I interviewed Shawn Dewitt (senior, psychology), who is this year’s Gaming Club president about the different events that he has planned for this year and all the benefits of joining this fun club–there’s a game for everyone!
Can you introduce yourself and tell us why you decided to run for president of Gaming Club this year?
Hi, I’m Shawn, and my favorite games personally are Super Smash Bros Ultimate on the switch, and I also play a lot of games like Valorant on PC. The gaming club has been around for three or four years now, and they had elections last year. I put my name in the ring for it because I had enjoyed the events they've done previously and want to see those events continue for this year, especially. It was also just something that I felt like I could do, and some of my friends who are also officers encouraged me to run. So we just decided to kind of collectively decide to step up and pick the leadership roles that we felt we could do and that the club needed us to do.
How would you describe the general vibe of the club?
The club is like a really laid back community is how I always like to describe it.
When it comes to gaming, there's so many different types of games and lots of different genres of games. And so just bringing people together across these different games and across different genres, or even in the same genre that you might have, in one place and then meeting up is really what the gaming club is all about.
How often do you guys meet up and what do you do at the events typically?
We have a big event about once a month, or bigger events, I should say. A lot of the regular meetings are game nights—you know, board games, video games, card games. We also have our tournaments. Usually there's a yearly Smash tournament so this year, we're gonna try to put on a Mario Kart tournament at the end of the year. So we have a couple tournaments throughout the year, but a lot of the normal events are just game nights where we’re all hanging out eating some food.
What are some of your favorite events that the Gaming Club has held, or an event that you’re looking forward to this year?
Probably my favorite event’s always gonna be the Smash tournament. Again, that’s one of my favorite games so of course I enjoy participating in it. It's been fun for me to see how I've progressed over time. I remember freshman year, I participated but did not score very well. And then each year after that, I've gotten slightly better. I’m still not quite the best, but I’m working my way up there.
What are some of the best parts about joining Gaming Club?
Gaming Club is a free club, so there's no club fees or anything like that. And again, it's just all about finding other people who share your interests and hopping in with any games that you like to play. It's just a great community. Join! We're really laid back so it’s chill and fun.
As the President, what are some of your responsibilities that you have to perform for the club?
My job is orchestrating and planning club officer meetings, mostly so that I can enable all of us to have goals in mind for events that we're doing and facilitate them to their respective tasks. That’s things like making posters for tournaments, or announcing on social media. So I would say my responsibilities are just kind of overseeing those meetings and letting things take place for the events.
What are the most popular games in the club?
There's such a wide variety. I know there's a pretty dedicated Dungeons and Dragons subset of the club that has a meeting every week, so that’s a big one. There's a lot of the classics like Call of Duty, sports games like FIFA and NBA K. And then you have the Switch games, with games like Pokemon and Mario Kart. So there's just a really wide variety and there’s something for everyone. As long as you like any type of gaming, you can find someone within the community that probably has the same tastes.
Approximately how big is the gaming club?
Right now, we have eighty-five members total, and what’s cool is that we try to make them all join our discord server, and there we have a lot of people from years past even though they're not actively at Andrews. Everyone can still log on and play online.
How do people join the discord?
Let's see. You would have to get an invite code, so I would say if people want to join the club and our discord, just reach out to us on our instagram (@andrewsgamingclub) through our DMs and we can send you a link.
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