This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2005, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

If you think the average video gamer is a teenage boy, think again. n Half of all Americans play video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). And the hard-core gamer has grown up. n The average gamer is 30 years old, ESA says, and nearly half are female.

Shalese Andersen, 20, West Jordan

Like a statuesque blond Bond girl, Shalese Andersen is deadly with a Colt .45 - at least in the virtual world.

By day, she's a department store sales clerk. By night, she's a video-game warrior who happily mows down the dark side in video games ranging from the violent "Quake 4" to the raw World War II fighting in "Call of Duty 2."

The 20-year-old West Jordan woman is a voracious gamer who plays "any chance I get."

In fact, her daily schedule looks something like this: Work at the Murray Dillard's in the denim department, go home at night and play the fighting game "Soul Caliber III" while she makes dinner. Then she eats with her boyfriend, and they "tweak out on a game until I can't keep my eyes open."

On weekends, it's even worse. She and her boyfriend, who also writes video-game reviews for a national store magazine, play nonstop. "I don't come out of hibernation until I go to work," she said, smiling.

It's actually difficult to prove to her boyfriend's friends that she's as competitive at gaming as they are, Andersen said.

"If anyone really wonders if I play games, I feel like I have to take them on," she said. "There are a lot of girls I know who play video games, but they're pretty quiet about it."

Not Andersen, who even applied to be a member of the "Frag Dolls," an all-female video gaming team that competes around the country.

Despite the heavy emphasis - and we mean "heavy" - on video games in her household, she and her boyfriend do have real-world discussions and make time for sports and swimming. Though you wouldn't know it the way she beams while talking about gaming.

"Games are like a getaway," she said. "There's so much stress in the world, it's nice to come home and flip the switch and have it all melt away around me."

Andrew Morris, 26, Sandy

Andrew Morris had an affair that cost him his job and nearly his marriage.

"The other woman," as his wife called "her," was the personal computer he used for to play a fantasy role-playing game called "Diablo II."

"Once I got into it, I was addicted," said Morris, an avid gamer since age 4. "Four to eight hours a night, I would just play, play. On the weekends, me and a buddy would play a 30-hour stretch. There wasn't even sleep time. That's all we did."

Video-game addiction is a real and destructive phenomenon. It has led some to kill over the sale of virtual items in games such as "Everquest," and others to die of exhaustion as one gamer did in South Korea last August during a session with the computer game "Starcraft."

Morris' co-workers at Barnes & Noble began to notice something wrong. His boss thought he was addicted to drugs.

Morris' gaming nights were fueled by alcohol. He drank cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon and bottles of cheap vodka and whiskey while he played.

"I would neglect my wife, my chores. I would come to work tired. I'd be grumpy and tired all day long," he said. "It went on for two years."

Barnes & Noble eventually fired him, and his wife was fed up.

Then during one session of heavy playing, he had an epiphany.

"I was just sitting there playing and thinking, 'What am I doing? This is just pixels,' " he remembered. "It had become an extension of my personality."

He sold most of his games on eBay, got a new job at a die-cutting business, and he and his wife had a baby.

Morris still plays every day, just not in eight-hour stints.

"I'll go and play an hour if I'm lucky," he said. "If I had to stop playing video games, I wouldn't know what I'd do for fun."

Donald Yatomi, 37,

Salt Lake City

Donald Yatomi graduated from this country's most prestigious art school and worked as a background artist for Steven Spielberg's animation studio.

Why is he now working on video games?

"I was interested in video games because it gave me the opportunity to go back to the drawing board and do other things than just background painting," he said. "In a word, video games are a culture. They're emerging as an entity."

Yatomi now works as the senior production artist for Incognito Entertainment in Salt Lake City, a Sony-owned game developer that produced the PlayStation 2 games "Downhill Domination" and the "Twisted Metal" car combat series. He comes up with design ideas for the game characters and vehicles.

Like the movie industry, which began with one reelers such as "The Great Train Robbery" before evolving into a legitimate artistic medium, video games are unfolding into a form of artistic expression.

"The only difference between what I do and what the regular painter does is I have to read a script and absorb the mood," he said. "Video games are the same as movies because you want to sympathize with the character and become involved in the story."

Yatomi earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii, then received an illustration degree from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. At Spielberg's DreamWorks studios, he worked as a background artist on animated movies such as "The Prince of Egypt" and "The Road to El Dorado" before starting at Incognito.

The gaming industry is starting to attract artistic minds as fertile as those behind any medium, he said. A sign that video-game design is becoming an art form "is that a lot of universities and colleges are having that as a specific major," Yatomi said.

And besides, he added,¬ "It's the funnest job in the world."

Cathy Macomber, 41, Murray

Cathy Macomber dispels any notion that video gamers are teenage boys gripping gamepads with sweaty hands. Or more to the point, she'll vaporize any such notion with her BFG 9000.

Macomber is a voracious gamer, but you wouldn't know it looking at her. Macomber's a 41-year-old mom who cares for a family and works a job - at Qwest - like the rest of middle-aged America.

Ask her what game consoles she's plowed through and she'll tick off a list that includes just about every one ever made, from the Atari 2600 to this year's Gameboy Micro and Sony PlayStation Portable.

In her heyday, she had more than 300 games that were "stacked in cabinets, on bookshelves, under the TV, on top of the TV cabinet," she said. "They were everywhere."

After having to sell some to get the latest consoles, she still has some 100 left.

Such facts fly in the face of a long-held myth about who plays video games. According to the ESA, 43 percent of gamers are female, and there are more women over 18 playing video games than boys between 6 and 17, according to the ESA's annual survey.

Macomber is not what some may think is the typical female gamer who only plays puzzle games or the people simulator "The Sims." She likes spilling blood in first-person shooters such as "Medal of Honor" and "Grand Theft Auto."

"My son says I'm the coolest mom on the block. All his friends tell him that," she said.

"I like video games because they make you think," she added. "Most people think they're mindless, and they're not. If you don't think, you die."

Nolan Bushnell, 62, Los Angeles

Oh, what has Nolan Bushnell wrought?

Thanks to the marketing and programming genius of this University of Utah engineering graduate, video games are now a $10-billion-a-year business and a permanent fixture of world popular culture.

Bushnell has been deemed the Father of Video Games, and not just because this former Lagoon arcade operator invented the one game that started it all, "Pong."

He also launched the world's first popular home video game console on an unsuspecting generation in the early 1980s, the Atari 2600.

Since then, button-mashing in front of a TV screen has become an entertainment staple, spawning an industry that is getting its hands into everything from music to books and movies. (Though we don't have to blame him for cinematic bombs such as "Doom" or "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.")

But Bushnell, now living in Los Angeles and head of a gaming company called uWink, feels somewhat uneasy about where video games have headed.

"Today's games are too male-centric, and the market is about a third the size it should be," he said. "I am also disappointed by the fact that more has not been done to bring game technology into the educational arena.

"Video-game technology has engaged so many young people," he added. "I don't know why education has not leveraged the technology."

His "Pong," the international sensation consisting of two lines and a square pixel, was the first mass-marketed arcade game when it was released in the Andy Capp Tavern in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1972 (and got jammed with so many quarters, it stopped working).

A technology maverick and entrepreneur who came out of the U.'s computer science department when it spawned other greats such as Pixar President Ed Catmull and Adobe founder John Warnock, Bushnell also branched out to other endeavors. He started the Chuck E. Cheese pizzeria/arcade chain as well as several other businesses from a venture capitol group to uWink, which develops entertainment software for bars and restaurants.

But Bushnell, who says he really got his business acumen running the carnival games at Lagoon for five years, said he's more concerned about the future than what he's unleashed for us in the past.

"Driving by watching the rearview mirror," he said, "is not as much fun as trying to push the envelope."

30

Average age of the game player

12

Average number of years adult gamers have been playing

42%

of frequent game players

say they play games online

55%

of gamers are male

43%

of gamers are female