Night on the Row

“Night on the Row” is one activity at Drexel that I see as making us, the general student body, smarter. This is because it has a lot to do with the Sleeper Curve, specifically how it has affected today’s video games. Due to the growing complexity of video games, certain skills have been gained by a large portion of our society as a whole. Skills Johnson labels as probing, telescoping, and seeking. All three of these skills gained from video games also drive Night on the Row. Probing, in the video game sense, is the idea of probing the game universe, in which a player discovers how things work and figures out what to do in certain situations. Like when to attack and when to defend against the evil monsters. At Night at the Row this was a skill almost all freshman were learning, how to handle and interact with their completely new environment. It was like the first hour of playing a video game, a lot of trial and error. The act of telescoping, according to Johnson, is in video games when players set goals within their new environment. This also happened during Night on the Row as students learned what they wanted to do and who they wanted to hang with as they recognized common goals for the night and for the future. Seeking is defined by Johnson as the drive players get while playing a game. He says of course you want to win the game, but what drives you when you’re hooked on a game is the desire to see the next thing. This is also evident in Night on the Row as while everyone there was hoping to complete college, there main goal at that point was to see the next thing: The next house, the next new friend, and the next way of life. The way of life of college. Night on the Row has many connections to the Sleeper Curve and ultimately how we as people in society learn. It definitely makes us smarter college students.