Geeks make their own games

He is a man with a Segway, a mallet and a mission.

Stuart Moore is a member of the Silicon Valley Aftershocks Segway polo team. He spend his extra time hitting a ball around a field while trying no to fall off a two-wheeled electric vehicle moving at 12miles per hour.

"We're not out there thinking, we’re big athletes, this is a hard-core thing," admits Moore, a stay-at-home dad, who used to work at Sun Microsystems in quality assurance. "It's just a fun thing to do."

These Segway polo players also get competitive. As the Olympics got underway in Beijing, Segway polo teams around the world went to Indianapolis for the Woz Challenge Cup, named after Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, a regular Aftershocks player.

Though Segway polo might sound like the ultimate geek game, it has plenty of competition. To qualify as geek friendly, a game must simply be fun, easy to play and have an appealing techie angle.

Different games for techies

A new game, speed cabling, seems to have sprung from the mind of a disgruntled information technology worker. Players compete to unwind tangled Internet cables in the fastest time possible. The “bundles’ of 7 to 21-foot cables are spun in laundry dryers. Last February’s speed cabling competition saw the winner untangling a beach-ball-sized bundle in two minutes.

“Dance Dance Immolation”, a game that pairs the hit music video game “Dance Dance Revolution” with fire. Participants dance with the game while covered in firefighter gear. Missteps activate blasts of fire, often to the face. DDI, created by Interpretative Arson “fire art troupe”, is mostly played at outdoor festivals.

Some geeky games are activities kicked up a notch to obsessive fan level. LG has transformed text messaging into a competitive sport.

On July 9, it hosted its second national texting competition in New York. Contestants typed short passages on their cell phones as quickly and accurately as possible in a bid for a $50,000 cash prize. The winner was  a 20-year-old college student who says he sends 5,000 messages a month. LG plans to host texting events around the world next year.