Honestly, in a From The Rumble Seat blog post about declining student attendance, is there anything more that needs to be said than this?
In college, I always found it wildly disturbing how many people (very social people, I should add) would rather sit in their rooms and play Assassin’s Creed or Battlefield all day rather than go watch Georgia Tech play a game against a major opponent like Pittsburgh or North Carolina. (Clemson, Virginia Tech, and uga were much easier to get attendance at without peer pressure – otherwise, a lot of folks showing up were doing so because they were “supposed to”, and doing so late before leaving at the start of the fourth quarter.) People have developed their entire social circles around others who like to play video games and partake in other entertainment via the internet, and it ends up that those things interest these individuals far more than watching folks do activities that they themselves never did or were never any good at. The sample at Georgia Tech may be somewhat skewed towards this type…
Never make a Techie choose between Dragon*Con and football.