Guitar Heroes and Madden Football fans stand to win $1,500 in prize money at this weekend's RotaryRock gaming convention and tournament.
The Hickory Sunrise Rotary Club will have the first event of its kind with RotaryRock, which also incorporates a CyberCollege with seminars for teachers, parents and anyone curious about today's video games, as well as texting and Internet use.
A $4 admission covers entry into all of the seminars, any of the tournaments and the free play areas with Xbox, PS 3 and Wii games.
Space is still available for tournaments. Spots will be up for grabs first-come, first-served Saturday. The Madden Football 2010 competition, open to 128 players, begins at 9 a.m. and lasts until 2 p.m. The Guitar Hero contest, with 64 slots, is from 3 to 5 p.m.
Grand prize winners from each will get $500. Second place is worth $200 and third-place winners get $50.
Room also is available for the seminars.
"The gaming part is the carrot that draws (people) here, along with the vendors," said Robert Yapundich, a Hickory neurologist and Sunrise Rotary member.
"But parents and teachers can come and we educate them to be more aware of what's going on."
Parents might not realize video games have ratings, much like movies, to help decide what is and isn't appropriate for their sons and daughters, Yapundich said.
Online components let players converse with other gamers in other parts of the world — another development that might have escaped parents.
Robert Myers, with Catawba Valley Community College's Cybercrime program, is one of a number of speakers who will fill them in.
Teachers can benefit, too, with up to seven continuing education credits.
But adults aren't limited to learning.
They can show off their skills at any of the gaming areas.
Don't expect the tournaments to be made up solely of adolescents, Yapundich said.
He himself is no stranger to the plastic guitar of Guitar Hero, even if his kids usually beat him.
The youngest of the gaming connoisseurs won't be allowed in the 18-and-older room for more mature games.
There, adults can try out games such as Halo, in which players fight a futuristic, science-fiction-based battle with aliens, and Call of Duty, a bloody, although historically accurate, first-person shooter game set during World War II
Jerry Young, a manager at The Game Core in Hickory, will help provide the games and hardware on which to play them.
He thinks gamers will welcome a chance to exchange ideas and meet new people.
"There's nothing like this that has ever happened (in the area) before," he said.
"It really is a community now. It's not like you sit at home and play by yourself anymore."
Profits from RotaryRock will go toward the Computers for Kids program, which supplies new computers for disadvantaged children, and to the Catawba Valley Community College Scholarship Fund.
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