamers' Inn has been plopped into the city. It's all there down to the linoleum floors, he says, stomping on the ground. "It's open 24 hours, and it feeds my addiction," he jokes with a what-else-could-you-want completeness before returning to his game.
They finish setting up and begin, but the gamers in the hallways are already settled in, preparing for another long night.
Contact the reporter at clecher@asu.edu.
